By now, every business with a web presence should be somewhat familiar with search engine optimization (SEO). If not, check out our crash course and get up to speed about the benefits of SEO. Search engine optimization is absolutely essential to your website’s success and in gaining you new clients, and an SEO audit is the first step to improving. VivosWeb offers free SEO audits so you can give your SEO a check-up!
An SEO audit refers to using a program to analyze your various web pages to determine how well you’re doing your SEO. It focuses on various aspects of your website and gives feedback that is key to increasing your rankings and online visibility. You should always perform an SEO audit when launching a new website, but it can also be helpful to do one annually to check up your SEO, or when you launch a new section of your website or product. It’s also a great idea if you notice an inexplicable drop in your traffic.
What is an SEO Audit?
The various aspects of an SEO audit will analyze your website in various aspects to see where SEO is lacking and where it is strong.
First, a technical analysis is completed to check if all the web pages are working and linked properly. If a visitor isn’t able to access all of your content, what’s the point in having content? Meta tags, robots.txt files, and XML sitemaps are all analyzed to ensure there are no missing links, dead pages, or URL errors. It also checks the amount of redirects your website uses. If you have too many redirects, it makes for a slow website, which will affect your bounce rate.
The SEO audit will also check for duplicate content. If you have duplicate content on your website, that is, pages that are the same or pages that target the same keywords, search engines won’t index all the pages. They will choose the strongest one and ignore the rest. This means you could have content that is being completed ignored by Google and other search engines and has no chance of ranking and are useless in SEO terms. That’s a waste of pages and content!
An SEO audit also checks various aspects of your content to show you areas of improvement for keywords, consistency, and clarity. It will check:
- The URLs of your pages to ensure it describes the content and is clear
- If your page titles match the URL and your targeted keywords
- The formatting and H tags for keywords and consistency
- The length of the content – at least 500 words per page
- Image optimization and alt tags
- The quality of links on your website
- Your meta information to check for keywords and consistency
Consistency in all of these areas regarding your keywords on your page is absolutely necessary for good SEO. A thorough SEO audit is the best way to see places where your content can be improved.
Lastly, an SEO audit will check the effectiveness of the keywords you’re targeting. It will analyze which keywords have high search volume but lower competition so you can find your niche to target. If your keywords are too vague or have too much competition, it will be very difficult to rank for them. An SEO audit will help you determine which keywords will be the best to target to improve your rankings.
Benefits of an SEO Audit Service
The biggest benefit of an SEO site audit is that if you take the suggestions and analysis to improve your website, you will see an improvement in your organic ranking on search engines and gain more leads.
Because an SEO audit determines your current SEO weaknesses, it gives you a clear path and suggestions to follow to improve your SEO. You can take the guesswork out of writing content and researching keywords – you can see exactly what you have to improve and how you can improve it.
You can also identify the strength of your competitors. You can see the keywords that they are ranking for and how they are doing it. You can use their ideas and research to make your own website better optimized.
With an SEO audit, you’re also able to easily create an SEO strategy. You can’t have a strategy, goals, or a plan if you don’t know your weaknesses and strengths. Once you see the areas your website can be improved, it’s easy to create goals and a strategy to improve your SEO and boost your search engine rankings.
Get Your Free SEO Audit
VivosWeb provides no obligation, free SEO audits. If you’re curious about your website’s SEO and how it can be improved, contact us. We’ll perform a free SEO audit to help you form an SEO strategy.
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