8 Reasons Why You Need to Perform an SEO Audit for Your Website

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is one of the fundamental tenets of e-commerce and digital marketing. SEO is a wide-ranging discipline comprised of multiple elements ranging from keyword analysis and image optimisation to building backlinks and content creation. A properly executed SEO strategy will help your website and products achieve higher visibility with search engines, which, in turn, will help to drive organic traffic. It will also help to increase conversions and improve your brand authority.

With so much at stake, it is vital for organisations to take a step back and review their existing SEO framework and practices by performing an SEO audit or SEO analysis. An SEO site check-up will provide organisations with a host of benefits as outlined below. Armed with the knowledge of an SEO check-up, your organisation will be able to improve your existing SEO strategy using measurable data. Let’s take a more in-depth look at the reasons why you should run an SEO audit on your website.

1. Enhance the Speed, Security and User Experience of Your Website

Search engines love well-designed and well-maintained websites which are fast, secure and offer great user experience. They reward such websites with greater visibility on their search engine result page (SERP) ranking.

However, with thousands of lines of codes present at any given time, websites tend to become heavy over time, and security issues will gradually accumulate unnoticed. Performing SEO audits on a regular basis will help companies identify arising weaknesses on their website and implement corrective measures.

2. Keep Up with the Times

SEO is an extremely dynamic discipline with hundreds of constantly changing standards of best practices. There was a time when publishing press releases at a dozen press release agencies will earn your website with a thousand valuable backlinks. Today, the same tactic could lead to your website being sandboxed. Or what about exact match anchor links, recommended keyword density and a myriad of other ranking signals?

How are you expected to keep track of these constant changes? Well, you don’t have to. An SEO audit with one of the SEO tools can help identify these obsolete practices.

3. What Are Your Best Keywords?

We all love to organically rank with keywords with the largest volume and highest relevancy. However, more often than not, the websites of small and medium-sized businesses usually rank higher with less competitive and long-tail keywords. Keyword analysis during an audit will help you to even the playing field by identifying the most effective keywords for your organisation and niche.

Armed with this knowledge, you’d be able to create more relevant content, spend your advertising budget more wisely, fine-tune your conversion strategy and improve your overall marketing efforts.

4. Competitor’s Analysis

Do you know what’s worse than not ranking well on search engines? Seeing your competitors dominating your niche. But how are they doing it, and can you emulate their strategy or find your unique selling proposition (USP)? Should you consider a different niche altogether?

Performing an SEO audit of your competitors’ websites you will be able to identify their top-performing keywords, most popular pages, backlink sources and a variety of other information. Your team can then review this data and learn from them. There is no shame in learning from your competitors. They may have been in the industry longer, so they might be further ahead of the learning curve. Take advantage of that tried and tested knowledge and improve your own SEO strategy.

5. Backlink Analysis

Backlinks are arguably the most important ranking signal for every search engine. Backlinks are seen as endorsements, so the volume and authority of backlinks can disproportionately impact your SERP visibility and ranking.

Gone are the days when you can simply buy anchor text, guest post or press release backlinks. Search engine algorithms have become smarter, and they will penalize websites which use shady methods to obtain backlinks.

Through SEO audits, you can review the source of not only your own backlinks, but also those of your successful competitors. This will give you an idea of how to emulate their link strategy. Audits will also highlight low-quality backlinks originating from link farms or spam directories that will damage your website’s ranking with search engines. Just remember to disavow such links!

6. Improved Usability

Building a website is a blend of science and art. We aren’t just looking for functionality and usability – we also want a pretty-looking and memorable website. However, aesthetics can sometimes impact the usability of your website. An SEO tool will help to identify some navigational, functional or structural weaknesses of your website. Resolving these issues will instantly improve the usability of your website and make your customers’ experience much more pleasant.

7. New Relationships and Sources of Revenue

SEO analyses will typically reveal the strongest players in your niche. More often than not, such analyses will show your competitors’ affiliates and partners, as well as influential bloggers and social media personalities. Use this information to develop mutually beneficial arrangements that will increase your revenue and brand profile.

8. Stronger and Better Content

Aside from technical aspects, SEO audit can also analyse your content quality using data such as content length, missing keywords, headers like H1s, H2s, H3s or meta descriptions, etc.

Audit specialists will be also able to identify the type of content that your readers like. Using this information, you will be able to craft a more relevant and efficient content strategy that will improve page views, dwell time and conversions.

Are you now convinced of the value of performing an SEO audit on your website? Good, because an audit will help your website rank higher, drive organic traffic and improve conversions – all achieved quicker, and with a better return of investment.