Performing an SEO audit is one of the most important activities your business can invest in.
Although it may sound complicated, the idea is simply that the SEO audit is a process that is designed to take a thorough look at the technical aspects of your website and your overall online presence.
Once the analysis is done you are presented with a report that has a detailed analysis of your current situation and also a detailed and actionable action plan on how to improve the situation.
With that said, let’s go ahead and see if we can convince you that SEO audits are important for your business.
Reason 1: SEO Audits save time and money
Source:Â http://streetfins.com/
SEO audits can save you a lot of valuable time.
Picture this: your current marketing team is extremely busy with their day to day tasks. They are somewhat familiar with SEO, but nowhere near the required level to take a website to the next level.
Also, they do not have access to the modern tools that can save huge amount of time.
On top of that, they keep doing various tasks for the website however the needle doesn’t seem to move that much, if at all.
Naturally, you may consider bringing in an SEO expert with a proven experience.
However, this may distract your existing marketing team because they may have to help the SEO with on-going tasks such as content creation.
So, to save yourself time and lots of headaches, your best bet would be to hire an external agency to conduct the audit on your behalf.
Also, there are plenty of other advantages to choosing an external vendor.
For example, the agency can use their experience to pinpoint the mistakes and identify technical problems with your website that are hampering the marketing efforts.
Also, agencies provide you with a detailed report on the current technical and marketing situation of your website so you don’t have to spend time wondering what to do next.
And last, but not least, when you are hiring an agency, you are taking advantage of years of experience at the fraction of the cost of hiring an employee with the same level of experience.
Reason 2: SEO Audits will help with your content marketing strategies
Source:Â https://curata.com
Content is another important aspect of your website. Doing SEO audits on a regular basis will enable you to figure out if your current content strategy is producing good results.
But how exactly SEO audits will enable you to improve your content strategy?
First of all, the audit will enable you to evaluate your content quality and its’ effectiveness. Also, it will provide you with new standards for a good quality content.
Second, you will be able to find content gaps by auditing and benchmarking your content against the competition. You will be able to discover new topics and find new ways to make your content speak to your target audience.
Also, you will be able to figure out the right types of content frameworks that work best for your industry and audience.
Third, your content will be better optimized for the search engine. This means that you will be able to precisely pinpoint if you need to improve the structure of your current content, for example.
In addition, you will be able to identify the so-called thin content and either remove it or improve it.
Last, but not least, you will figure out how to increase the efficiency of your content distribution. But what does that mean in practice?
Do you have a blog post that follows the definitive guide framework? If yes, create a power-point presentation and publish it on SlideShare, LinkedIn or whatever else is your suitable for your industry.
Break it down into really small content pieces that are easy to distribute via facebook, twitter etc. Also, feel free to use images with headlines, data etc. in order to make the content even more digestible.
Reason 3: Audits assure compliance with new algorithms
Every now and then, Google and the other primary search engines such as Bing, will do an update of their rules.
Also, there are many algorithm updates taking place nowadays especially in Google’s search engine.
So much so, that it is reported the number of algorithm updates per day are around 9.
Of course, not every other update is as a major and important one like the Panda update, the Hummingbird update or the recent BERT update.
However, you or your SEO specialist, if you happen to have one, should regularly follow the news on the algorithm updates and see how to make your website and its’ content more compliant and up to date.
Reason 4: Outdated, irrelevant or duplicate content can hurt your rankings
Source: backlinko.com
It is important to go back to your already published content every once in a while and thoroughly go over it again.
You may find different ways to improve it or perhaps you can find a broken link somewhere.
Also, if there is time-sensitive information/data you may want to update it to something more up to date.
Doing this will allow you to improve the user experience for your users.
As an additional benefit you will begin to see some of your rankings start to increase as you update your older blog posts.
This is because Google loves content that is fresh and up to date.
Do this regularly and a lot of your rankings will be improved without much of an effort.
Reason 5: Website’s loading speed must be one of your top priorities
More and more people are using the Internet via a mobile phone. And in the last few years this percentage is ever increasing.
This means that not only will websites have to be optimized for a mobile experience, but they will also have to be optimized to load faster.
On top of that, the website’s speed is an official ranking factor for Google.
So, working on improving your website’s speed should be one of your top priorities from now on.
As you can see, we still have quite a bit of work to do on our own website, but the progress is not bad.
Reason 6: Keep an eye on organic traffic
In general, the amount of organic traffic your website directly correlates to how well the website is performing in technical terms.
It is also one of the most important metrics you can keep track of.
And the reason for this is simple – SEO is about helping users by providing them with quality content via a search engine.
However, the content has to be accessible both by search engines and people. It also has to be user-friendly.
And one of the main aspects of SEO audits is figuring out whether everything is indexed properly and appearing the way it should be in the search engine results.
Because if your website and content are not indexed properly your organic traffic will start to fade away.
And you wouldn’t want that to happen after all of the hard work put into your business’ online presence.
Reason 7: Audits can tell whether the website is mobile-friendly or not
The importance of having a mobile-friendly website has increased dramatically in the last several years.
In fact, Statista predicts that there will be more than 211 million mobile phone searches in the USA alone in 2020.
It is clear that having a website that can be properly used on a smartphone is now more important than ever before.
In fact, Google started paving the way for the increased smartphone usage back in 2015 with the release of Mobile-Friendly Update.
This means that both nowadays and in the future the mobile usage will also be increasing consistently.
And the good thing is we are mobile-friendly:
Reason 8: Audits can help with improving the user experience
Source:https://www.unionsquaredesign.com/
User experience has become quite important in marketing and SEO over the last several years.
But first, what does user experience mean?
In an essence, the overall experience of a person using a product such as a website or computer application, especially in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use.
The term can also relate to various consumer hardware products and other types of products or services, but in this case we are talking about websites.
So, what does user experience actually mean when it comes to your business’s website?
There are several primary aspects of that.
They include website navigation, overall design, content and whether the website is indexed properly.
Of course, a lot of other factors are taken into consideration but these are the most basic ones.
Reason 9: Audits will help you identify negative SEO
Unfortunately, things like negative SEO exist as well.
The sole purpose of the negative SEO is to harm your website by spamming it with toxic backlinks, spam comments and so on.
The reason for this is that the person behind the spam will hope that your business’s website will fall down in rankings, which can lead to loss of traffic and can, ultimately, decrease the number of inquiries your business receives.
Reason 10: Audits will help you plan for the future
Source:Â https://hostpapa.com
SEO audit can help you identify present problems and fix them quickly once they are identified.
However, audits can be beneficial for your long-term success too.
For example, part of the audit includes competitive analysis. We will take a thorough look at your competitors and their strategy and will take and implement the best aspects of their strategy while adding our own best practices at the same time.
Second, we will be able to identify things that will be a problem for the future of your website. For instance, we can identify things like broken pages, features that are not working properly etc and anything else that may be blocking the results from your current efforts.
Conclusion
So, this was quite a detailed list of reasons on why you should perform SEO audits for your business’s website.
Were we able to convince you that audits are important for your business and its’ online presence?
Is there anything else you would like to know performing these detailed analysis?
Did you begin planning when to order an audit for your business?
Let us know in the comments.
