Why You Need An SEO Website Audit Of Your Website
Do you cringe when someone says SEO?
I think we all have at one point, and some of us still do.
SEO can be hard to understand. You have all this technical jargon to try and get your head around, plus you also need to work out how to implement the changes required.
An SEO website audit will help you better understand where your website’s SEO is at, and what you can do to improve your search ranking.
SEO audits are a health check-up for your website
An audit, as defined by Oxford Dictionaries is “an official inspection of an organization’s accounts, typically by an independent body.”
Its use has broadened from a pure financial meaning to be defined as
“A systematic review or assessment of something.”
Therefore, an SEO audit is
“a health check of your website. It looks at the technical infrastructure, plus on-page and off-page elements to optimise visibility, usability, and conversion.”
In my opinion, it isn’t just a marking system of how your site ranks, it needs to explain what you can do to your site to further optimise it.
The key benefit of an audit is you become aware of where to best invest your money to make your site SEO-friendly. After all, there’s no point investing in content marketing if your site has some key technical issues that stop people from hanging around.
There are lots of SEO factors to consider
A lot of SEO is technical. There’s your site’s page structure, navigational elements, URL structure, mobile responsiveness, site speed and accessibility.
Then there’s an XML sitemap to be submitted to search engines, a user sitemap, and you need to find out if you have a robots.txt file too. Plus heaps of other things to be aware of.
Any new content, such as blogs or additional pages, needs to be optimised. Each page is optimised for one keyword/keyword phrase only. And optimisation doesn’t mean stuffing your content full of keywords either.
The keywords you use also need to be carefully researched to determine whether people are searching for that phrase. Plus you need to determine if you have a good chance of ranking for those words. That’s why an audit of your website should also include a content audit too.
SEO is not static
SEO is not a one-fix wonder. You don’t set it and forget it. Some of the above technical aspects may have been set up when your developer created your website.
This is great, but depending on when your site was created, it may not be optimised for current search engine algorithms.
At the end of the day, you could be putting all your time creating content that’s not optimised. Or you could be optimising your content but the technical SEO factors may be letting your site down.
Or worse, you could have a few dodgy backlinks that are harming your SEO.
What are the key factors of Google’s algorithm?
No one knows what the algorithm is. Even those working at Google. The algorithm also goes through updates so you need to be on top of these changes.
Have a look at the Google search engine recommendations for optimising your site. You can read about the key factors that they use in their algorithm.
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