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You can’t overlook the importance of SEO audits for your business.
SEO audits offer insights into areas you should address to meet algorithmic requirements and industry trends. They analyze your technical, off-site, on-site, and social media SEO and identify ways to boost search rankings.
For these reasons, SEO audits provide the information you need to combat organic traffic hindrances. They, therefore, allow you to retain decent conversions and compete favorably.
Here’s a comprehensive overview of SEO audits’ benefits to your business and the areas an effective one covers.
What is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is the process of identifying problems with your website and provides insights about site structure, crawlability, indexability, speed, and mobile-friendliness, among other issues. The goal of an audit is to identify problems with how your site is built that could prevent Google from finding and indexing your content, or affect your site’s search visibility. Addressing such issues can boost your performance, authority, visibility, and functionality.
What Should You Include in an SEO Audit?
A comprehensive SEO audit should include the following areas:
- Technical audit: This includes assessing your crawlability, clickability, renderability, indexability, and ranking elements.
- Content audit: This involves analyzing your content pages to determine topicality, keyword usage, content gaps, duplication, and other content-related issues.
- Link audit: This includes assessing your brand image, backlinks, user feedback, and local SEO factors like Google Business Profile. It also allows us to compare how your competitors generate links and find ways to duplicate those efforts.
The Critical Importance of an SEO Audit
Streamlining your website and other marketing platforms has many advantages for your business. Here are some of them:
1. Improving Your Site’s Search Engine Rankings
An SEO audit ensures your website and socials align with Google’s 200+ ranking factors. It assesses how well you meet the key requirements for top organic rankings by checking if:
- You have quality, authoritative content that adequately addresses the needs of your visitors.
- Your keywords, schema markup, and technical elements are sound. These allow bots to understand your content and rank you accordingly.
- You provide a seamless user experience that increases the likelihood of search engines recommending your platform.
- Users can effortlessly share and give feedback on your content, among other factors that can boost your brand’s reputation.
2. Identifying Technical Issues Affecting Your Site
An effective SEO audit helps identify technical issues that could impact your site’s search visibility and organic traffic.
Here are some technical problems that an SEO audit can help you uncover:
Crawling Issues
If important pages on your site cannot be crawled, they won’t be shown in the search results and generate traffic. This is the first and most important step in the auditing process. Some of the top crawling issues include servers returning 4xx and 5xx errors, disallowed or blocked pages, canonical tag issues, menu and internal linking problems.
For some complex crawling and indexing issues, we may require help from your development team to provide additional reports/data, or we may need to run a log file analysis.
Duplicate Content
Googler Matt Cutts once said that there’s about 25-30% duplicate web content.
While duplication isn’t always bad, it may lead to issues like sharing link equity, which affects your authority.
Moreover, search engines select which duplicates to show. So your content may fail to reach your customers. Or what may reach them may not be the most relevant copy.
Mobile-Friendliness Problems
Over 23% of the top million websites lack mobile-friendliness. An audit can identify whether your site has suitable image and font sizes for mobile users, among other things.
Mobile-friendliness is crucial as Google prioritizes your mobile website for indexing (mobile-first indexing). The increasing percentage of mobile users (60.67% of all searchers) led to this indexing criteria.
So, ensuring your site offers an intuitive mobile experience may appeal to most of your visitors besides impacting rankings.
Slow-Loading Pages
The average website load time on mobile is 8.6 seconds. However, 83% of users expect at most three seconds, while 40% bounce if your load time exceeds that.
You can assess your website’s speed with tools like Google PageSpeed Insights. This tool also recommends what elements to adjust for faster performance. Following them may make your visitors stick around longer to see your offers.
Broken Links
A study found that 66.5% of links added since 2013 no longer work. An audit can identify whether you have dead links.
Removing broken links provides a user-friendly experience and may lower bounces. Fixing broken links also ensures search engines find your site complete and trustworthy.
3. Establishing Issues Affecting Your User Experience
An SEO audit helps identify issues that affect your website’s usability.
Some of these issues include:
- Slow load times.
- Poor readability.
- Irrelevant content.
- Navigation difficulties.
- Unresponsive website design.
By identifying and addressing these user experience issues, you can ensure visitors stay for longer and boost conversions.
CTA Problems
70% of small business websites lack CTAs. An audit can help you identify if you missed opportunities to drive users to your desired actions.
Additionally, it helps assess whether you have catchy, well-positioned CTAs that encourage conversions.
4. Identifying if Your Website is Affected by Algorithmic Changes
Google rolls out thousands of algorithmic changes yearly. For example, the company made over 3200 changes in 2018.
Keeping up with these changes is important to avoid sudden ranking drops. For instance, the 2018 Medic update caused over 42% of medical, nutrition, and diet sites to fall off in favor of smaller, local-based businesses.
