When and how to do SEO Audit. Why is it important?
Ever wondered why your car mechanic always stresses regular oil changes? For one, it helps to run your car smoothly. Secondly, it extends the car’s life. Now replace the oil with SEO and car with your website.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is one of the important tools in your toolkit. It helps in visibility and other essentials that define your online presence. SEO audit involves analyzing your website’s technical infrastructure, and on-page, and off-page elements. Auditing helps in optimizing the search engine’s usability, visibility, and conversion. Like regular servicing and oil change, a regular audit is essential for the increased shelf life of your website.
An optimized website can attract more leads and ultimately more sales. And SEO audits play an important role in this. Audits help in ensuring that your SEO strategy is up-to-date.
Let’s see some of the reasons why you should engage in SEO Audits
- Algorithm Changes: Nothing is permanent and search engines are no exceptions. Search engines such as Bing, Google, and Yahoo engage in constant updation of their algorithms to ensure “searching” is a smoother and more enriching experience. To be in the race, you need to know these constant updates and make necessary adjustments.
- Search Console Guidelines: Search Console tools offered by Google and other search engines are constantly changing, and one needs to be compliant.
- Title Tags and Meta Data: First impressions last long and titles and meta data are no different. They are the first thing a visitor will read when they visit your website, which pops up on search results. Hence, the titles and metadata must be relevant to the content on your website.
- Broken Links: Links are an important element in a website. Any website errors or broken links can result in lost traffic. An SEO audit can help in addressing them.
- Dated Content: Fresh content plays a vital role in attracting first-time visitors and making them regular visitors. SEO audits help in determining whether your website content is dated. The thumb rule is - Re-evaluate and change your website content if there is reduced visitor flow in 3 months.
Impressed by the reasoning? Here are some suggestions that help you get started with the audit:
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider: A free application, Screaming Frog Website Crawler extracts data and performs audits for routine SEO issues. It easily identifies URL issues, redirects, page titles, duplicate pages, headings, meta descriptions, and more. This data can be extracted into an excel sheet for analysis and auditing of data.
- Integrating with Google Analytics: Integration with Google Analytics enables the gathering of data about website visitors. Google Analytics helps to know how long your visitor stayed, did they visit any other page, and even the device they used for accessing your websites.
- Registering with Google Search Console: Once your ownership has been verified by Google, it allows access to various sections like Links, Search queries, Sitemaps, Crawl errors, and HTML improvements.
- XML Sitemap: Producing sitemap is important after any website changes. This helps search engines to scan and index every content present on your website.
- Duplicate Content and Redirects: Addressing duplicate content and title tags under the HTML Improvements section with the use of Google Search Console can enrich your user’s online experience and performance. URL redirects make sure that search engines and visitors do not encounter unwanted website errors.
These are some basic suggestions for optimizing search engines. At VIBA, our team will closely coordinate with you to develop audit strategies that can fully unlock and unleash your brand. Regular audits allow you to stay updated with various changes happening in the web world. Performed correctly, SEO audits can dramatically improve the performance of your website, enhance SEO, and increase conversions enabling maximum revenue generation.
So, ready for an oil change..err...SEO audit?
