Your website’s ranks and traffic acquisition might not be going too well lately. And for that, you may consider an SEO audit. A sound idea for sure! The importance of such regular audits cannot be stressed enough. But before you get in touch with an audit agency for the job, it helps to know a bit about the work. So, here’s a list of facts that an SEO audit will tell you about:
1. Keyword health
An SEO audit will look into the most high-value keywords for your business. Then, it will focus on where your site ranks for such keywords. Also, the audit will tell you which keywords are bringing the most traffic and whether that traffic is converting or bouncing.
Keyword analysis brings up many critical points that the site needs to look into. For instance, maybe the keywords that got you high traffic earlier aren’t working too well now. Or, maybe the home page and subpages are all optimized for the same keywords.
2. Content issues
When it comes to a content review, an audit takes into account both the search engine and the user perspective. And both love high-quality, relevant, and fresh content. So, the process of auditing might reveal that you need to increase the number of pages with substantial content.
Another crucial aspect that’s revealed is the presence of duplicate content. Your site might have a ‘http’ and ‘https’ version at the same time, which is creating the problem. Your SEO audit service might suggest sticking to the https version, while 301 redirecting the http one to it.
3. Meta tag uniqueness
Meta tags are what you use to let the search engines know what the page is all about. Thus, each page on your site needs to have unique and relevant meta tags. This way, you are allowing the search engine to use the most relevant text to describe the content of your pages.
SEO audits make sure that your pages aren’t getting filtered out of the results due to a lack of relevancy or duplicate content.
4. Links
Your auditing agency will look at both internal and external links in preparing a report for you. Now, internal links are the ones that are on your site, while external links refer to other websites that link to yours.
So, in terms of internal links, having too many of them on each webpage is never a good idea. Another way to appear spammy is to use an irrelevant anchor text. Similarly, for external links, you cannot have a very complex site structure where reaching a page involves too many clicks.
5. Site speed
If your site takes forever to load, your visitor is simply going to close the tab and look at other options. As this keeps happening time and again, the search engines will continue to drop your ranks. After all, crawling and indexing by search engines also gets slower when page speed is low.
Did you know that Google can even mark your site non-mobile-friendly in the process? Therefore, run an SEO audit to know the current page speed and whether it helps your ranking and traffic generation.
6. Sitemaps
Another significant ranking element that SEO audits tell you about is the health of your robots.txt and XML Sitemap files. After all, how well the search engine crawlers assess your site is dependent on these elements.
The XML Sitemap has to remain updated. The site’s robots.txt file should not block certain parts of your site to make it difficult for the crawlers. The audit will check the status of both these technical elements to reveal what you need to do.
7. Code quality
Without getting into any complicated details of coding, let’s just remember this: a cleaner site code means greater ease for the search engine crawlers to index.
However, don’t let the mention of code quality make you think that search engines penalize sites with poor codes. There will be far too many sites to penalize in that case! Audit agencies check the codes from an SEO perspective just to make sure they are clean enough and won’t cause any issues with crawling.
8. Mobile friendliness
A chunk of your traffic comes from mobile devices. Thus, if your site does not perform as well as expected on a mobile device, your chances of driving conversions are slim. Search engines have been insisting on mobile-friendliness for the longest time.
As a matter of fact, Google ranks the websites for their mobile versions first for every user. So, is your site mobile-friendly enough? Is it friendlier than that of your competitor? How long does it take to load on the mobile? SEO audits will answer all these and more relevant questions.
9. Overall site health
SEO audit agencies also run a general health check on the sites to note the red flags, if any. If you are not planning to do a full audit right away, ask the agency to at least run a basic health check. It might include different aspects like the number of pages appearing in the search index or the overall site speed.
You will be surprised at the number of factors that are revealed about your site from even a general audit.
10. Discoverability
Discoverability refers to making a site easily accessible for the search engine crawlers. For instance, JavaScript is much easier to interpret for a search engine compared to Adobe Flash files.
It delves into the complete structure and organization of your site. As important as it is for the search engines to find a link between different concepts, it’s equally necessary for users to find information with ease. In order to determine this, the site architecture is taken into consideration.
Though only ten factors are mentioned here, there are a lot many minute details that an SEO audit looks into. So, this list, which is certainly not an exhaustive one, is a glimpse into what an audit can do for your site. Are you ready to make the necessary changes?
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