Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) ensures that your website is optimised for search engines like Google. A professional SEO audit is essential for keeping your SEO strategy up to date, and ahead of the competition.
An SEO audit for your website may include outlining and analysing any problems with your site which are having a negative effect on your organic rankings, meaning you’re less visible to your potential customers. Errors such as broken links or slow loading speeds are going to prevent you from achieving a high ranking, wasting your marketing efforts and costing you money.
You may be thinking: which kinds of websites need an SEO audit? Or even: why does my website need one?
To answer this, the truth is that every website would benefit from an SEO audit. No website is perfectly optimised, so there is always room for SEO-based improvements which would improve your rankings in Google, possibly cementing you as a trusted service provider in your industry. Also, search engines and their algorithms are constantly changing, meaning you need regular updates to your website to stay on top.
Reasons your site needs an SEO audit
Monitoring your competition
Understanding your competition is always important for any business, particularly if they are ranking above you on search engines. An SEO audit is a great way to obtain valuable insight into your competitors’ websites, to determine what keywords they are ranking for, and how we can use this information to boost your website.
Another strategy is to pick out some keywords which are relevant to your industry, but your competitors aren’t managing to rank for. Using these terms allows you to gain some ground in your industry, taking you one step closer to being the authority in your industry.
Keywords
Regular SEO audits can provide you with specific information on certain keywords which you are successfully ranking for, and what you aren’t. Thanks to this SEO analysis, you can update your website regularly to stay up-to-date with the latest and most relevant keywords, and monitor the impact of these changes in real time.
Loading speed and mobile optimisation
When it comes to indexing, Google prioritises the mobile version of your website before the desktop. Your site is then ranked based on its mobile performance, and one thing that Google likes to check is the loading speed.
An SEO audit reveals issues such as poor mobile optimisation, or slow loading times, allowing you to amend them and improve rankings.
Broken pages
Finding broken links, redirects or ‘page(s) not found’ is the next important step. Outlining these issues, alongside any other which might be reducing your site’s traffic, gives you somewhere to focus your efforts and improve organic rankings.
Web traffic insights
Using tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console allows you to discover your search volume, clicks and impressions that your site is generating on search pages.
A good SEO strategy will result in clicks and impressions. Regularly monitor this data so you can find any outlying data and changes in traffic.
Identify on-page issues
On-page SEO refers to the optimisation of any website content. This includes the structure of a blog post for example, in terms of whether the right headings have been used and in the right way, and that key queries have been pushed in the right places.
An effective SEO strategy allows search engine crawling bots to easily understand what your website, or post, is about and index it quickly and accurately.
An SEO audit allows you to understand any issues with your meta titles, descriptions, headers, content and internal links. These are problems which you might not notice at the surface level, but they have a big impact on the rankings of your site.
Helps you build a content strategy
Based on all the factors we’ve discussed above, an SEO audit will outline all the strengths and weaknesses of your website, as well as those of your competitors. This information allows you to develop a more effective content strategy to achieve higher rankings.
SEO audits will help you identify opportunities to create unique content which will attract readers and backlinks, and subsequently business, to your website.
