A website SEO check is the analysis of your website based on search ranking factors. An online competitive benchmarking and an evaluation of a website for its ability to appear in search engine results pages (SERPs). The purpose is to determine issues and opportunities to improve your website’s lead generation and conversion. The process is also referred to as an SEO (technical) audit.
Why is the website check important for any SEO project?
A prerequisite to setting up an effective SEO strategy is this step by step website audit. It concludes with a list of recommended fixes and solutions to all site links and assets. Covering the technical infrastructure, content as well as on-page and off-page elements.
An SEO check identifies strengths, weaknesses, and potentials of your website for long-term search positioning and ranking. It helps you spot the technical problems affecting your website that are restricting robots from crawling your site and/or understanding your website’s content. With an SEO audit, you also identify what needs to be optimized and how your website is ranking in comparison with your competition. It is the ground for an informed and effective SEO strategy.
The audit and online competition
An audit might help businesses identify their competitors. Often that offline competitors are not the same as online ones. Thus It helps in tapping into new products and service opportunities, search data, seasonality and forecasts. This is especially important for e-commerce sites and businesses in highly competitive industries. An improved search positioning means improved organic search visibility, hence greater exposure to the targeted traffic. On the contrary, a static website – a website left without optimization – will not be favoured search engines. The competition will rather succeed in their efforts to rank on top. Therefore, an SEO audit is an essential business process, not a proactive measurement.
When does your website need a check?
Website SEO check should be done regularly. In general, it’s enough for a small business website to perform a major SEO audit twice a year. Though, minor audits are highly recommended when you update your website. For big company websites with new content published every month, a quarterly audit is recommended. Also, it is highly recommended to conduct an SEO check before the launch of a new product or before starting a major advertising campaign.
It might sound strange, but an SEO audit is actually important before running an offline campaign. For instance, if you add a call to action asking an audience to visit a webpage that is incidentally tagged with no-index, contain broken links or links to other internal pages that have issues, users will find it difficult to reach your page and/or navigate your website. Therefore, with an audit, you avoid costly mistakes.
An audit analogy
To make it easier to understand where the SEO audit stands in the overall SEO project, let’s take an analogy of a car checkup service. A car checkup or maintenance should be done either regularly or when there is an issue to fix. In both cases, the technician starts with a diagnosis of the car and then recommends some maintenance actions to take.
This is similar to an SEO audit. It is the diagnosis of your website before recommending fixes and improvements. Optimizing a website without conducting an SEO audit first, is as ineffective as adding or changing car’s parts without checking them.
Letting time pass without performing a website SEO checkup can affect your performance. This is because the online competition is very dynamic and Google algorithms are continuously changing. Staying passive on SEO can harm your website’s ranking and traffic enormously.
Details about website issues
A quality SEO audit provides you with comprehensive details about the website performance and issues that need to be fixed. It goes beyond conducting a comprehensive analysis of the technical elements of a website.
The more detailed and specific the audit report is, the easier and more effective the implementation is.
Without providing detailed information to specify the issues (the specific tags and URL concerned to give a simple example), clients are left with a big homework to do. They need first to find where the issues are applicable. And second, to research the solution. Solutions often require not only technical but also SEO knowledge and experience of what works and what works best, what to work on and what to prioritize,
For instance, a missing title tag on a page requires identifying a keyword. Identifying a keyword requires keyword research to find a search term that is relevant to the product/ service, and has good search volume and competition levels. Thereafter, this keyword needs to be used in a catchy way supported by relevant terms. There are limits to the characters used in title tags among other on-page elements that need proper implementation.
A good SEO agency, provides thorough website SEO check part of its SEO service, including a comprehensive SEO analysis and details of the elements. This comes with the most practical solutions in line with your business priorities and resources.
What can you do after the website SEO check?
After conducting a website SEO check and making sure all is set and on-page errors are fixed, it is important to keep updating your website with fresh content. Try to have multiple pages of quality and original content with anchor texts containing your keywords pointing to them. Work on the internal links between pages, and build backlinks to connect with external websites that have a good reputation. Keep updating the site frequently. High ranking websites in Google have an abundance of content. You can gain much on less frequently updated sites.
