How often do you carry out an SEO audit on your business website – if at all? If you’ve got an SEO strategy in place or you’re engaging in some form of search engine optimisation, then it’s fair to say you should be doing it on a regular basis.
Why?
If you want to improve your organic search rankings (who doesn’t), then an SEO audit will determine how SEO friendly your website is. How do you know what to fix on your site if you don’t even know what’s wrong? Doing an audit will give you insights into the areas of your site that are performing well or, not so well, so you know what to focus on to boost your search presence.
We all know Google, Bing and Yahoo change their search algorithms frequently, so giving your website a regular health check will help you stay on top of this. You’ll pick up things you might be getting penalised on, and therefore impacting your rise up the SERPs.
What does an SEO audit include?
An SEO audit can be split into 4 key areas:
Technical analysis
A technical review ensures your website is working properly (from a backend perspective). This is generally best left to SEO experts with coding experience, or web developers who can identify issues and tinker with your site as required.
On-page analysis
Is your website design and content following SEO best practice? Are your links and meta tags all in check? How quickly does your site load? How fresh is your content? An SEO audit is a great trigger for realising you should update your site content. No one likes eating stale bread, and the same goes for your content – both from a user and Google’s perspective.
Off-page analysis
This involves looking at how popular your site is with others. Who is linking back to you, talking about you, and the level of social engagement are all factors that contribute to your search engine rankings. If you’re seen as trustworthy, engaging and a subject matter expert in your industry, then so will Google.
Keyword analysis
Reviewing your keywords and your competitors will help steer your SEO strategy. If you’re not tweaking and modifying your strategy, you won’t get the results you’re chasing.
SEO audit: In-house or outsource?
So, should you do an SEO audit in house or hand it over to a Perth SEO specialist? Depends on your situation. If you have time, resources and some SEO knowledge up your sleeve, then you could most certainly tackle your own SEO audits. There’s heaps of comprehensive how to guides out there, but the extent of what you do and how well you do it is limited by your own SEO expertise.
At the very least we suggest having an SEO specialist complete a thorough technical audit for you once a year to help you stay on track with your SEO goals.
Need a hand with your SEO strategy or SEO audit? Get in touch with us to see how we can help you boost your search rankings.