An overnight drop in rankings may significantly impact your traffic and revenue before you can prepare.
Conversely, if algorithmic updates find that your site aligns with the changes, you may rank better and get more visitors.
But, responding to nine daily changes isn’t possible. Hence, you need to know which updates matter the most.
An SEO audit can highlight the most impactful changes by showcasing that
- There’s a sudden widespread shift in traffic or rankings.
- There are significant changes in featured snippets.
- You have new penalties and warnings in Google Search Console as the company considers some of your past behavior unsuitable.
- A sudden increase in crawl errors can highlight a shift in indexing and crawling patterns.
- Your conversion rates may be declining despite relatively similar traffic, because of a shift in the quality of visitors.
By staying up to date with changes, you can:
- Outsmart your competition, especially those that don’t conform.
- Optimize your content to improve relevance and reach suitable users.
- Identify the tweaks needed to stay at the top of rankings and maximize your reach.
You can keep up with these changes by checking Google’s blog. Also, consider subscribing to our blog to save time by identifying the most crucial search engine marketing updates and the latest news.
5. Identifying Avenues to Boost Conversion Rates
One key area an SEO audit analyzes is your conversion rate optimizations (CRO). A CRO audit identifies issues hurting your conversion rate. By addressing those problems, you’ll streamline the process for buyers. Hence, you may entice more conversions and boost your revenue.
A CRO audit establishes how users interact with your website. This assessment helps identify why users are converting or not and their drop-off points in the marketing funnel.
For instance, it can identify which CTA users are clicking and which ones they aren’t. You can then use these insights to optimize your CTAs and boost your conversion rate.
6. Determining Ways to Increase Organic Traffic
An SEO audit can identify issues affecting your rankings. As high rankings are a big part of getting a good amount of traffic from the SERPS, this is a huge area of an SEND audit.
According to 2023 statistics, the top three results share 68.7% of traffic, 39.8% of which goes to the top result.
An SEO audit tells you:
- Whether bots can crawl and index all your pages and areas that may be wasting your crawl budget.
- If your speed on different devices is suitable for bots and users.
- If you’re using structured data.
It checks your top-performing and worst-performing pages to see which ones you need to improve and how. For instance, it can show you on-page errors like missing H1s, link issues, keyword stuffing, and images that aren’t user-friendly.
You can also assess your site’s security to determine if you use HTTP instead of HTTPS. To fix that, you’ll need to install an SSL certificate.
By addressing these technical and on-page mistakes, you may boost your rankings. And by ranking better, you may improve your visibility and organic traffic.
7. Helping You Stay Ahead of Competitors
Competitor analysis is another big component of an SEO audit. It offers insights into competitors’ actions, which can help you to outsmart them.
An effective competitor analysis shows you their top-ranking keywords, backlink strategy, and content.
It unravels their weaknesses and strengths, which can help you know the tweaks that work and which elements to avoid.
Furthermore, an audit offers competitor insights that can boost your industry knowledge and credibility. It tells you what works and what doesn’t within your niche. Using and sharing this information positions you as a knowledgeable source amongst peers and customers.
By understanding your competitors, you can also alter your marketing plan to account for their tactics.
An audit can also help you establish industry trends you need to adapt to stay relevant and competitive. For instance, it can identify new keywords that you’re not using but your competitor is getting traffic from. Other things include:
- Keyword stuffing.
- Hidden links and text.
- Over-optimized anchor texts.
8. Providing an In-Depth Content Analysis
An effective SEO audit provides in-depth content analysis to ensure you identify issues impacting user experience and rankings.
It helps you analyze your content’s aspects, like:
- Content quality: How unique, valuable, and exhaustive is your content?
- Image optimization: Are you using friendly sizes and adding appropriate alt texts?
- Metadata: Do your title tags and meta descriptions feature suitable keywords that appeal to users and search engines?
- Linking strategy: Are you using descriptive anchor texts and linking to relevant, authoritative sources?
Conclusion
Having an SEO audit done by an SEO agency gives you the ability to identify issues that might be holding your site back from generating more organic traffic and business.
The recommendations may range in scope from some minor adjustments to a complete redesign or move to a new content management system. It’s then up to you to prioritize the recommendations and provide the necessary resources to address the issues.
Vizion can offer a one time SEO audit, or we can be retained monthly to help you through the implementation and be available to assist your developers work through the possible solutions. Sometimes there are multiple ways to solve an issue, Vizion’s SEO team can be available to help you work through those options and find the best solution for your company.
At Vizion Interactive, we have the expertise, experience, and enthusiasm to get results and keep clients happy! Learn more about how our SEO Audits, Local Listing Management, Website Redesign Consulting, and B2B digital marketing services can increase sales and boost your ROI. But don’t just take our word for it, check out what our clients have to say, along with our case studies.
