Respected SEO expert and Senior Content Writer at Semrush, Vlado Pavlik aptly calls the SEO audit an “overall health check” for a website. Elaborating slightly on this definition, he goes on to describe an SEO audit as “the process evaluating how well your website is optimized for search engines.”
As SEO (search engine optimization) ensures that your company website ranks highly on relevant user searches on Google and other major internet search engines, SEO auditing ensures that your SEO efforts adhere, as strictly as possible, to industry best practices. As we will examine in greater detail below, a quality SEO audit will focus on technical issues (such as indexing and crawlability) on-page issues (such as strategic keyword use and overall site content structure), and off-page issues (such as backlink profile building and social media presence).
As a whole, these efforts will paint a comprehensive picture of your web presence and general online visibility. Therefore, regular SEO audits are crucial for identifying website issues and optimizing SEO performance. Partnering with an SEO agency that performs holistic audits can provide valuable expertise and insights.
Why Your Website Needs an SEO Audit
Briefly put, an SEO audit can help you identify common problems that are holding your website search engine rankings back as well as overlooked opportunities that can give your website search engine rankings a significant boost. Because your website serves as the digital hub of your online brand, you must conduct regular checkups to make sure that everything is optimized for success. As you add, remove, and change content form your site over time, it is essential to perform audits on a regular basis. At least one SEO audit each year is recommended so that your teams can address changes and solve critical issues as they arise.
Beyond boosting your website visibility through prominent search engine rankings, SEO helps drive organic website traffic to your website and boost conversion rates among website visitors while turning new leads into paying customers and paying customers into brand adherents.
Sharing the opinion that a good SEO audit must be a comprehensive one, highly successful entrepreneur and tech influencer Neil Patel lists technical malfunction, site speed, content strategy, and user experience (UX) as just a handful of areas for website improvement that an SEO audit can identify. Specific problems in these areas include broken links, uncompressed images, duplicate content, and poor site structure.
What an SEO Audit Involves
As previously noted, a comprehensive and holistic SEO audit will cover technical, on-page, and off-page elements. Read on for a closer look at what each of these SEO audit areas involves.
Technical SEO Audit
A technical SEO audit involves the close examination of elements such as indexation (the capability of a search engine to organize website information before a rapid user search) and crawlability (the capability of a search engine to access a web page and analyze its content) while looking for problems with URL architecture and legacy domain issues. Other technical aspects of SEO include robots.txt file, XML sitemap, canonical tag, status tag, and page speed optimization.
On-page SEO Audit
An on-page SEO audit centers around improving website content structure and themes while performing in-depth keyword research to ensure that your website is strategically packed with the right words and phrases to promote exceptional search engine ranking. On-page audits also analyze metadata such as page titles, heading tags, and meta descriptions as well as non-verbal website content such as images and videos.
Off-page SEO Audit
Unlike the SEO audit site audit concentrations above, an off-page SEO audit examines factors that are external to your website yet still have a profound effect on its ability to rank highly in relevant search engine results. This includes taking a close look at your backlink profile to evaluate the number and quality of other websites that link to yours. It also includes collecting ample data from all your company’s social media pages and assessing your company’s social media presence as a whole. Performing audits of competitors’ websites for comparative analysis is also a key component of off-page SEO.
How a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Agency Can Help
The power of a good SEO audit can be so highly transformative that it commonly saves businesses from financial ruin. However, no two SEO audits are created equal.
Leading SEO auditing consultants agree that it takes a high-quality SEO agency to lead an audit that makes a real difference. Cut rate and run-of-the-mill audits from random freelancers on Fiverr are unlikely to make a tremendous difference, so make sure that your audit is conducted by someone with expertise in the art and science of SEO.
The highly specialized and technical nature of SEO requires extensive expertise and experience that only seasoned SEO professionals can bring to the table. In addition to offering in-depth industry knowledge and skill, a top SEO agency like Marketing Done Right has access to the latest in technological tools and industry best practices.
Benefits of Conducting Regular SEO Audits
Even if your SEO efforts are strong today, routine SEO audits offer long-term benefits for ongoing website performance and SEO strategy. In other words, you must audit if you want to maintain high website visibility and effectiveness through search engine rankings and organic traffic generation. By taking a proactive approach to audit, you can anticipate future problems and address them immediately when they arise. Search engine algorithm updates and changing webmaster guidelines are just two among a broad spectrum of SEO factors that face constant evolution.
Partner with a Top SEO Agency in Cleveland, Ohio for Enhanced Digital Visibility
An SEO audit can help you both address important problems and boost overall performance to keep your company website at or near the top of all relevant online searches. Partner with a leading SEO agency like Cleveland, Ohio’s Marketing Done Right (MDR) to ensure SEO audit service that is as comprehensive and effective as possible. To learn more about what an MDR SEO audit can do for your business, fill out a short information request form by clicking here.
