Wouldn’t you love to see more sales coming in to your website? Wouldn’t you like more responses to your blog posts, more subscriptions to your email list?
There really is no shortcut to a winning website, but there are proven strategies and tactics used by professional SEO experts to get visitors onto your site who actually want what you’ve got to offer. If you’re considering ways to get more qualified traffic and boost your subscription list, an SEO audit of your website should be your first priority.
And it won’t break the bank, either.
Why You Should Audit Your Website
Professional SEO experts and agencies perform a website audit as the first step in a comprehensive strategy. They build a strategy based on their evaluation of your site’s performance. A doctor can’t prescribe you the right medication without a thorough examination, right? In the same way, you can’t get more traffic if you don’t know what’s keeping traffic away. By thoroughly evaluating every aspect of your site’s architecture, you can:
A) Improve your domain’s ranking in search results for more traffic
B) Save thousands of dollars in marketing, online advertising, and lost sales.
C) Create a strategic SEO plan that supports your business goals.
There are a host of onsite and offsite issues that can affect your website’s ranking in search results. Backlinks, crawling errors, keywords, HTML scripting, site mapping, to name a few, are matters typically managed by a web administrator, but business owners can still appreciate the benefits of an audit without the technical SEO expertise.
Take a look at the key benefits listed below, and you’ll see why so many trusted SEO professionals recommend an SEO website audit.
8 Key Benefits of A Website Audit
Improved visibility in search results
Meta data refers to content found within the HTML of your website. Search engines analyze your website’s metadata to determine an appropriate match and ranking in relevant search results. Errors in your meta data could be keeping search engines from indexing your content, and appearing prominently in search results.
Detailed competitor analysis to discover successful strategies
Keyword research and SERP tools analyze your website’s keywords, ranking them against your competitors for popularity. By understanding how successful competitors are attracting visitors, you can adopt similar keywords and tactics relevant to your business.
Discover potential sources of revenue (i.e. affiliates, influencers)
Websites utilizing the same keywords as you could be potential affiliates or influencers you could partner with. Bloggers who have linked to your content frequently, sites that have proven rich in leads, can all be discovered by examining citations of your business online. A website audit can uncover these and other lucrative opportunities for raising your brand’s profile.
Identify and repair onsite/offsite issues diverting traffic
Broken backlinks, spam, unfriendly URL’s and hidden content on your website are a few of the factors that could be unwittingly driving traffic away. A website audit can uncover and repair these issues before they spiral out of control.
Optimize content for higher online engagement A website audit can also help you capitalize on your strongest content by optimizing titles, headers, tags, images, and other multimedia. By analyzing your pages (layout, design, tone) you can repurpose underperforming pages for better online engagement in social networks as well.
Improved Keyword Distribution
Keyword stuffing used to be an easy way for businesses to manipulate search results. Google’s Penguin 4.0 update, finalized earlier this year, has helped to reduce spam and duplicate content in search results. Using keywords naturally and strategically is the best way to improve your ranking in SERP’s organically. While Google won’t penalize your entire website, pages with a suspiciously high frequency of keywords can get tagged, bringing down the overall authority of your domain.
Identify and capitalize on trends in traffic
One of the immediate insights you’ll gain through a site audit is trends in traffic. Tracking the peaks and valleys in hourly, weekly, and monthly traffic can help you better understand customer behaviour, so you can strategically release content (new products, blog posts, email marketing) to the right channels at the right time.
Improved User Experience
Poor load times, unresponsive pages, flash, and interstitial content can drive potential customers away in a hurry. Search engines are user-centric, focused on delivering content that other users endorse through engagement. Seizing the first position in search results will only happen if your website provides a consistently, high quality experience across all platforms – smartphone, tablets, and laptops. A site audit will help you identify ways to improve the overall functionality of your website so visitors actually want to stay.
How Often Should You Audit Your Website?
It’s a good idea to routinely audit your website two to three times a year. Being proactive will allow you to build traffic organically, gaining momentum and increased visibility through consistency, rather than losing precious ground to new competitors, shifting industry trends, or algorithm updates.
Want more great SEO tips and advice? Then contact a local SEO consultant like Paul Teitelman and find out how a site audit can help improve your website today!
