Conducting an SEO audit to see if you are missing a trick

By David Wharram, CEO of Coast Digital

As a business owner, having a website that doesn’t perform well for you simply won’t do. The purpose of a company’s website is to attract targeted visitors who are likely to become customers. Therefore, your website needs to rank high within search engines. Despite SEO’s high level of effectiveness, a study highlights that 39% of surveyed business leaders are unsure as to whether their company website is optimised for SEO, underscoring the need for an SEO audit. A single site can be assessed by several factors when it comes to its ranking – including content, speed, mobile-friendliness, and a solid internal linking structure, to name a few.

Carrying out an SEO audit can be significantly beneficial to your business, as you will be able to determine just how your SEO efforts are performing and working towards that shared goal of ranking higher within the search engines. The process allows you to review your website and highlight its strengths and weaknesses. Not only this, but it also provides an in-depth understanding of how the business appears within search results, thus identifying opportunities to improve user experience.

With a multitude of terminology and SEO tools to navigate, the idea of performing an audit on your SEO can seem daunting. However, knowing how an SEO audit could benefit your business and understanding how to interpret the findings can be very valuable to your business.

Technical SEO Audit

One of the main areas of an SEO audit is a technical SEO audit, which aims to improve the ‘health’ of your website. Technical SEO audits look at issues such as duplicate pages, slow loading pages and broken internal links. One of the popular SEO audit tools used by many is Google Search Console. Google Search Console monitors how Google views your website and can provide valuable insights, as well as monitor and maintain your site.

This process can also help identify whether your website is using a search engine crawl budget efficiently. Search engine crawl budgets look at the number of pages Google will crawl on your site on a day to day basis. By identifying these issues, you can recognise how well equipped your website is for search engines, as well as how optimised it is for organic traffic. By having a website that is optimised for search engines it will allow potential customers to find you easily online.

Keyword Audit

Once you have a better understanding of the health of your site, you can carry out a keyword audit to look at your businesses position within organic search, against a variety of keywords. Keyword audits are an essential part of an effective SEO strategy. When using keywords, it is critical to consider specific words and phrases that your audience might use when searching. By recognising these, you can gain a more in-depth insight into the intent of your audience, as well as identify any new tracked keywords that are relevant to help your site achieve an increased quality in traffic. This process is often completed through keyword research, using tools such as Google Ads Keyword Planner.

Backlink Audit

Carrying out a backlink audit is an essential step in acknowledging the health of a business’ current backlink profile, helping to identify any issues with poor backlinks. Typically, backlinks provide a clear image of the quality and professionalism of a website. However, previous link building methods have resulted in many sites now being stuck with malicious links. In some cases, poor backlinks can result in a penalty being issued by Google; that’s why getting it right is crucial.

Generally speaking, the quality of links is more important than the quantity. Ensuring you are using domains that are relevant to your business is vital and can help showcase your company as professional and trustworthy. It can be advantageous to look at your competitor’s backlinks, as this can help you uncover potential opportunities and provide you with an understanding of how they use and implement them.

SEO Page Audit

Finally, SEO page audits look at the outcomes gathered from all the relevant aspects to determine how specific landing pages can be improved – this can be done by comparing content to key competitors. Google Analytics can also be used to identify any opportunities for improving and increasing traffic to your site. Once you have completed an SEO audit, you will be in a much better position to implement an efficient strategy. As issues are identified, you can make significant changes to help improve the overall SEO strategy.

Having a clear view of how your SEO is performing is critical and can be an effective, cost-efficient way to grow your business. Not only this, but it will help to increase website traffic, refine organic search visibility and achieve the broader business goal of converting more customers.