You may have the most beautiful and well-built business website, but is it performing to its full potential? If your website is not ranking or generating the traffic you’re expecting, maybe it’s time for an SEO audit.
An SEO audit is a “health check” for your website. It’s a crucial component of Search Engine Optimization that deep dives into your website to catch any issue hindering you from ranking on search engines. With a comprehensive check-up of your site’s health, you can uncover:
- Website structure issues
- SEO problems
- User experience issues
- Content gaps
- Market competition data
Why it’s important to SEO audit your website:
1. It lets you detect weaknesses in your site.
The primary purpose of SEO audits is to review your website and tell what’s working and what’s not. By having an SEO expert help you audit your site, you can discover many things. These include whether you have broken links or too many links, if you’re using relevant keywords, if you’ve got all the right backlinks and page titles and descriptions, and why your website is slow.
2. It helps you understand your keywords.
Keywords are the terms or phrases people type on search engines when looking for products or services. However, not all business owners fully understand how these search queries work and what keywords to target for their brand. Running a thorough SEO audit will show you the keywords you’re actually ranking for and which of those you should focus on since not all target keywords can bring you traffic and leads.
Once you know which keywords deliver the most value to your business, you can optimize your content and update your website accordingly.
3. Search engine algorithms change.
From time to time, Google and other search engines update their algorithms to provide better search results to users. Algorithms are a set of ranking factors that determine whether a web page is giving quality content and whether it’s relevant to the user’s search query.
Given that, it’s good practice to give your website a health check now and then to see how those algorithm changes have affected you and make the necessary adjustments to your site.
4. You can monitor and learn about your competition.
What’s worse than not ranking for your target keywords? Seeing your competitors beat you in organic search. Besides performing an SEO audit for your website, you can also run a competitive analysis to find out how well your rivals’ websites are doing in Google’s eyes and learn from them.
Remember that there’s nothing wrong with learning from your competitors. Take advantage of all the information you can get from your audit, including their most popular blogs, top-performing keywords, and backlink sources.
5. It analyzes your backlinks.
Backlinks refer to links on a website that point to another website. For example, if someone links to your page, you get a backlink from them. Major search engines like Google see backlinks as “votes” and rank websites with a high volume of backlinks higher on search results.
Through a comprehensive SEO audit, you can determine how many backlinks your website has and whether you have spammy or low-quality backlinks that can affect your website’s search ranking. Routine SEO audits can also tell you how many backlinks your competitors have compared to you and allow you to assess their link-building strategy.
6. It improves your website’s overall performance.
Since you’re finally aware of the issues holding your website back, you can take steps to address them based on your SEO specialist’s recommendations. Google loves healthy websites and looks at site performance as a crucial factor in search rankings.
Professional SEO audits take time to completely reveal your website’s strengths, weaknesses, and potential. For small to medium-sized businesses, audits can take anywhere from 1 week to 4 weeks and are recommended to be performed every six months, with mini audits conducted each month.
Not confident with your SEO audit skills? Sprout Digital is here to save the day!
We are a digital marketing agency specializing in search engine optimization, including SEO audits. With our extensive knowledge and set of web tools, we will not only take an in-depth look at the health of your current website but also interpret our findings for you and provide you with useful recommendations. Contact us today to get started!
