Website SEO Audit Benefits
Your website is an important piece of your business; it’s the digital structure that houses everything from your contact, product and/or service information, to the marketing efforts that directly and indirectly drive sales.
Just like a strong and sturdy home relies on regular inspection, fixing integrity issues and planning for the future, your digital structure needs the same attention.
An SEO audit does just that by identifying potential issues or gaps and creating a plan to address them and optimize your site, which will provide a platform for better traffic that can lead to more clients and an increased bottom line.
What exactly does an SEO audit entail? While it can vary based on your site, typically, an SEO audit will analyze a variety of factors including your keywords and metadata, sitemap, page speed, crawlability, mobile compatibility, and even site content (images, video, and text) and how it’s structured.
An initial audit may take several weeks, but the efforts to optimize a site are never-ending, requiring continues monitoring, maintenance, and optimization. However, the effort is well worth the reward, and here are a few reasons why.
An Audit will Identify Gaps and SEO Errors
A successful SEO strategy is a complex web that unites each part of your site with the outside world, including search engines and users. In that sense, it’s easy to overlook part of that web or make common mistakes that cut those connections. One of the fundamental benefits of an SEO audit, even at a high level, is that it will identify those gaps or issues and allow you to fix them.
Though on their own, the occasional broken link or an image, missing or duplicate meta, or 302 redirects, etc., can seem innocuous, together they can have devastating effects on your SEO efforts. An audit will identify them, allowing you to take action and improve your search engine results on Google and others.
Provide Insight into Competition
Remember that complex web I mentioned earlier? Your competition, whether you know it or not, has a few strands tangled within as well. Everything from the keywords they rank for to their backlink profile can impact your efforts, and without taking the time to do some competitive analysis, you will likely have trouble targeting and ranking for certain keywords.
Additionally, the content you produce, and leverage directly impacts the way your audience engages and perceives your brand, and the same is true for your competition. An audit can help you identify keywords, valuable concepts, and customer needs you may be neglecting in your current SEO strategy.
Improve Content Initiatives
When it comes to traffic, ranking, and conversions, there is no doubt that content is driving force, but that’s only true if the content is cultivated with the attention and care required for successful SEO performance. And, though you may have been building content for several years, the amount doesn’t dictate success – quality and relevance do.
How does an SEO audit help you improve or leverage content? For content to be effective, aside from being well written (a must), it must also be unique, up-to-date, accessible, and of the appropriate length. Pages with duplicate content, little to no content, or outdated content can be harmful. An SEO audit will assist in identifying what content is working, what isn’t, and where you need to improve or update your content to address the audience’s needs and search engine requirements.
Design a Road Map for Moving Forward
As mentioned above, SEO is an ongoing effort, and an SEO audit can help you improve your website by providing a concrete road map towards not only success but long-term management and maintenance. As part of an audit, you’ll also gain information about valuable KPIs and benchmarks by which to gauge future performance.
Additionally, as the audit identifies where and how you can improve your site, it will also empower you to make educated decisions about the resources you’ll need (human, digital, and financial) to reach your goals.
All the benefits provided by an SEO audit provide one desirable outcome – increased rankings and conversions, which will boost brand awareness and your bottom line. There’s no question that an SEO audit is as valuable as it is necessary. However, we also know the time and effort required to properly perform an audit and act upon the subsequent SEO report can be significant. We also know that you have other important things to focus on, like running your business.
Let ContentMender take some of that work off your shoulders; visit us here to request a free SEO audit, which we will follow with a free SEO consultation. Together, we can review and analyze your site, making sure that it’s a technically and structurally sound dwelling for everything your brand represents.
