Do you know how your search engine optimization (SEO) is doing? You might know that you do – or don’t – show up on page one for specific searches.
But do you know why? Or what to do to improve things?
If not, it’s time for an SEO audit. This will allow you to gain insight into your website, page performance, and overall traffic. You can see how your keywords are performing and how you stand up to your competition.
Here’s what you need to know about SEO audits.
How Often Should Audits Be Done?
SEO is a long-term process, so checking your SEO every day is likely to be frustrating. Most companies do an SEO audit between two and four times a year.
If you are a smaller business with a small website, once every six months will be perfect. If you have a larger company or a large website with a lot of new content every month, reviewing your efforts every quarter makes more sense.
No matter how often you do an audit, having a clear strategy and checklist will save a lot of time and effort.
What Does an SEO Audit Include?
As you consider an SEO audit, you might feel a bit intimidated. Do you have to be a website expert in order to understand your page’s SEO setup and keywords?
Good news – you don’t!
Not only are there a variety of tools that can help you, but there are also easy-to-use strategies to evaluate the three key areas of an SEO audit.
Technical Analysis
The first step is making sure your website is working the way it should. You want all links to go to the appropriate pages, all images to load quickly, and all content is easy to read and understand.
Fortunately, you don’t have to do all of this manually. Use a site analysis tool to quickly check all of the technical details quickly and easily. If you have an IT team or focused tech expert, let them handle the analysis and recommended fixes.
You’ll be surprised how easy this can be given today’s SEO resources.
On-Page Review
Next, you want to make sure your website itself is well-structured and that content makes sense for your brand and your products and services. You also need to evaluate keywords.
Look for general content issues by reviewing your blog categories and making sure everything lines up with your current business direction and goals. Writing about focused topics helps Google consider you an authority in that area. A scattershot approach will hurt your ability to rank highly.
You also want to make sure that your pages are not duplicating the same text. This can confuse Google’s web crawlers because they aren’t sure which page to index.
Finally, check your keywords for ranking difficulty and search traffic. Your Google Analytics dashboard and the Google keyword planner can help.
Off-Page Analysis
Off-page SEO can be a significant challenge because it’s not as much within your control. You want Google to recognize your website as a trusted authority.
There are a lot of elements of this, including incoming links, online reviews, and not using shady SEO practices.
Encourage your customers to leave reviews online, especially on your Google Business page. Use guest posting or local media to gain high-quality incoming links. And of course, be sure to keep all of your strategies above-board.
SEO Audits Help You Succeed
Think of an SEO audit as a check-in to ensure that your efforts are still going in the right direction. Discovering broken links, missing tags, and poorly-used keywords early can save you months of frustration.
There are a wide variety of tools available for SEO audits. Don’t be intimidated – let the tools do the work and simply make adjustments as needed.
