Why an SEO Audit is Important To Your Business

While many business owners may have heard of SEO, few truly understand its importance and how to properly execute an SEO strategy. A comprehensive SEO audit is one of the most important steps in understanding your current website’s strengths and weaknesses and developing an effective plan to improve your site’s SEO and search engine visibility.

If you’re unsure of how to perform your own SEO audit and assess your current SEO performance, an expert SEO audit is perfect for you. But what is an SEO audit? How exactly can it benefit your business? What should you expect from an SEO audit?

At Dandy, we’ve helped small businesses start from scratch to get consistent traffic and leads from search engines (Google) with our SEO packages. One of the key places we start is always an in-depth SEO audit. 

So we’ve put together a brief overview of SEO audits to help you understand what they are, and how they can help your business.

What is an SEO Audit?

An SEO Audit is an evaluation of a website’s visibility and organic search traffic. It is a process of reviewing the site for areas that can be improved to increase site visibility and organic search traffic, as well as identify any potential issues with the site that could be causing a loss, or holding the website back in organic search.

An SEO audit will assess many factors across different aspects of an SEO strategy. So you’ll want to get on page basics analysed but there should be deeper analysis around thin content, reviewing key landing pages, internal links, Local SEO, page speed, back link audit, user experience and more. 

You can utilise an SEO audit to highlight what is and isn’t working in your business, and work your way through the recommendations yourself, or you may also receive an SEO audit within the process of hiring an SEO agency, as an initial overview of the SEO recommendations an agency has for you.

There are plenty of free tools that you can use to crawl your website that will highlight issues. Anyone can do this and send you the reports. A real SEO audit will touch on these issues but highlight specific issues for your website and go much more in-depth than just a crawl.

Why are SEO Audits Important For Your Business?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important to your business for many reasons. SEO audits are important because they highlight how your current SEO is performing, identify any areas that need improvement, and provide actionable recommendations on how to improve your SEO.

When your website is optimised for search engines, you will see an increase in website traffic from people who are looking for the products or services that you offer. 

If an SEO audit is done right, you should hopefully get the below benefits:

• Improved website visibility and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs)
• Increased organic search traffic to your website
• Improved ROI from your website traffic
• Informed decisions about your website and SEO strategy

If you’re not currently conducting regular SEO audits, then you’re missing out on a valuable opportunity to improve your website’s performance. Not only will an SEO audit help to increase your website’s visibility, search rankings and organic search traffic, but it can also help to highlight critical issues that may be affecting your site’s SEO performance.

What Should Be Included in an SEO Audit? 

Technical SEO Audit

The technical SEO audit is the first step in an SEO audit and is responsible for evaluating a website’s technical infrastructure. 

The main areas that are assessed in a technical SEO audit include:

• Site structure
• URL structures
• Internal link review & optimisation
• Indexing and crawlability checks
• Canonical tag checks
• XML Sitemaps
• Robots.txt files
• Website speed
• Mobile friendliness
• Schema usage
• Redirect checks

These are just some of the areas that are assessed in a technical SEO audit and each one is important in order to have a well-optimised website.

Backlink Analysis

Backlinks from other websites are a sign of a page’s authority and relevance to search engines. Simply said, the more high-quality links you have pointing to your website, the higher its authority and ranking potential. 

An SEO audit will identify your website’s backlink profile and highlight any areas that need improvement within your off-page SEO efforts, including finding broken links, identifying low-quality links, and more.

The main areas that a backlink audit will review are:

• Anchor text ratios
• Toxic link identification & review (this can be manual)
• Disavow file review or creation
• Topical relevancy of existing backlinks
• Page link analysis (do important pages have enough links to compete)

On-Page SEO Audit

The on-page SEO audit is responsible for evaluating how well your website’s content is optimised for certain keywords. This will include analysing metadata, headings, images, and other elements on the page. The main goal of the on-page SEO audit is to identify any areas that need improvement so that your website’s content can be optimised for better visibility and ranking in SERPs.

The main areas that are assessed in an on-page SEO audit include:

• Title tags
• Meta descriptions
• Headings (H1, h2 etc)
• Images
• Use of keywords
• NLP analysis

User Experience

An SEO audit will crawl your website to determine where changes may be made to improve conversion rates. We’ll look at each key page, from layouts to calls to action, in order to provide you with a guideline to how your site user experience can be improved. 

This is a key area of focus, as improving your website’s user experience can result in increased conversion rates and improved ROI from your website traffic. Audits may also use tools like Google Analytics to assess how users are interacting with your website content.

Keyword Research

The first step in any good SEO content strategy is comprehensive keyword research. With this in mind, A thorough SEO analysis will look at numerous keywords in depth to figure out which ones are most relevant to you, have a lot of traffic, and have minimal barriers to first-page placement. From there, the audit report should tell you which keywords to focus on in your SEO campaign.

Content Analysis

An SEO audit will also analyse your website’s content – from key landing pages to blogs – to see if it is of the best quality and relevance. Are you optimising for key search terms? Are you missing out on key blog content? How exactly can blogging boost your SEO efforts? All will be revealed in this section of our report.

This section of the report may include an evaluation of:

• The amount of content
• Page query analysis 
• Search intent reviews
• Duplicate content checks
• Cannilbilsation review
• Thin content issues
• The types of content
• The tone and style of the content
• The content structure
• The relevancy of the content to certain keywords.

SEO Audit Recommendations

Once the SEO audit is complete, it’s time to start making recommendations for improvement. This will include everything from fixing crawl errors and implementing a 301 redirect strategy, to beefing up your content marketing plan and actions to increase the site loading speed.

Each recommendation in our report is geared towards helping you achieve better visibility and ranking in SERPs.

The SEO audit report is an essential tool for any business that wants to improve their website’s visibility and ranking. By identifying areas of improvement and providing detailed recommendations, a comprehensive report will help you take your website to the next level.

Your Next Steps

Once you know what to expect from your business SEO audit, it’s important to choose the right SEO agency to work with. There are a variety of factors that will impact your decision, including the cost of their SEO services, their experience, and the overall quality of their audits.

At Dandy, we pride ourselves on being a full-service SEO agency that offers comprehensive audits, expert advice, and first-rate service. We believe in putting our clients first and always aim to deliver the best possible results.

With our website SEO audit, we will go through every detail, from on-site modifications to backlink analysis, in simple terms so you know exactly what you need to do to enhance your website SEO strategy. The best bit? It’s completely free, with no obligation. There’s really no catch, we’re just helpful!

So, what are you waiting for? Book your FREE SEO Audit today!