In the modern day business environment, your success is heavily dependent on the amount of traffic that your online page(s) receive. With more than 6.5 billion Google searches per day, the most effective way to direct traffic to your site is to ensure that it ranks highly on relevant search engine result pages. This is achieved by having a well-thought-out SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy. For an existing site, you first have to carry out an SEO audit to identify the areas that have to be improved in your existing SEO strategy. This is where a professional SEO audit service from RS Digital Marketing comes in. This guide will highlight the four main areas that an effective SEO audit should cover.
- Technical Audit
A technical audit focuses on the ‘background’ infrastructure supporting your site which affects its performance. A site that performs smoothly improves the overall user experience which is one of the most important metrics that affects your site’s Google ranking.
One of the main issues that will be addressed by your technical SEO audit service will be the page loading time. You are competing with billions of other websites for attention on the web. If your website takes too long to load, users will probably opt for a faster loading page. Loading time is also factored in when ranking your page on search engine results.
Apart from checking for broken internal and external links, they will also audit your backlink strategy. The Google algorithm considers backlinks as endorsements. You should ensure that backlinks come from reputable websites within the same general topic areas for relevance.
Other important technical aspects that have to be addressed in your audit include:
- Is your website mobile friendly?
- Are all your webpages indexed for search engine visibility?
- Does your website use a secure HTTPS encryption?
- Content Audit
A website content audit seeks to review all the indexed pages within your website to ensure that they are SEO compliant as well as useful/informative to your target audience. Some of the specific functions of a content audit are:
- To ensure that you don’t have duplicate content, which is penalized by the Google algorithm
- To find, and update, out of date content
- To edit content that has typos and other grammatical errors
- To audit your keyword strategy for relevance and to ensure your content does not spam keywords
- To ensure that your title tags and meta descriptions actively work to attract users to your website
- To ensure that your content is well formatted into paragraphs and bullet points/numbered lists for easy readability.
- Design Audit
There are two main factors to be considered when talking about website ‘design’, these are: the visual elements in the website (aesthetic appeal) and how the different pages link to each other (website architecture).
You need to audit your site architecture to ensure that users can logically and intuitively navigate through your web content. Internal navigation buttons should be visible and well labelled. The site architecture should ensure that there is a well-defined hierarchical flow when navigating through your website. For larger websites, a sitemap should be included in the home page.
The visual design adopted should create a positive first impression for all your visitors. A competent SEO audit service will ensure that your colour scheme is not only visually appealing, but also matches the visual elements associated with your brand.
To improve the user experience, the design audit will also consider the font type and size used as well as the integration of images and videos in your website.
- Audit Your Competitors
When getting technical advice on website development, you should always keep an eye out on what your competitors are doing. This benchmarking should focus on both established industry leaders and newer entrants who might have a more innovative approach to establishing an online presence.
A good technical SEO audit service should show some of the performance metrics associated with competitor websites so that you can see the approaches that appeal best to your target market.
Conclusion
As this guide has shown, there are numerous factors that need to be considered when carrying out an SEO audit in order to improve your websites Google ranking. While the SEO audit service will identify the areas that need improvement on your site, results will be achieved once you implement the recommendations given.