10 Reasons Why Your Website Needs an SEO Audit

June 27, 2023 | Basic SEO

A professional SEO audit will give you everything you need to know about the current condition of your website and how it ranks on the search engines. This gives you all the information you need to improve your website to make it the best it can be. Despite the name of an ‘audit’, renowned for being a bad thing, for example, tax or IRS audits, an SEO audit is an essential tool that your business should be using on a regular basis, and the results will only positively benefit your business.

Still not convinced? Here are ten reasons as to why your website should have an SEO audit.

Your Website’s Wellbeing

Investing in an SEO audit for your website is like taking it for a routine check-up at the doctors. The audit will be able to compare your website’s condition to the benchmarks set by the online industry such as search engine giants, Google. The audit results will be able to inform you of any problems your site has as well as detailed analysis of your website’s statistics. These statistics can include your bounce rates; the time visitors have spent on your website pages and the effectiveness of any referral plans you are currently running and managing.

This general analysis and overview of your website will be able to look into a variety of areas as well as key SEO aspects including your citations, links and the data on your social networking accounts, your sitemap and how effectively your website is linked internally. These audits will also be able to show you if your website has any ‘red flags’. This includes potential penalties that Google can impose on websites for poor content, therefore harming your overall search engine ranking.

It’s worth remembering that search engines are constantly changing their guidelines and requirements for good SEO practices. If you are focused on improving and operating your business, it can be easy to miss these updates, or you simply may not have time to research the current guidelines, which is why it’s essential that you bring in the assistance of a professional SEO expert.

With this information, it’s easy to pinpoint the weaker areas of your SEO practice allowing you to rectify them to improve your website almost instantly.

Checking Out the Competition

The Internet is renowned for being a dog eat dog world when it comes to businesses. Everybody is competing to be the best, and the main weapons in this fight? Your website. By investing in a competition audit, you can accurately monitor and see exactly what SEO methods and techniques your competitors are using. What works for one successful website can work for yours which is why checking out your competition is so important.

Maybe they’ve implemented a technique or practice that your business has missed on its own site, and now your competitors are stealing all your customers and leads? An SEO audit is a perfect tool for finding out the truth, enabling you to better yourself and even out the playing field.

How’s Your Visitor Count?

You may find that, over time, the visitor count on your website is slowly diminishing or levelling out. Search engines are constantly updating their algorithms to find new and effective ways to index websites such as yours. If you haven’t updated your website in a long time or you are not using currently effective SEO methods, your preferred search engine can proactively kick you down the search engine results page.

A low visitor count is a very clear indication that your SEO methods are not as good as they should be. An SEO audit will be able to highlight the errors causing this, allowing you to correct them. 

PPC is Expensive

As we all know, pay-per-click campaigns are very expensive, and at the end of the day, you’re much more likely to get leads coming to your website through search engine results than you are through a pay-per-click campaign. By optimising your website to its full potential using an SEO audit, you can effectively reduce the costs of your PPC campaign, saving you a tonne of money in the long run.

Constantly Updating Search Engines

As mentioned above, search engines are constantly updating their rules, algorithms and regulations to suit their consumers and business needs. With this, the guidelines of effective SEO practices are constantly changing which means that the practices that were effective two years ago, may no longer be relevant today. This makes an SEO audit essential in figuring out what had changed and how it affects your website.

Monitor Your Site’s Traffic

When referring to the analytical data of your website, do you find that the majority of your web traffic is coming from sources other than search engines? This shouldn’t be the case as statistics and studies show that every lead you receive from an external source should be matched by around 100+ people from search engines. Search engines have and always should be the leading source of web traffic to your website. If it’s not, then something is not right with your website, and this problem needs to be found and rectified as quickly as possible.

The best way to achieve this and start getting your website back to where it should be is to invest in an SEO audit. The audit will be able to show you why your website is ranking poorly in  search engines, therefore identifying why your web traffic statistics are out of balance. 

Two Eyes Are Better Than One

As the old saying goes. Whether you have completed your SEO practices yourself, your IT guy has completed them, or you hired an external company, your business was always involved in the process which means it’s extremely likely that your teams may have missed something. 

With a fresh pair of eyes from an external SEO auditing team, they are much more likely to pick up on techniques you have previously missed, allowing you to redeem your website as quickly as possible.

Has Your Website Peaked?

Statistically speaking, your website traffic should continuously grow around 2%-10% every month. If this is news to you and your website is not receiving this level of traffic, something needs to be done about it. This kind of trend is easily identifiable from your web traffic analytics pages. On a graph, you’ll usually see your website traffic gradually (or dramatically) increase before that growth begins to slow down and theoretically ‘flat-line’.  

By investing in an SEO audit, you and your team can identify any potential weak spots in your website that’s holding your website back. This will allow you to make corrections on those weak spots, perfecting the SEO condition of your website. If implemented correctly, you should start seeing the results within the first month!

Have You Got the Right Person for the Job?

If your business is hiring a website design company or an individual to handle your SEO, chances are you’re paying large sums of money to someone who may only know the basic techniques and practices of SEO. Now is the time to see if your money is being well-spent. Even at a basic level, an SEO audit will be able to pick up anything from the search engine guidelines to the tricks and tips that SEO professional around the world should be aware of.

Your audit results will show whether your specialist SEO technician knows what they’re doing. If they’re not, you could easily be saving yourself hundreds of dollars a month.

Expanding Your Business?

In both the long and short term, SEO audits are not relatively expensive, depending on what company you choose to go with. By fine tuning your website using the results of your audit, you can be sure that your website is running at its optimal level. Automatically, after your revisions and alterations have been made, you’ll see your website traffic start to increase, perfect for times when you’re trying to expand your business.

Conclusion

Whether you’ve recently launched your online business or you’ve been operating for years, an SEO audit is a must when it comes to perfecting your business’s online presence. By investing in an SEO audit sooner rather than later, you can immediately begin to address the issues with your website, allowing you to see the more positive results as soon as possible.

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