Achieving great organic rankings for your website content doesn’t happen by chance. SEO is a long game, driving traffic to your website when you publish relevant, optimized content. However, if you don’t have a strategy and aren’t following best practices, you could miss opportunities. In this scenario, an SEO audit will evaluate where you are and how to improve your efforts. Let’s dive into what an SEO audit entails and how it can identify issues that are holding you back.
What Is an SEO Audit?
This audit reviews all the on-page and technical aspects of SEO. It assesses your performance against best practices. Here’s what an SEO agency would deliver in such an audit:
- Content review: Is content optimized, highly readable, and formatted correctly with headers and subheaders?
- Website speed: Are there files or code slowing down your website? Those can negatively impact ranking.
- Redirects and 404 errors: Discovering any redirects and errors is necessary because it impacts user experience.
- Meta data: Does each page have the correct meta titles and descriptions? Are they the right length, and do they include the keyword?
- Alt tags: Do all images have alt tags? These are the descriptive text of an image, which usually includes the keyword.
- Crawlability: Is Google able to crawl each page with errors?
- Linking: Do your pages include internal links? For external links, are they still active or broken? Broken links can affect SEO, too.
- Backlinks: How many backlinks (links from other sites) does your website have? And what’s the quality of these?
- Competitive analysis: How does your website compare in organic ranking with competitors? What are competitors doing to rank better?
Finding Opportunities with an Audit
Once the audit is complete, it’s time to plot a path to improving issues found.
Content
On-page content likely will need a refresh to ensure it’s as optimized as possible. You may even need to change keywords if the current ones are no longer relevant, highly competitive, or have a low volume of searches.
Adding new internal links or fixing broken ones should also be on the list. Improving meta data, although not on-page, is still in the content bucket. A tune-up to your content and using headers throughout could boost your ranking.
Technical Updates
Outside of content, all the other areas of the audit relate to technical aspects. The firm may have found some issues that are easily fixable, such as:
- Removing unnecessary code to speed up the site
- Condensing images so that they are smaller and don’t impact speed
- Improving site architecture and structure so that the site doesn’t have crawlability errors
- Optimizing for mobile, which could be impacting ranking
Backlink Building
From the audit, you’ll also receive a backlink evaluation. Backlinks can be valuable for SEO. Overall, you want quality vs. quantity. You may find sites linking to your content that are reputable, so connect with them to see if there are opportunities for more.
Learning from Competitors
You don’t want to copy your competitor’s SEO strategy, but it can deliver insights. You can learn what content is ranking the best for keywords you’re targeting, too. Dissecting how they’re ranking well provides a formula that can influence how you move forward. Ideally, you want to create higher quality and more optimized content than what they have so you can rise in rankings!
An SEO Audit Reveals Your Blueprint
An SEO audit is a must-have for companies serious about ranking well in search. It delivers a blueprint of what you’re doing well and what you can improve. The first step is finding an experienced auditor. Our team has this experience and would love to help you plot a course to stronger rankings. Contact us today to discuss an SEO audit.
