What is an SEO Audit?
Marketing any brand on the internet today requires that you have deep knowledge of digital marketing as well as SEO rules. Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important aspect of any successful digital marketing campaign. Businesses marketing their products or services online should have a well-built website that they can always drive traffic to. This way, their audience can learn more about their products or services and the business can gain more leads and conversions.
Despite all this, having a well-built website with consistent traffic is not enough; organizations need to ensure that their website is SEO compliant. This is why there is a need to do a thorough SEO audit on the website.
What is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is a comprehensive analysis done on a website that helps website owners assess the overall performance of every page on the site. This further ensures that they are getting a good SEO score as well as reaping all the benefits of having a well-optimized website.
An SEO audit will primarily focus on ensuring that the website is performing very well on search engines by screening the architectural design of the website as well as the content. The audit will highlight any issues with both the content and architectural design while suggesting ways to resolve these issues.
Want to know how optimized your website is? If so, it would be useful to contact an experienced SEO marketing agency who can help you through the process. In the meantime, here are 5 benefits of carrying out an SEO audit on your website.
1. Improve the brand’s image and position in its industry
This is one of the amazing benefits of doing an SEO audit for the website. The web crawlers for search engines are primarily responsible for helping the website get indexed to be shown on the search engine results page (SERP). Now, if there are some issues preventing these web crawlers from effectively doing their job when they get to the website, the SEO audit will help fish these issues out. In addition to that, if there is an issue with the website that is preventing it from getting good ranking for relevant primary and secondary keywords, the SEO audit can help fix that. Once that is fixed, the website will keep ranking high for such relevant keywords. They will also receive more organic traffic to the website which might lead to more conversions or sales. When an organization keeps getting high ranking for certain keywords or search terms it would automatically boost the image of their brand. It will also help the brand gain respect as an authority in that industry.
2. Generate more leads that can turn to conversions or sales
This is also a great benefit for brands seeking to get more sales or at least reasonable leads. Getting enough traffic to the website is one main reason why brands advertise on various digital marketing platforms. It is believed that more traffic to a website means more visitors will travel through the sales funnel of the brand and a certain percentage will be converted to leads or sales. Likewise, the more traffic the website receives the possibility of getting more leads and sales increases. While that is true, brands can still get more quality and relevant traffic to their website which does not necessarily have to go through all the steps in their sales funnel in order to make a sale. Now, because SEO focuses on the quality of the website to improve ranking, it means that the website will have more organic traffic (the visitors who are actually looking for what that brand offers). This is because they searched for it using the keywords that are already present on the brand’s website and they move straight to wanting to purchase the item. So rather than spending a lot of money on getting more traffic on the website only to have more than half of that number not go through, brands can focus on getting higher quality traffic. They can also focus on converting that organic traffic to leads or sales.
3. Learn more about the brand’s competitors and discover new strategies
Carrying out a comprehensive SEO audit on the website allows brands to get a better understanding of what works in their industry, in terms of SEO. They can also see those competitors performing well in that industry as well as what strategies the big fishes in that industry are using to dominate. Brands can also learn the strengths and weaknesses of such brands and leverage them to strengthen their current SEO strategies. This is why they say having a competitor in business is not always a bad thing. Besides competitors, doing an SEO audit can also help the brand to discover new SEO rules that they are not complying with. Just like the algorithms of search engines keep changing, the rules that govern SEO also changes. Techniques used today are not going to be used five years from today, so the brand’s website needs to be kept up to date with current SEO trends. This cannot happen if a business does not carry out an audit as often as possible.
4. Boost user experience
One of the things produced during an SEO audit is verification that the website is responsive to mobile devices and that it opens fast and well on major web browsers. This is needed because these two SEO rules (responsiveness to mobile devices and fast website/page loading) is not negotiable as it determines whether the website will rank high or low. Search engines are very keen on providing search results that will fit the needs of mobile users since they account for a larger percentage of the mode used for accessing web search tools.
5. Improves the overall content on the website
SEO audit also focuses on the quality of the content on the website as well as its authenticity. All the content on the website will be thoroughly scanned to ensure that it complies with current SEO rules, in terms of being relevant, authentic and shareability.