Unlike an IRS audit, an SEO audit can actually help your business. Think of it like an old car getting an oil change, tune up, and some new tires. Even though it was running fine before, it’s going to be at the top of its game now.
In this article, we’re going to cover the top 5 ways an SEO audit can help your website perform at its best so you can continue growing your customer base.
What is an SEO Audit?
Simply put, an SEO audit is an analysis of your website and SEO marketing efforts. A professional SEO audit will help you learn what’s working, what’s not, and what you can do to fix it. What should you expect when you have a professional conduct an SEO audit of your business website? We cover the main components of a good SEO audit below.
The General Overview
This portion of the audit is going to look at your business as a whole, including on-page, off-page, and technical SEO. By completing this first, you’ll be able to identify any immediate issues and gain a better understanding of the way your website is measuring up.
Strategy Analysis
This component of the audit is research and observe the SEO strategies that your team is currently using. With the ever changing online world, it’s important to ensure that you’re not only using the most effective tactics, but also that you’re not doing anything to actually hurt your website.
Competitive Analysis
Taking things more in depth, this portion of the audit is going to look at what you’re doing in comparison to your competitors. It helps to give you a better understanding of where you stand and what you can be doing to gain an edge.
5 Ways an SEO Audit Can Help Your Business
1. Are You Getting Enough Visitors?
Over time, if you’re not staying on top of the constantly evolving SEO train, your traffic numbers will begin to stagnate and drop. Without SEO expertise, this can be an alarming and difficult problem to fix if you don’t know the proper strategies to utilize.
This happens for a number of reasons, but it’s primarily because the search engines are always launching new updates that change what works and what doesn’t. As a business, you need to evolve with them to make sure you’re getting the lion’s share of traffic and potential customers.
An SEO audit will be able to identify the exact causes of your dropping traffic numbers. Not only that, but it will also be able to pinpoint what you can do to fix the problems so you’re visitor count resumes a steady climb once more.
2. Taking a Look Under the Hood (Technical SEO)
Let’s face it, as exciting as on-page and off-page SEO can be, the technical side of things is a little more complex and dull. Similar to the car analogy, even if your website looks nice on the surface, if it’s got a bad engine underneath, your search engine rankings are going to suffer.
Given that technical SEO encompasses so many different components, it’s typically an area that websites are lacking in. The worst part? If you don’t know what you’re looking for, you can easily go for months on end without even realizing you have a problem!
This portion of the audit looks at the technical SEO factors like website layout, sitemap, website speed, and coding issues. It’s going to help make sure that your website is optimized for users and search engine spiders.
3. Get a Sneak Peak On Competition
No matter how small the niche, you’re going to have competitors. Whether you’ve recently fallen a rank to your worst enemy, or you just want to see what you could be doing better, an SEO audit can give you an inside look at what your competition is doing, or, more importantly, what they’re not doing.
If they’re beating you out, an audit can help you identify exactly how so that you can better adjust your strategy. Better yet, it could also reveal a weak spot in their SEO strategy that you can exploit to gain a competitive edge.
4. Gain a Better Understanding of Your Customers
This benefit goes hand in hand with getting more traffic. When you better understand what your target consumers are looking for and what they’re not interested in, it becomes that much easier to cater to them and build effective marketing strategies.
SEO audits are great for analyzing your campaigns to figure out which ones work best and where consumers are going once they land on your website. The more you can learn about your target market, the easier it’s going to be to convert them into paying customers.
5. Gauge Your Team’s Performance
While every online business is going to have a dedicated SEO specialist or team, that doesn’t mean they’re always doing everything right. Humans are creatures of habit. As a result, it’s easy to grow comfortable and complacent in the SEO strategies that are being utilized.
This is a great way to fall behind the curve and slowly diminish your search engine rankings. When you have an outside agency or specialist come on to perform an audit, you’re getting a second set of eyes to easily spot problems that your team missed or simply doesn’t know about.
As such, it’s generally a good idea to bring periodic outside professional help to make sure your website is running like a well oiled machine.
That’s All Folks
It’s easy to put off or avoid SEO audits, but hopefully, this article has helped highlight their importance and the many ways they can benefit your website. So, if you’ve been looking for a way to take your business to the next level, an SEO audit may be just what you need.