What is SEO Audit and Why is it Important?
In order to make sure your website is constantly performing well, you need to keep track of its assets and weak points. In this entry, you’ll learn the true importance of SEO Audit. What is it actually and why is it so crucial for your website’s results? Dive in!
What Is SEO Audit and Why Is It Important?
SEO audit is essentially a health check which allows domain owners (you) to analyze their website’s ability to rank in the SERPs (search engine results pages). It’s looking at your website through the eyes of Google and other search engines.
There are many SEO auditing tools to choose from, such as SEMrush, Moz, Woorank, etc. and your results may vary, but not significantly. You can also conduct a manual SEO audit for free, but it definitely would take much more time, and you will most likely miss important details. You may follow this SEO audit checklist as your reference in the future.
Also, SEO audit allows you to see areas that need improvement and detect practices that are detrimental to your website’s ranking. Aside from that, conducting an SEO audit also benefits you the following points below.
Helps You Detect And Fix Errors
An SEO audit helps you identify mistakes that are keeping your website from getting the traffic it deserves and from ranking high in the SERPs. It also brings to light if any of your strategies are causing you to lose web traffic instead of attracting them.
Problems that an audit can detect include but are not limited to the following:
● External links going to your site that’s harming your ranking.
● Duplicate content that is confusing Google and other search engines.
● Missing meta tags
● Slow load time of web pages
● Error messages
● Many more
You see, an SEO audit will help you find and fix website errors that may impact your search results ranking, web traffic, and conversions or sales.
Lets You Know Which Keywords You Rank For
Search Engine Optimisation starts with keywords and knowing which keywords to rank for is important because it’s a measurement of your SEO success. As you optimize and build links, your ranking for keywords should go up over time, but if there are critical issues, then your ranking would go down.
Conducting an SEO audit will allow you to see the trend of your keyword rankings, and this knowledge will help you troubleshoot traffic drops – whether already existing or impending.
Moreover, when you know which keywords you rank for, you will be able to identify new opportunities – thanks to regular SEO audits.
However, if your web pages are not getting any clicks from the search results, it likely means that your pages are not what your target audience is looking for, but this gives you the opportunity to create new pieces of content or improve your site’s existing pages to match the search intent of your target audience.
Gives You a Peek Into Your Competitor’s Strategy
With SEO auditing tools, you can also conduct a comprehensive SEO audit of your competitor’s site. And through that, you will learn their keyword rankings, backlinks, SEO tactics, and even their weaknesses and strengths. You can see which of their content is most shared or is getting a lot of backlinks and if their strategy is effective, then by looking at how they do it, you can emulate their strategy and boost your SEO success.
By discovering where competitors get their backlinks, you can use the data to target the linking sites so that you can also get a backlink from them or create even better content, offer it to them and ask them to replace your competitor’s link with yours.
Provides a Data-Backed Progress Report
SEO Audit is a routine procedure. As you continue with fixing all the issues of your website, you also need to measure all the site’s improvements continuously. An SEO audit report allows you to keep track of what the situation was like before you made all the changes; this way, you can monitor your website’s performance accurately.
Moreover, all excellent SEO strategy starts with an SEO audit of a website. If you want to have a data-driven SEO strategy and a solid baseline to compare your future results with, you’ll need a comprehensive audit of your website.
Helps You Identify Technical Issues
An SEO audit includes a report of all technical issues with your site – this includes page load time, sitemap structure and format, canonical page references, broken links, page crawl problems, and slow loading speed.
While most SEO campaigns focus on the on-page SEO factors like the title, meta tags, and so on, the technical SEO audit makes sure that external factors like your page load speed, server configuration, and third-party hyperlinks are not sabotaging your optimization efforts.
Keeps Your Website Updated
Google is also updating its algorithms regularly. And today, Google announced that they would be releasing a broad core algorithm update which they call the May 2020 Core Update.
These algorithm updates are really hard to keep track of, and they may or may not affect your website’s ranking. Also, Google has over 200 ranking factors, so you need to be careful with the changes you make on your site.
And that’s where the SEO audit comes in. SEO auditing tools work with Google metrics, and they help you make data-based and up-to-date suggestions about what changes to make on your site.
Takeaway
Independently conducting an SEO audit may leave a lot of areas that needed improvement. Your familiarity with your own website may make important aspects of your site go unnoticed. And that’s why conducting a third-party SEO audit can pay dividends – you can compare the results so that you can get an accurate review of your website’s overall quality
Sure, you may yield the same results when you do the audit yourself, however, with an SEO audit expert who seeks the interest of your site and its rankings just as much as you do, you can act on your SEO strategies with confidence.
