The advantages of an SEO audit
Running your business is exciting but challenging. You may find that you are so driven and focused on producing the right and the best kind of quality for your products or services. But what happens when you find out that you aren’t attracting enough leads or more specifically the right leads?
It can be frustrating. You have put in the hours of developing your brand, only to lose out on customers that your competitors will most likely target. This is when the importance of a SEO audit becomes useful.
But first, what is SEO? And what is an SEO audit?
In this article, I will not be able to cover every single feature that an seo audit tool deals with. But here are some of the important basics.
All about SEO
source: landerapp.com
SEO stands for search engine optimization. The purpose of SEO is to optimize your website and its content to rank better on search engines. It’s about attracting the right kind of traffic from the right areas on the web. Whether that be from youtube, news sites or online advertisements.
There are more media outlets than those three I mentioned above, but the most important takeaway is that you attract visitors who actually want to use your brand.
But how do we do this?
Well, the first building block to this answer is simple. Get a free SEO audit tool.
SEO audit tools
When it comes to SEO audits. Other terms such as website audit tool and website analysis tool are both applicable.
With an SEO audit tool, you can upload your site’s URL, logo and your important company details. However, a useful fact to know before this step is that many of these audits are free. You want to take advantage of this so make sure to search for a free SEO audit tool or free website audit tool on Google.
SEO audits are more tailored towards your site’s technical runnings. With a website audit tool or a website analysis tool, you can see how your site looks.
Does it look professional? Does it communicate your brand’s vision clearly?
The service can give it a fine polish.
Make sure you familiarize yourself with questions above. Luckily, there are some services that are WordPress compatible, which is the go-to site for many people.
Another good feature of an SEO audit tool is it determines how safely and securely your site’s data is stored. When you start your website or have years of experience behind you, you really want to know for sure that everything is stored with protection.
Technical performance
Maybe, you haven’t had the time to revisit your content, especially if it’s old. Under each blog post you will have a meta title+description and this part is worth revising.
The meta title+description is important because it helps the reader know what to look for when visiting relevant topics on the web. It could even be used to optimize the URL of your site. You will be surprised by how much of a difference it could make by just a slight re-wording or rephrasing of your site’s URL. The description part is more concerned with the marketing of your product or service. It’s the part that consumers read before clicking on your site. It needs to have a catch and engage the reader.
You can practice summarizing your service or USP features in a few sentences.
These are all concerned with the technical runnings of your site. But what about content?
This is when keyword analysis comes into the picture. You could be missing out on attracting the right leads because your keywords could be:
- Out of date/against trends
- Outranked
- Not particularly relevant
These are only three areas where your usage of keywords could be going wrong. Every once in a while, they need to be updated and sometimes you don’t always have the time to think about them constantly.
What will help you a lot when doing the audit, is to identify what keywords you want to rank for for your website. Create a list based on using services such as Ahrefs etc.
That way, I think the results of the audit will make more sense and may not be a huge surprise. Call it a top tip.
Create a more user friendly experience
With every SEO audit, you’ll identify how you can improve the quality of your site not just for your sake but for the consumers as well. Improving all of the technical runnings of your site is going to help you with that.
In terms of user experience, knowing the bounce rate of your site is going to be a useful indication to know how effective your site is to the visitor and how it ranks against sites using a similar or identical service to yours.
But how does your website converse into other devices such as tablet, iphone, ipad etc?
Source: telemediaonline.com
The above graph is a general overview of internet usage of 3 devices recorded in 2020. It shows that mobile usage outweighs desktop usage by a small percentage. However, this number may increase over time. But this shows that creating a website for your mobile is just as important as creating one for your desktop.
If you want to be realistic then having a website that works on as many different technical devices as possible may help you outrank your competitors.
Although this is a report tool, it can be seen as a customer user experience review because you may not own all of these different devices. The audit tool will determine how user friendly it is, because it’s just that clever.
Some of the areas it may cover is the text size and measuring how easy it is to read, as well as the overall speed of your site’s service. One of the most important elements consumers look for now is speed. They want to get to your site’s info as quickly as possible.
Your site’s social network
Have you connected your site with every possible social network channel?
Nowadays, there are just so many to keep track of, but here are the main ones to keep an eye out for:
- Google+
- Youtube
Although, there are more, these sites are the ones to get started on. These sites are the ones that a good seo audit tool will highlight.
The more green ticks you have with each one the better. A lot to do with effective marketing is developing a good social media presence. You can have a plan on how you want to market your content on each social media platform, to increase your brand’s awareness.
SEO audit report tools
Now that we have discussed the areas that a typical seo audit will cover, how is the constructive feedback presented?
Look for a grading system, from A+ to D-. For each department, you will be given a clear grade.
The whole report will consist of around 10 pages and will be finished with a recommendation sheet. The recommendation sheet will be one of the most useful sheets in the whole document. It will rank each recommendation in order of importance.
With each recommendation, you will be able to see which department it’s from. This could be SEO, social or performance etc.
it gives you, the owner of the site, a great starting block to build on. You can see where your site needs improvement and what specific areas that can be fixed to get more visitors.
It can be very common for the owner to share the results of the audit to the rest of the team, since Improving SEO is a collaborative effort.
The part that I have not mentioned yet is that the report tool will tell you where your site is potentially performing well. With this, you may get a better indication of your site’s USP and therefore focus a lot on that and develop your next strategy of those positive results.
Rank higher on google
However, all of these features lead to one goal and that is to rank higher on Google.
When people search for your website, you want to and need to be on the 1st page. The majority of internet users view 1st page results and then move on.
Before doing the audit, you may be able to do a pre-analysis of your site. You can start by searching for some of your blogs on the web. See where they’ve ranked and what your competitors are writing about as well.
Sometimes, when you know these facts, it can shape and change your brands goals, which may affect your website and SEO audit. So, I recommend doing this stage before the audit if possible.
What to look for?
When it comes to a SEO audit, you want the whole picture and there is a lot to consider. You don’t just want to focus on one branch of SEO. When you choose a service, here is a recap of what your service should include:
- SEO optimization
- Social links
- Usability
- Adaptability
Adaptability refers to other branches of seo such as white label seo or local seo. For some businesses, they may require a more tailored approach before they begin to audit their site. Which is why it’s important to first identify your leads and where you think they are currently coming from in the first place.
It can also refer to the many languages you have on your site. There is definitely a purpose for sites offering users the multi-language feature, but a SEO audit will make sure this is being run accordingly.
After the audit, you should be 100% informed on all the workings of your site. Like I mentioned before, always make sure that it is a free audit. The next stage is now gearing those recommendations to your business’s core values and goals in the long term. It also wont hurt to do research before the audit, it’s good to keep up to date as much as possible with any changes to your market sector. These are all good points to be aware of when you complete your audit.
If you want to learn more about SEO audit tools, click here.
FAQS
The best seo audit software is SERPWizz but some other good ones are SEMrush and Screaming Frog.
An SEO auditing software scans your site for 6 things:
- Mobile Usability
- SEO issues
- Social Media
- Servers
- Security
- Semantic Web
Here are the top paid SEO audit softwares.
- SEMrush
- Screaming Frog
- Ahrefs
- OnCrawl
The best way to do an audit is to use a seo audit software – you might even find a free seo audit software to search for limited areas.
People always ask “why is seo audit important?” SEO audits uncovers problematic areas that you can’t manually find right away.
Technical site audit softwares looks at the technical aspects of your sites and checks the overall health so you can improve it.
