Why Your Site Needs an SEO Audit

Since Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an industry that is forever changing, it can often be hard to keep track of the many changes that occur. This can result in the amount of information available to help you rank better on the SERPs being quite overwhelming and difficult to make sense of at times. Almost every marketer that talks about SEO will begin by telling you that it’s important to begin with an audit of your site. Simply put, an SEO site audit is the process of looking into your website at several levels in order to verify and ensure that everything is performing correctly at a technical level. You will be essentially looking at the backend of your website and checking for any issues that need fixing, ultimately implementing the changes and repairs that are necessary to optimise your site for SEO.

Why is an SEO Audit Important?

It’s crucial that an SEO audit of your site is performed in order to identify problematic areas that are in need of improvement and to create a plan of action in order to rectify these issues. On top of this, thorough and regular checking ensures that your website is up-to-date with the latest developments in SEO and search marketing, which will result in being more effectively recognised by the search engines and remaining one step ahead of the competition.

What Needs to Be Looked At?

The full list of an SEO audit checklist can seem quite overwhelming, but the vital components of the check are simpler to understand. On-site is the most essential component of an SEO audit checklist. In short, you should be looking at your domain and URL structure, any duplicate content, the structure of your internal links, the downloading speed of the website, your images and alt-tags, any broken links in need of repair, testing for sitemap.xml and robots.txt, and how mobile friendly your site is. As you can probably imagine from the short list, performing a technical SEO audit manually is extremely time consuming, which is why it’s helpful to use an SEO audit tool for better efficiency.

How is an SEO Audit Performed?

Your domain and all its pages will be checked by the website crawler against a checklist which will then come up with a list of recommendations regarding what needs to be improved or changed in order to improve the optimisation of your site. Correcting these issues will improve not only your website’s performance, but how it is exposed to search engines and appears in search engine results. Even if you are new to SEO, it is entirely possible to perform a deep audit with the correct SEO auditing tools. It’s required that you have some level of technical knowledge, however, in order to ensure that you have the necessary skills to make any corrections needed.

Do you perform a regular SEO audit on your site? How has this been of benefit to you and your business? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.