9 Reasons why a Regular SEO Site Audit is so Important

Every business online quickly discovers the importance of SEO (search engine optimisation) and understands that it’s the only way to ensure their site doesn’t become one of the lost millions that are never found by searchers. So, you learn the basics and start implementing them on your site. You (hopefully) see improvements in your traffic, but how do you know what you’re doing wrong and right? You need an SEO audit.

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit is a process that looks at all the elements of your online presence and analyses how well optimised and effective it is at that moment in time.

What does an SEO audit cover?

An SEO audit will examine your technical SEO, onsite SEO, and offsite SEO. It will:

• consider the goals you want and how you are currently measuring up to them
• look at how well you are performing for your chosen keywords
• review how you compare to your competitors
• check for things that may harm your SEO (such as duplicate keywords, unoptimised content, missing image alt tags and more)
• check your technical SEO (such as loading time, mobile optimisation, broken links and more)
• review your content and how easy it is to share

What might you miss if you don’t do SEO audits?

If you don’t do regular SEO audits, any changes you make when your site growth slows or plateaus will be made simply by guessing what’s wrong – if you want to see real results from your future SEO efforts, you need to know where your weaknesses are and strengthen those areas. SEO audits find out exactly what’s wrong or not strong enough, so you can make accurate changes rather than fumbling around in the dark.

9 reasons to run regular SEO audits

1.    Search engine algorithms change over time

While the foundation of SEO best practices are, thus far, timeless, algorithms do change, and that means your site may be positively or negatively affected by these changes. Often, when there’s a new algorithm update, you’ll need to pivot your SEO strategy to ensure you continue to get the traffic you need.

2.    Site speed

With Google’s new algorithm update rolling out in May 2021, site speed has never been so important. An SEO audit will pick up page speed issues that will negatively effect your ranking. Having unused CSS or unminified Javascript can bloat your website and slow it down. Images also need to be optimised for web use, ideally they need to be 500kb or less and saved as jpeg 2000 or WebP formats.

3.    Spring clean your site

If you’re adding new content to your site all the time, some pages are bound to get lost or broken, resulting in broken links that lead to 404 pages. Links to pages that no longer exist can damage your SEO and the user experience. An SEO audit will identify these so you can redirect your links to better pages and resources, and in turn help user experience. A good user experience helps keep potential new customers and clients on your website and stops them leaving for a competitor.

4.    Review user experience

Your user experience is more important than ever; in the eyes of search engines, you have no excuse not to have a mobile-optimised site and fast loading times. An SEO audit will review your website to ensure all pages and content are suitable for mobile users (June 2019 saw mobile searches peak at 50.71% of searches, with desktop searches at 45.53%).

5.    Review how you measure up to competitors

We all review our competitors when we first set up our sites and find keywords, but if you don’t do regular SEO audits, you probably don’t review how they’re progressing. You need to know where their strengths are so you can review what more you need to do to compete with them, and where their weaknesses are so you can beat them there.

6.    Review your progress

You likely review your traffic analytics regularly, but do you track and monitor your keywords? An SEO audit will help you review the keywords you want to rank for and see how much progress you’re making.

7.    Note any bad practices

While you may never have intended to try to hoodwink the algorithms, trends change over time, so some SEO practices eventually do more harm than good. A good SEO audit will review your strategies and spot any practices that need to be removed and in turn improve on.

8.    Help give you next steps

Often, we forget to properly strategise our SEO and just make changes here and there. An SEO audit can identify your weak keywords, keywords you need to optimise further, and more, so you can start making progress again, rather than simply going through the motions and doing more harm than good.

9.    Identify outdated content

Unless you’re in a very unique niche or industry, a lot of the content on your site will be evergreen. That means that the information for someone reading it today will be just as good for someone reading it in five years’ time. The only problem is, old content tends to fall down the search engine rankings over time. That means you need to keep them updated (if only in Google’s eyes) to maintain their position. An audit can identify any content that is “ageing” so you can go in, update it, and maintain your search engine rankings.

Can I do an SEO audit myself?

If you’ve got the right knowledge, it is possible to do an audit yourself. However, if you don’t, you may not know where to look to find the errors on your site. You may also be blind to issues that someone who is more impartial will be able to spot for you. If it’s not something you can do yourself, don’t worry – we offer free SEO audits so you can learn all the good and bad things about your site so you can continue to climb search engine rankings. Start yours here.

Get your free SEO audit or get in touch to see how we can help you. We offer different levels of service to suit all businesses.

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