For businesses to thrive in today’s digital landscape, they must have a strong online presence. And although social media plays a big part, having a website that ranks highly in search engine result pages is paramount. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in, a digital marketing strategy used to increase visibility. However, with constantly evolving search engine algorithms, staying ahead can feel impossible. Understanding why an SEO audit is important for your website in 2024 is crucial for growth and staying relevant. SEO audits help identify technical issues that negatively impact a website’s visibility.
Your SEO company should be doing monthly audits to make sure your website has no technical issues that may be holding you back from ranking on Google.
What is an SEO Audit?
Think of an SEO audit as a health check-up for your website; just as our bodies need regular checkups, so do our websites. An SEO audit analyzes your website to find any issues hindering its performance in search engine rankings. It’s like peeking under the hood of your car.
You may not understand all the details, but a mechanic can easily point out what’s running smoothly and what requires attention. This is why an SEO audit is important; it flags opportunities to help improve your search engine rankings. Let’s break down how an SEO audit works and how it benefits your business.
Why Are SEO Audits Important for Businesses in 2024?
An SEO audit identifies and rectifies technical issues, optimizes your content, and keeps you up-to-date with the latest search engine algorithm changes. A properly executed SEO strategy will not only bring more organic traffic but convert that traffic into paying customers.
There are many advantages to incorporating regular SEO audits into your marketing strategy, so let’s break those down in further detail.
Boost Organic Traffic
Organic traffic makes up a significant amount of website visitors. The higher your website ranks in search engine result pages for relevant keywords, the more visible it is to potential customers, increasing the likelihood of more clicks, traffic, leads, and ultimately more customers. Data analysis company, Ahrefs found the top-ranking pages get 49% of all search traffic, proving just how vital it is for businesses to compete for those positions.
Enhanced User Experience
Did you know that, on average, 40% of visitors abandon a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load? Slow loading times create a frustrating user experience, ultimately driving visitors away from your site, causing a higher bounce rate.
But this goes much deeper than just speed; this ties into Google’s Core Web Vitals, an initiative introduced to improve web users’ overall browsing experiences. SEO audits help uncover UX issues affecting things like speed and responsiveness and reveal any crawl errors.
Aligning with the Ever-Changing SEO Landscape
Staying current with SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. The landscape continuously evolves; with each passing year, Google’s algorithms become increasingly sophisticated. As an SEO blogger, I can tell you these algorithm updates affect how websites are crawled, indexed, and ranked, meaning keeping up with them can feel impossible. For example, Google rolled out mobile-first indexing back in 2018 and ever since they’ve heavily prioritized websites optimized for mobile.
SEO audits are important because they flag potential indexing issues brought about by algorithm updates, helping businesses stay current. They can also point out areas for improvement when it comes to your overall SEO strategy.
Content Optimization and Keyword Strategy
Content is king – this is something you often hear touted in the world of digital marketing – and with good reason. An SEO audit gives you valuable insights into your existing content strategy to see what’s performing and what isn’t.
You might think conducting your own keyword research will be enough, but it’s also smart to study your competitor’s keyword strategy. You can do this using keyword research tools like KWFinder or SEMrush. These tools can identify high-value, low-competition keywords and, more importantly, opportunities to outrank your competitors. An SEO audit can also provide detailed analysis of your current keyword strategy.
Gaining a Competitive Edge
Think of your competition as guinea pigs. You can analyze their SEO strategy using SEO tools like SEMrush to reveal your competitor’s backlinks and keyword strategies, uncovering what they’re doing well (or even poorly.), which gives you insight into what you could be doing better.
Imagine this: You’ve been working on your business for two years. You post consistently and although you’ve seen some growth in traffic, you’re nowhere near where you think you should be, especially after finding out 90% of blogs get zero organic traffic.
You conduct a competitor analysis during an audit and realize that most of your competitors link to their service or product pages internally, something you hadn’t considered. You start implementing similar internal linking throughout your content, leading to a 30% boost in organic traffic and more importantly a noticeable uptick in sales after just a few months.
This right here is a real-life scenario of how analyzing your competitors during an audit can greatly affect your overall success. SEO audits help your business discover gaps in content strategy and look for potential backlinks you could leverage.
Technical SEO: The Backbone of Your Website
An SEO audit examines your website from a technical standpoint. Imagine a physical brick-and-mortar store with poor lighting, messy displays, and disorganized shelving; these issues make it less appealing for shoppers to want to spend time (and money) in. It’s no different for your online storefront.
If search engine bots, for example, are having trouble understanding, crawling, and indexing your content due to a lack of structured data or XML sitemaps, it’ll lead to low search engine rankings. A comprehensive audit uncovers these underlying technical factors and gives you an opportunity to improve overall SEO health, performance and ranking. It also gives you a chance to review important on-page elements that may need to be refreshed.
FAQs about Why SEO Audit Is Important
What Does a Technical SEO Audit Entail?
A technical audit dives into your website’s structure and how easy it is to crawl and index. This type of audit is especially important to businesses that have undergone some technical upgrades to their websites. The reports provide crucial data about your website, but more importantly, alert you to technical factors that could be negatively impacting site performance.
This is one of the most common reasons SEO audits are important, especially with today’s complex website structures. Performing audits will also provide detailed information about your domain authority.
Who Can Conduct an SEO Audit for Me?
Conducting a detailed and accurate SEO audit involves understanding complex technical aspects. Although it is possible to run your own DIY audit, bringing in professional help may be beneficial. There are online SEO tools available but it requires the person to interpret and understand often overwhelming information and data. Some popular tools used are Screaming Frog and Google Search Console.
On the other hand, partnering with an SEO consultant or digital marketing agency may be more expensive. However, they are experienced and qualified individuals who understand what they are looking for. They can make recommendations you might not have thought of, and this can be extremely beneficial to your overall digital marketing efforts.
How Often Should I Have My Website Audited?
Website audits aren’t a one-and-done type of deal, similar to servicing your vehicle or getting an annual health check. You should ideally be having audits done quarterly, but some experts recommend once a month if budgets allow. Think of SEO audits as preventative medicine – they highlight issues, big or small – before they have a chance to impact ranking.
Regular check-ups are always a good idea, and SEO audits help you stay on top of outdated content, identify and fix website errors, and help you recover lost traffic.
Conclusion
Understanding why an SEO audit is important can no longer be overstated. It’s the cornerstone of building and maintaining a successful online presence. A well-optimized site, with current and engaging content, ranks well, but more importantly converts those visitors into paying customers.
As you’ve now learned, an SEO audit identifies any potential issues early on to maintain high levels of organic traffic, improving search engine visibility and ultimately sales, making them crucial to consider, not just for 2024, but as an integral part of any sound marketing strategy. SEO audits help maintain visibility and increase profitability.
