Top Items to Check in an SEO Audit
Categorized in: SEO
When it comes to digital marketing, there are many components and SEO is one of them. Yet, to do it correctly, it’s a lot more involved of a process than one might think. In order to formulate an SEO strategy and determine how it fits into the wider digital marketing program, one has to first take a step back and see where things are at. This is where the SEO audit comes in.
Why Do You Need an SEO Audit?
There are a few reasons why you might want to do an SEO audit. Here are a few of them:
- Technical issues. This is your chance to uncover any technical issues that will need to be addressed for your digital marketing and SEO to both thrive. For example, if your site speed is slow, it will negatively impact your SEO and your overall marketing.
- Current status. You need to know where you are at so that you can figure out how to get the SEO to a place where it will help you meet your goals.
- User experience. Did you know that a properly composed SEO strategy helps improve user experience? An audit can help you identify areas that will improve how your audience perceives your website.
These are just a few of the reasons why you need an SEO audit. Of course, there are others, but in our experience, these are some of the most important ones. If you take the time to assess where you are with your SEO, you can know exactly what it is you need to fix.
Items to Check During an SEO Audit
There are a lot of different things that you can check in an SEO audit. Each of these items have the potential to help your SEO if it’s operating correctly, but also hurt your SEO if there is something about it that needs to be improved. Here’s a list:
- Site Speed. If your site is slow, users won’t be happy. They’ll click away from your site in frustration. Search engines know this and dock slow websites in search results. Your site needs to be as fast as possible.
- Meta Data. This isn’t technically a ranking factor in the same way that it used to be 10+ years ago. However, they still help. It can hurt you if the meta data isn’t written optimally or if you don’t even have any meta data in the first place.
- Crawling and Indexing. What does the website crawling and indexing data look like? You’ll need to know because you’ll want to fix any issues that you see.
- Backlinks. You’ll want to check your backlinks on a regular basis. If you have some spammy backlinks, you’ll want to disavow them to signal to Google that you didn’t get those spammy links on purpose.
- Mobile. These days, and it depends on the market, most people seem to use their mobile devices to search online. You need to make sure that your site looks great on mobile!
As you can see, it is so important to do an SEO audit. Every website should have this done at least every few years in order to check on the health of your SEO program and of the website itself.
LIKE AND SHARE THIS ARTICLE: