For most people, the word ‘audit’ has negative associations because it means they’re being evaluated. For example, an audit of your finances could mean you’re being accused of scary things such as fraud, tampering, or lying. But when it comes to SEO or search engine optimization audits, you have nothing to fear. Conducting an SEO audit shows you’re proactively trying to help yourself and your business.
In layman's terms, an SEO audit is a check of your website’s infrastructure. It looks through the on-page elements and off-page essentials to optimize your website’s search engine visibility and usage. To get a better understanding, let’s look at some of the factors that go into the SEO audit.
Ranking
The first and most important thing that an SEO audit will tell you is the status of your website and keyword rankings in search engines like Google and Bing. In order to improve your search engine ranking, you first have to understand why your site ranks where it does. Understanding your rankings will also give you a better look at the competition you face as you move forward.
Links
The next thing you want to focus on are the links on your website and other websites who have linked to you, which is called backlinking. Having a non-working link on your website is detrimental to your SEO ranking and can steer away customers or users visiting your site. You should make sure none of your links are 301, 302 redirects or 404 errors that will push your site down in rankings. Last, you want to make sure the sites backlinking to you are not bad or toxic to your business model. A backlink is like a recommendation for your website so you want reputable sites linking to you and not spam sites. And if you find reputable backlinks that you didn’t know about, you can link back with them to improve your rankings and overall visibility.
Content
If other websites are linking to you, then it probably means you have good content. Search engines like fresh content, so if you have had the same stagnant content for longer than 6 months, it’s time for an update. This will also help you figure out which content isn’t being visited as frequently, so you know what exactly to update. This is also very crucial if the content with your most important keywords is not performing well. Keeping your content fresh will not only help with SEO, but users visiting the site will appreciate the update.
Algorithms
Keeping things fresh is just as important to search engines as it is for your content. Google likes to keep the way they rank you new as well. Because the world is always changing, the algorithms follow suit. Just last year, Google updated their mobile algorithm rankings, forcing many websites to further optimize, and in some cases, completely update their websites to be more mobile friendly. You want to always make sure that you are up-to-date with the latest SEO news and updates.
Although these are not the only things an SEO audit will find, they are some of the most important. Conducting an SEO audit is the beginning of a process to improve your website’s usability and search ability. You may not go to jail if you fail this audit, but you will have some work to do on your website, and when done, you’ll get more traffic, higher page rankings, and hopefully more business.
For a free, professional SEO audit look no further than Red Lab Media! We can help you improve your ranking and online performance in no time. Request an SEO audit today to get started!