When most people hear the word audit, it often conjures up thoughts of the IRS. However, an SEO website audit is in a whole different category. Performing an SEO audit on your site is, in fact, an extremely beneficial and essential thing in ensuring that your site and marketing strategy are well developed. If you are still not convinced, then we’ve put together a list of the top advantages to performing regular SEO audits on your website to ensure that it is optimized for search engines and your user experience.
An SEO audit will aid you in determining your site’s SEO activities that are not up to par. For instance, you may find out that you have not been using the best keywords or Meta descriptions, targeted keywords, or social media sharing on your web pages. You may also find that you have slow site speed, duplicate content, or inbound links that are poisonous. Considering these critical SEO issues is imperative in implementing a great SEO strategy.
The functionality and design of your site are only limited to what you or a team of experts can come up with. However, if you create an overly complicated web design with too much information and busy-looking web pages, your website will suffer. If your site does not make your visitors feel as though they are where they are meant to be in a concise and clear way, then they will quickly exit out of your website. An audit of your site can aid you in discovering the areas of your site that need to be simplified so that you can decide what content, function, and structure looks best for users.
An SEO audit assists you in knowing your competitor’s SEO activities that are working well. For instance, you may find that your competitors are gaining links from relevant and qualified sites, which is allowing them to gain fast website speeds, or that they are using proper attributes. Knowing what is working for your competitors can help you to improve your own website’s SEO performance.
It is true that the best way to provide visitor loyalty and strong SEO is to create fresh, valuable content. However, each content piece that you write does not need to be a brand-new, original idea. By auditing your website, marketing collateral, and blog posts, you can discover opportunities for content repurposing that allows you to put a spin on already created content while still using best SEO practices.
An SEO website audit can check things like page views, time on site, bounce rates, etc., which are all crucial components to improving your search engine indexing. That being said, both search engines and people will return to your website because of your content quality. Doing an audit on your content will allow you to understand the sorts of content that both people and search engines like, as well as the ways that they like to view it, such as in video, image, or word format. An SEO audit can aid you in deciding on a content strategy for your blog and site that focuses on what users want, as happy users result in higher organic rankings on search engines.
SEO has shifted dramatically in the past couple of years. In fact, on average Google makes 500 changes to its algorithm every year. This means that what is working for your website now will probably not be in the next couple of years or even months. Having good SEO means focusing on giving your visitors the best user experience possible, with pleasing search engines being secondary. An SEO audit will analyze your current SEO practice and how it intertwines with your user experience for you to find a balance between making Google and visitors happy.
