Do you have a healthy website that is fully optimized to pull in organic and direct traffic online? How do you know? The purpose of a website SEO audit is to determine which areas of your website are performing well and where additional optimizations can improve your ability to climb the ranks of search engine result pages.
What is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is a report looking at various aspects of website performance, metadata, and infrastructure that are used by search engine algorithms to determine where a website ranks on search engine results pages. There are a number of factors that contribute to search engine rankings, some of which are closely-held secrets by search engine providers, but many of which are widely known by the digital marketers who work with SEO. These known components are what you can expect to find in an SEO audit, including factors like page speed, page titles, meta descriptions, and much more.
When Should You Perform An SEO Audit?
There is never a better time to improve your website performance than the present, and an SEO audit is the perfect resource to guide optimization. Think of an SEO audit like your website’s annual doctor visit. It provides an opportunity to look deeper into how your website functions not only on the development backend but also with front-facing content.
Completing an SEO audit regularly allows you to address any problems proactively so that organic search doesn’t suffer as a result. We recommend running a full SEO report on an annual basis, at the very least. An SEO audit can be run with more frequency and can be a valuable inclusion to monthly or quarterly reports, as well.
If you’ve run an audit recently and are wondering when to perform another SEO checkup for your website, take into consideration what your website traffic is telling you.
- How many people visited your website?
- How long did they stay?
- How many pages did they visit?
- How did they get there?
If you’re seeing declines in any of your metrics, an SEO audit is an easy first place to start looking for answers.
You can learn a lot about your website from the data it collects. In fact, we recommend becoming data-obsessed as you lean into search engine optimization. By focusing on how many people are visiting your website through organic search results and exactly how they’re getting there, you can let your users determine what information they’re most interested in on their journey toward becoming a customer.
Organic traffic is related to your website’s overall SEO strategy and implementation. If you have bad website SEO, chances are your organic traffic is going to be bad as well. After all, the purpose of website SEO is to position your business as a leading resource of information in search engine queries. In other words, when someone goes to Google with a specific question, you want your website to be Google’s top answer to their query.
How Does a Website SEO Audit Improve Organic Search Results?
You can’t fix something if you don’t know that it's broken. Website SEO audits are an opportunity to evaluate what is working and, more importantly, what isn’t.
When you perform an SEO audit on your website, you are looking into both surface-level components and backend components of your website. On the surface, an SEO audit looks into necessary details like meta descriptions, headings, page titles, image alt text, and anything else visible to a visitor on your website. An SEO audit on this level will uncover duplicate content, too many or too few words, along with all of the above-mentioned components.
On the backend of your website, an SEO audit will uncover developer issues such as page load speed, link health, crawl errors, site security, redirect issues, and XML sitemaps, to name a few.
Any one of these issues can dramatically affect your website performance and how search engines will rank your content. Therefore, it is critical to understand what is wrong with your website and not let your content marketing go to waste.
What Is The Best Way To Perform A Website SEO Audit?
There are a number of different free and paid tools that you can use to evaluate your website SEO. We recommend starting with a website grade, which you can find here on our website. It is a free tool that will provide information about website performance, infrastructure, and where optimizations are needed or recommended. Other tools we’ve used and recommend include SE Ranking and HubSpot’s SEO tools.
Take the information received from your SEO audit and incorporate the necessary fixes into your website to ensure it performs to its fullest potential and pulls in traffic effectively from search engines.
When we’re working with our clients, a website SEO audit is a common starting point we use to help establish the need and opportunity for search engine optimization. As a data-driven agency, we know how impactful strong SEO is for organic and direct search traffic. Don’t let poor website practices keep your company from capturing attention online.
