SEO can be essential to success online for many businesses – for many users, a search engine is the first time they will see and consider interacting with your business, and their subsequent interactions with your website can make the difference in how they perceive your business. Routinely auditing your website allows you to quickly identify technical and optimisation issues, and address them before they have a major impact on customer experiences or your search engine rankings.
SEO audits have become a standard part of the digital marketing industry, and can be a key introduction to the world of search engine optimisation for many companies – providing a clear set of problems and solutions in order to drive growth.
Why Are Audits Necessary?
Running a SEO audit is a necessary part of keeping your SEO strategy updated, if you are regularly optimising your website, you will see a regular increase of traffic to your website which should increase the amount of leads and enquiries you are getting for your business through your website.
An SEO audit measures how well your website is optimised for search, this can include analysing keywords, link profiles, traffic behaviour, goal conversions, metadata and image and video optimisation. There are also many technical aspects that will need to be audited.
The most important part of creating a strong SEO strategy is to do an initial SEO audit of your website. This is extremely helpful and can quickly show you what is working and what needs to be tweaked to maximise your website’s performance.
Performing audits regularly is a great way of ensuring that your website is mobile optimised, loading quickly and allowing users to take the right action on your site. It also helps with planning the next stage of SEO activity for your website.
Common SEO Audit Areas
SEO audits involve a number of different checks and areas of search engine optimisation and website construction – assessing everything from the written content to how well a website interlinks its pages. Whilst all of the areas looked at by audits are part of SEO best practice, many also include the technical underpinnings of a website, helping to maintain and improve the experience for users. The 4 key elements that a good SEO audit covers are:
- Technical Areas – A fundamental area for audits to cover, the technical underpinnings of a website can make the difference between poor performance and e-commerce success. Many search engines will use elements of technical performance such as code compression, overall site speed, mobile vs. desktop optimisation and more. By exploring any errors or issues within this area, businesses benefit twice; improving their search engine optimisation, as well as creating a fundamentally better experience for their digital customers.
- SEO Fundamentals – These areas are a baseline for good search engine performance, and ensuring that your website is regularly audited to check for any problems with these fundamentals – as well as tracking the effects of updates and fixes – can be a one of the most effective ways of maintaining and improving your search engine rankings. These fundamentals include accessibility elements like image alt text as well as metadata that is displayed directly in search results.
- Content – Whether written or visual, the quality of your website content is a key indicator for both search engines and users in determining the authority of a website. For engines like Google, this means establishing that content provides a truthful, authoritative insight that can give users meaningful information and a positive experience. For users and potential customers, the quality of content can make the difference between a bounce and a return visit – and where your business goals occur largely offline, can make the difference for potential customers researching your brand or looking for a point of contact. Some of the issues that SEO audits can uncover include content duplication (heavily frowned upon by search engines), the strength of internal linking, as well as the readability of written content. Audit results can be essential to identifying areas of improvement, assisting the development of long-term content strategy.
- External Factors – The final common area of SEO auditors, there are a number of external factors such as backlinking, local search profiles, as well as competitor analysis and tracking that can be outside of direct control – but are important pieces of information to monitor and integrate into SEO optimisation strategies.
Digital marketing and SEO Audits can be essential for business success, whether your digital goals involve growth, improved visibility, or driving sales! For the answers to all your questions, digital audits, and SEO expertise, get in touch with the team at Wonderful today!
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