Serious digital marketers would agree that a search engine optimization (SEO) audit is something you cannot skip. It is part of making sure that you are investing in a strategy that helps you meet your business goals.
If you want to stay ahead of the game, you need to look through your website on a regular basis. Whether you are doing it on your own or you have consultants doing SEO services for you, the amount of information you can collect through an SEO audit can provide you better insights into your website performance.
Use these insights when planning out your next steps to boost your leads. Remember, as a digital marketer, it is essential that you continuously update and enhance your SEO strategies for lead generation. Take note that 66% of marketers say that improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority. This underscores the importance of reviewing your website thoroughly.
By conducting a rigorous SEO audit, you can do the following:
Keep Up with Updates
Yes, everything in digital marketing changes so fast. That includes algorithms, webmaster guidelines, and more.
Algorithms changes: Search engines update their algorithms to provide better search results to users. Don’t let your website be left behind. Whether it’s a minor or a major update, you need to keep up with these changes to perform necessary adjustments to your website content.
Google updates its search algorithm around 500–600 times every year. You can check the history of Google algorithm change outlined by Moz here. Knowing when these updates were rolled out can help you explain any changes in your ranking and organic traffic, which could have affected the number of your generated leads.
Webmaster guidelines: The webmaster guidelines document is a guide for search marketers to the best SEO practices, including the dos and don’ts. Search engines like Google and Bing update their webmaster tools from time to time, so better watch out for it. Be sure that your website complies with their guidelines. Keeping up with these changes can help you further improve your website’s performance for search by enabling your pages to get indexed and crawled by search engines.
Also Read: SEO Guide Stage 3: SEO Audit - Spiralytics
Know the Health Status of Your Site
Act as if you’re a doctor of your site. By conducting an SEO audit, you can diagnose website issues that could be affecting your lead generation goals. Knowing your website’s health status helps prevent issues from worsening.
Here are some of the issues you can check.
Website errors: These are your broken links, error messages, missing or broken images, non-friendly 404 pages, and non-friendly URLs, among others. Proper SEO audit can help you spot these website errors, and once you do, fix them. Doing so can help you recover the traffic you’ve lost.
Review links to your site: Bad links are never healthy for your website. Through SEO audit, you can review the websites that are linking to you and the quality of those links. Clean up those bad links to be sure that you are abiding by good SEO practices.
Outdated content: Search engines and visitors want fresh content the same way you want a fresh sandwich for breakfast. Update your website content to make it relevant and timely. Fresh content gives your visitors a new reason to come back—an opportunity to convert them into leads.
Is your content well written? Is the information in your website already outdated? Are your website or blog’s content links to external resources still working? These are some concerns you can address when you conduct your SEO audit properly.
Mobile usability issues: Google can penalize your rankings if your site is difficult to use on mobile. Plus, if it is not easy to navigate, a potential customer might choose to leave your site instead of contacting you.
Pagespeed issues: Just like above, if your website loads slow, you can be penalized in two ways:
- Google will choose not to rank your site highly.
- Your bounce rates will increase as many people will not wait for the page to load and instead leave your site.
Identify Weaknesses and Opportunities
Since an SEO audit lets you look through and diagnose your website, it’s easier to determine which aspects need improvements, especially if it’s blocking your online visibility and upsetting your lead generation campaign. From here, you will find windows of opportunities to enhance your website by applying informed SEO strategies.
For instance, if your keyword for a certain service page is too general for what you actually offer, you may opt to optimize a more targeted keyword to ensure that the visitors your page attracts are looking for that particular service.
Competitive Benchmarks
There are tools to help you see what your competitors are implementing in SEO in order to rank number one for your primary keywords. SEMrush will show you all the keywords that are driving traffic for your competitors, and Ahrefs will show you all the new backlinks they’ve earned. From here, you can uncover their strategies.
Provide a Guide to Improving User Experience and Website Performance
Learning about the important issues on your website gives you an edge as you can immediately fix them. The knowledge you’re able to collect from an SEO audit can guide you as you strategize for appropriate alterations to enhance your user experience and website performance.
For instance, if you’ve found that your website does not load fast on smartphones, you can perform actions that will make it friendlier to all kinds of mobile devices. This is important since Google, in 2015, reported that more searches occur on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries, including the U.S. and Japan.
Takeaway
Coming up with informed and strategic SEO techniques to enhance your website performance can be guided by the insights you can gain from an SEO audit. Ensure your website and SEO strategies stay relevant by keeping up with new trends and updates. Don’t miss your calendar. Audit your SEO strategy regularly.
If you want to learn more about our SEO services in the Philippines, visit our website today!
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