Imagine you’ve got a beautiful-looking website, packed with all the products and services that your business offers … but your customers just aren’t seeing it. Why might that be?
And how can you find out?
An SEO audit is a good place to start. SEO (which stands for search engine optimisation) auditing needs to be performed regularly if your website's going to be successful in the long term.
Let’s take a look at what’s involved.
What is an SEO audit?
An SEO audit is an evaluation of your website’s ability to appear in Search Engine Results Pages. Its purpose is to measure current performance and find any issues that need to be repaired or improved in order to boost rankings.
It’s important to remember that whilst a website may look clean, be easy to use and have plenty of attractive imagery, if Google cannot read it or its pages focus on the wrong terms, potential customers could be being lost.
Some of the findings that come to light during an SEO audit can also be addressed to improve user experience, which in turn is also likely to lead to an improvement in conversions - which means more sales for you.
The importance of an SEO audit
SEO audits are a key component in keeping your digital marketing strategy up to date. The need to regularly keep on top of your website’s organic performance is often a natural consequence of more pages being added to the website, or changes in Google’s algorithm.
The arrival of new competitors also requires businesses to invest in taking time to evaluate their own website’s performance, as well as examining the opportunities to improve that an SEO audit provides.
Mobile optimisation
Worldwide data shows that in general more than 50% of today’s searches come from mobile, 46% from desktop and around 4% from tablet. Put simply, if your website is not optimised for mobile search, you could be missing out on half of the browsing population.
Of course, every website is different so the first part of measuring your website’s mobile optimisation is ascertaining how much traffic your website receives from which devices - and the best place to do this is in Google Analytics.
Google Search Console can then be used to uncover search terms by device and page by device. By understanding the pages mobile users are visiting, you can ensure the pages are correctly optimised for mobile, and by understanding the search terms, you can build out your mobile keyword strategy.
Technical spot checks
Technical checks involve measuring the effectiveness of many unseen elements of a website, including its HTML, page speed, structured data, website code and JavaScript. Developers can often overlook the SEO implications of many of these key features during a website’s build by instead focusing on the look and functionality of website. This means potential SEO problems are left undiagnosed until an audit brings them to light.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO refers to all the activity that takes place away from your website that affects its ranking performance. Simply put, the more high-quality domains a page has linking to it, the more authoritative Google deems its content, rewarding it with a high search engine position as a result.
The reverse is true of a backlink profile comprised of poor-quality, ‘spammy links, which can lead to Google penalising your website with a low ranking or worse, a penalty.
Often businesses have no idea about the health of their website’s backlink profile and may even be paying for an agency to build harmful links in the form of ‘black-hat’ link building campaigns, targeting ‘lifestyle bloggers’ with poor metrics. An SEO audit will bring such issues to light and here at Ascensor we will provide you with advice on how to counter the effect of any harmful links by implementing a ‘disavow’ file and discuss alternative, organic outreach strategies.
Monitoring your competition
Keyword gap analysis makes it easy to see which keywords you share with your competitors, as well as those they have a ranking presence for which you do not. This information can then be used to influence future SEO strategies in the form of re-writing existing page content, changing headers or titles or even the creation of new pages altogether.
You can also track new links that your competitors have gained in recent months and look to incorporate those sites in your existing outreach strategy.