We know first hand the importance of a good SEO audit and the benefits of structuring an SEO strategy can be for your business. However, the same question often repeats itself – Why is an SEO Audit important?
In its simplest terms, search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving your website to help increase its visibility for related searches within a search engine. Therefore, the better visibility your pages have within search engine result pages (SERPs), the more likely you will attract attention and attract potential customers to your business.
Article Contents
What is an SEO audit?
An SEO audit is a process of analysing your website and its presence related to SEO best practices. It is often the first step when creating an optimisation plan that will have measurable results. An SEO audit aims to identify as many foundational issues affecting organic search performance as possible.
Highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of your website from a fresh perspective and delving deeper into:
- Technical SEO – This part of the audit allows us to discover how healthy your website is from a technical standpoint and highlight improvements such as crawl issues.
- On-Page SEO – This includes the visible elements on your website such as copy and imagery.
- Off-Page SEO – This section allows us to review how off-site activities can be improved such as link building.
Why is an SEO audit important?
Once an audit is complete, you can build actions around areas that have been identified for improvement. The audit will also form a benchmark and be the starting point for your business’s SEO strategy.
In my opinion, it is an integral part of a process for any SEO agency to carry out an in-depth review of your website before committing to implementing any changes to your site structure, on-site content or off-site activity.
What are the benefits of an SEO audit?
The first real benefit of an SEO audit is to highlight your current SEO weaknesses. If you have never invested in an SEO strategy, these may be simple things that should be resolved quickly, for example, finding and fixing 404 errors.
Some of the other key benefits of an SEO audit include:
- Understanding the technical health of your website.
- Devising an ongoing SEO plan to improve KPIs such as sales or leads.
- Identifying and resolving on-page issues.
- Develop a better user experience.
- Pinpoint areas for improvement that will enhance search visibility, putting your business in front of the right users.
What can you expect from a good SEO audit?
You should expect a thorough review and in-depth analysis of your website, covering the key areas I mentioned above, including technical SEO, on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO focuses on the technical issues within your website that could be impacting a search engines’ efforts to crawl and index the site efficiently or even at all.
By analysing data gathered through an SEO audit, your agency should highlight many issues that need to be resolved. Some of these issues may be critical to the performance of your website.
To fully improve your website’s technical optimisation, you will need to take into account all of the following:
- Javascript
- XML sitemaps
- Site architecture
- URL structure
- Canonical tags
- Structured data
- Thin content
- 404 pages
- 301 redirects
- Duplicate content
- Hreflang
An area I am always keen to look at is the speed and mobile optimisation of a website. Last year Google announced mobile-first indexing for the whole web. So it is crucial to consider mobile-first aspects for your website and make sure that Google can access and render your content and resources.
Reducing image file sizes and minifying CSS, HTML, JavaScript can improve page loading times dramatically on mobile networks like 4G, improving mobile users’ experience. There are many ways to action this from bespoke development solutions and out of the box plugins.
What is on-page SEO?
On-page SEO focusses on optimising the content visible on your website, i.e. physical content/text and the media you have in place.
An SEO audit should include measures to optimise the content or improve the meta description and title tags.
On-page SEO factors are almost always within your control and can be actioned quickly following an SEO audit.
What is off-page SEO?
Off-page SEO covers elements that will impact your rankings within search engine results pages (SERPs) outside your website.
SEO factors off-page include backlink profile structure, which ultimately builds on and develops your website authority.
While search algorithms and ranking factors evolve constantly, the consensus is still that the relevance, trustworthiness, and authority that effective off-page SEO affords a website still plays a significant role in a page’s ability to rank.
Do you need help with an SEO Audit?
We work with clients of all sizes, from single landing pages right through to multi-category eCommerce websites. If you are looking for SEO support or an SEO audit to implement strategy yourself, we would love to help and discuss your website.
You can contact us directly about an SEO audit using the form below.
