Why Should You Perform SEO Audits?

Before starting an SEO strategy, it’s important to set yourself up for success. Looking at every aspect of your online world can help support your SEO efforts in the future. In this post we’re going to review why SEO audits are so important and what types of audits you should be performing.

Why perform a website audit?

An audit provides insights into areas that need improvement. You need to understand your website’s strengths and weaknesses fully. Ask yourself:

• Do you have interesting and original information?
• Does your site load fast?
• Could your site load faster?
• Are there accessibility issues with your current design?

Then, you can develop a tailored SEO strategy that addresses your specific issues. Prioritizing your SEO tasks allows you to develop a roadmap for achieving your goals. Scheduling regular website audits after the first one will help identify any changes in search engine algorithms that may affect your website’s ranking. Remember that SEO is an ongoing process. Regularly auditing your website helps you continue to move forward. 

How often you audit your website depends entirely on your industry, business model, and goals. If your website is a crucial aspect of your lead generation efforts or your sales, then you will want to run audits as often as weekly. This will give your team a chance to react immediately to the valuable information you can glean from an audit. If your website is informational or you have a smaller team handling your SEO, monthly audits are more reasonable and more realistic to manage. Regardless of your situation, having a regular audit schedule will make your website able to compete with the leading brands in your industry. 

Your website audits should cover four crucial areas: technical SEO, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, accessibility, and UX (user experience). 

Auditing for Technical SEO

It includes everything that is going on under the hood of your website that can affect its search engine ranking. Slow, clunky, and hard-to-crawl websites can prevent some search engine bots from even being able to crawl your site. If search engines can’t crawl your site, they can’t index your pages. If they can’t index your pages, users cannot find you. Technical SEO improvements you can make include things like fixing broken links, updating shoddy coding, making site pages mobile-friendly, improving site speed, and clearing up a wide range of shoddy coding practices.

Auditing for On-Page SEO

On-page SEO optimizations are the tried and true search engine rules that stretch back to the early days of the internet. Through years of experimentation and documentation, we can tell what search engines like and don’t like to see. Old tactics like “keyword stuffing” are one of the many tricks that webmasters used to try to convince search engines to give them high rankings. “Keyword stuffing” is when you use your keyword over and over in your website content without any regard for clarity or coherence. 

Google and other engines have wised up and introduced elaborate algorithms that require webmasters to build websites that follow a long list of mostly unwritten rules. SEO experts have cracked this code over the years, and we have identified some of the non-negotiable on-page SEO optimizations every site must include. Things like properly structured HTML and the inclusion of meta tags and titles gives our website a logical structure that every search engine will expect to see. On-page SEO can also include having original and coherently written content that addresses your keyword focus and having images with appropriate alt tags.  If you do nothing else to help your site, make sure you focus on your on-page SEO items.

Auditing for Off-Page SEO

These are items from other sources directly related to your website’s reputation. They can give search engines a comprehensive picture of how other sources, companies, brands, and people view your website. Do they trust you? Do they interact with you often? Off-page SEO can include other business websites that mention yours and link back to you (we call those “backlinks”). Make careful note of these “backlinks” but manage your expectations on how to resolve them. Some off-page SEO items can take months or years to fix. This depends on how quickly other people act and if they can be corrected at all. 

Auditing for Accessibility

After auditing for technical, on, and off-page SEO, you should take some time to evaluate how good of an experience using your website actually is. There are two main areas to examine: accessibility and user experience. An accessible website is one that everyone can use, regardless of their disabilities.

For example, can your site be used by blind people who rely on screen readers or by someone with poor hand-eye coordination? The correct implementation of accessibility features benefits both humans and search engine bots. Having an accessible website isn’t just the right thing to do, but it can help improve SEO results over time.

There can also be legal consequences for not having an accessible website. However, the inclusivity and SEO benefits are more than enough reasons to prioritize these items. 

Auditing for UX

Finally, let’s think about UX, or user experience. UX issues are aspects of your site that affect a user’s opinion of your website. Can people find what they need quickly and without getting lost or frustrated? Will anything make them want to leave your site in favor of another one? This may sound subjective, but there is an entire field of study dedicated to clearly defining how web surfers use websites and how they expect them to be structured.

Adhering to those standards will convince users to stay on your site longer, increase the likelihood of conversions, and make them more likely to share your website with others. When they leave quickly, your website’s bounce rate increases. Search engines use the bounce rate to quantify how much time people want to spend on your website.

Auditing your website is a key component of SEO. It’s the first thing you should do and will help create a strong foundation for your strategy moving forward! If you want to know more about auditing for SEO – or need help auditing your site – look no further than SEO Pro Geeks. Our comprehensive SEO audit covers everything we talked about here, and more!