For most business owners, the word ‘audit’ is enough to make them shake in their boots.  And, how about this thing called an SEO Audit?  Well, again, it’s not something that most are super eager to jump into.  But, what you may not understand, yet, is that an SEO audit is actually a great thing for your business and website.

Often, companies subject themselves to stressful, drawn-out administrative audits in order to satisfy a third party, like a financial regulator. This isn’t anything like that! In the world of digital marketing, an SEO audit, which is essentially a website scan, is conducted in order to ensure that your business has a solid presence online.  These audits actually allow businesses to build a solid, strong foundation in order to better get their message out to current and future customers.

 

How to Conduct an SEO Audit: What Your Marketing Team Looks For

SEO audits are conducted by marketing specialists.  The actual purpose of these audits can vary, depending on your company’s goals.  For example, targeted audits may be conducted in order to assess your website’s exposure to a certain type of cyber-attack known as “negative SEO”.  In a completely different capacity, an audit may be conducted to assess whether or not changes or dips in website traffic could be due to algorithmic penalties.  Some even conduct audits on their websites to better examine conversion rates and gain optimization insights.  

An SEO audit may be conducted for any number of reasons, but the process, when conducted correctly, will always deliver the following key elements:

  1. An SEO audit will uncover ways for you to improve your online presence and search engine marketing efforts (organic, as well as paid, if applicable).
  2. An SEO audit will identify any and all weak points in your marketing campaign, who you’re attracting, and what opportunities you may be missing.
  3. An SEO audit will provide you with a list of detailed action items that require immediate attention.  

Once your Realnets team member has these key pieces of information in-hand, we will be able to make improvements to your strategy and SEO performance.  

 

A Step-By-Step Process

SEO audits should be regularly implemented into your strategy, say every quarter, and more often if you are a new business or feel your campaign or website traffic may be suffering.  When it’s time for your marketing team to conduct an audit, they will carry out all or some combination of the following steps:

  • Define the company’s strategic objectives
  • Create a solid keyword map and establish targets
  • Run a competitive analysis
  • Conduct a technical analysis
  • Conduct Page Level Analysis to target your most valuable pages
  • Review all website content, links, citations and calls to action
  • Determine and ensure optimal user experience
  • Run extensive link analysis
  • Check site structure and URL hierarchy
  • Test and run website load speed analysis

 

Double Check Technical Elements

As your marketing team goes through each step of the SEO audit process, they will be looking at more than just content. They will also be paying close attention to each and every technical element that drives your website’s functionality.  They will be looking at:

  • Title Tags
  • Header Tags
  • URL Issues
  • Meta Descriptions
  • Images
  • Internal Linking
  • Duplicate Content
  • XML Sitemaps
  • Out of date CMS elements or obsolete plugins/extensions/apps

This is just the beginning of what’s involved, but as you can start to see, an SEO audit can be quite the tedious process. They are absolutely essential, however.  A reputable SEO provider will take the time to check your website’s functionality, including all technical elements (not to mention ensure that all-too vital user-friendly experience).  It is the best and fastest way to ensure that your website is being indexed by search engines in the most beneficial way.

If you’d like to give your website a boost, the best first step is a technical SEO audit carried out by one of our experienced SEO experts. Give us a call today at 773.631.6851 to begin.