We all know that SEO rankings are vital if you want to attract valuable visitors and make your site profitable and alive overall. Search engine optimization is an ongoing process that requires a lot of time and effort, but once a site has reached a certain position in search rankings, a business can rely on it to get a constant flow of valuable traffic that can make it sustainable.
However, SEO is still a mystery to a lot of people, and even though they might be performing optimization through keywords, blog posts, on-site optimization and other practices, they don’t have a structured plan or understanding of their website’s strengths and weaknesses.
This is where SEO audits come into play.
Defining SEO audits
SEO audits are basically processes through which a business or marketers analyze the SEO characteristics of a website. This kind of audit is designed for marketing purposes and this is why it’s different from traditional audits.
Any business that wants to be serious about its website, SERP (search engine results pages) and marketing efforts overall needs to perform SEO audits on regular basis. A lot of people think that SEO audits are only good for launching a website, but in reality, they are an integral part of SEO campaigns.
This means that SEO audits should always be an ongoing process and conducted frequently, similarly to other SEO efforts. SEO audits should be performed whenever you start new marketing projects so that you can get valuable information that can help you get them on the right track, as well as during each quarter to see what shape your website is in.
Understanding the current state of your website
All good website SEO audit tools have the option of analyzing the overall health of a website. An audit report can show you how well your website is performing in all important areas of SEO, such as page load time, navigation, how clear and well-optimized your content is, how good your code is, URL structure, links and link building, key phrases and so on.
All of these insights can help you understand how good your SEO efforts are and where your website currently stands. If you don’t know what needs fixing and where you are doing well, you will never be able to take proper, effective steps in the future.
SEO audits can pinpoint mistakes in your campaign
When looking at an SEO audit report, you can see where your site is performing badly. By comparing these insights with your current efforts, you can recognize the mistakes in your SEO campaign and make the necessary fixes. Professional SEO audits will even point out what you are doing wrong and give you viable solutions.
For example, if your site has its physical address “hidden” deep within, it might be difficult for local customers to find it. This is where it’s a good idea to add another page on your website and display the location of your business clearly, making it appear more in local searches.
On the other hand, maybe you are trying to rank for the wrong keywords and you are actually performing well on others that you aren’t even aware of. This is one of the essentials of being found more easily in searches and an audit report can give you these answers.
You can discover red flags
The rules in SEO change quickly. Keeping up with updates and adjusting your strategy is essential. This means that forcings you did last year might have no effect whatsoever today or there might be new rules which penalize certain actions. These are known as SEO “red flags” and you need to avoid them.
An SEO audit report can clearly show you red flags and you need to work on changing them as quickly as possible. No matter how good your current efforts are, if there are tiny bits which are penalized, your rankings will be drastically reduced.
As we can see, SEO audits are essential in modern marketing. Every business that wants to have an actionable SEO campaign needs to rely on them to get good results.
