By bbdg_se on 04/8/2022
The most likely time you’ll need an SEO audit is when you notice a change in website performance like a sudden drop in visitors or leads or sales.
Another common time is when you engage with a new agency. The first thing any SEO professional will want to do is perform an audit of your site to reveal strengths and weaknesses. If done right, you’ll able to clearly see what parts of your SEO strategy are working and what parts are suffering. An SEO audit is the first step in a roadmap to improving organic search performance.
Doing a routine SEO audit when things are going well for your site is also okay. Sites get updated. Developers make changes behind the scenes. Content management systems release updates. Things just naturally break. You never know what you might find.
An SEO audit gives you a detailed analysis of how your website is performing in organic search. There are many different types of approaches. But ultimately, whoever does the audit will use a variety of tools to gather data and present it in a report with analysis and recommendations.
Technical SEO: An SEO audit usually starts with addressing technical SEO. These kinds of problems are often hidden but have devasting effects. Like having mold quietly growing in your home for years. Or a leak in your AC that is costing you money. Think redirects, internal linking, sitemaps, indexing, errors, etc.
Keywords: You’ll see what non-brand keywords are working best and what keyword gaps exist between you and competitors. The audit will likely use Google Search Console and other third-party tools and should reveal a list of opportunity keywords that you can start targeting.
Content: With an SEO audit, you’ll be able to identify what types of content is working well and learn what poor performing content needs to be addressed. What pages represent think content? Should they be removed? Or improved.
Meta Data: Do your title tags contain the right keywords? Are meta descriptions for key pages generating clickthroughs? Is the structured data correct? The answers to questions like these will help form an action plan for getting Google to see your site the way you want.
Usability: What a user experiences on your site can be tricky to measure but is becoming more important to search engines. Understanding user friction and what choke points need to be alleviated can improve conversions. Think mobile friendliness, Core Web Vitals, site speed and all sorts of design elements.
Backlinks: Any SEO audit will show you what your backlink profile looks like and attempt to score the value of links that are pointing into your site. Higher quality backlinks may be one reason your competitors outrank you. The audit team will likely use Google Search Console, and third-party backlink tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, SerpStat or Moz to analyze and compare your backlink profile with competitors.
The above is a quick rundown but expect many other elements to be called out in a professional SEO audit.
An SEO audit is essential for many reasons. When it’s over, you may be overjoyed at the hidden opportunities uncovered. Or you may just find that your site is working pretty much as expected with few changes needed. Most serious SEO probes will surface revenue-impacting issues that you’ll want to rush to fix.
Growth is another reason. If you care about growing your business, you are going to want to see your site the way Google sees it. A beautifully designed site can still have critical search issues languishing under the hood, even if it’s built on a search engine friendly platform like WordPress.
SEO audits are known for finding low hanging fruit. It may be more than just keyword opportunities to integrate into your content strategy. Sometimes you discover design or usability enhancements from competitors that you want to emulate.
The SEO audit tells the story of what’s going well and what’s going wrong with your site. It’s information, only. It’s up to you to decide how, what or if you want to implement changes.
Contact Black Bear Design for a Full Website SEO Audit!