Businesses need to capitalize on the growing online market if they want to succeed in modern commerce. The thing about Internet marketing is that there are a number of things that have to be addressed to ensure that sites are performing well and actually exist as assets for companies that use them.
One of the things that businesses online need to ensure is that they run an SEO audit every now and then. What the audit does is give them insights as to how their websites are performing from its current search engine standing to its effectiveness as an online marketing tool.
It’s important that business sites provide information and remain relevant. With the SEO audit, companies can determine which particular components need improvement and which ones are functioning correctly. Everything from content quality to backlinking to indexing is assessed through this process and this is why it’s something that can’t be discounted from the equation.
Unbeknownst to most people, an SEO audit doesn’t only look into the performance of on-page activities. It also assesses any off-page activities that a company might currently be or have engaged in. When it comes to the latter, a good example would be the assessment of the performance, reliability, and value of third-party inbound links.
There are a handful of components that every thorough SEO audit comes with and here they are:
- Link Assessment
If you take a close look at websites, they usually carry both inbound and outbound links. Inbound links are links to your business site that people can access from other websites that you’ve chosen to work with. Outbound links are the opposite and they work by providing your visitors with access to other sites via a link on your company page.
Through the SEO audit, you can analyze the quality of these links and compare their performance and effectiveness with those found on your competitors’ pages. You can also discover links that may be harming your page’s quality, poisonous links as they’re referred to, and then remove these from your directory.
2. Keyword and Content Assessment
Everyone knows that utilizing keywords can drastically improve the rank of a website. Using proper keywords will make a company’s page visible across search engines so knowing how Google indexes your site based on keywords and general content matters.
As for the content itself, the SEO audit will help you determine whether or not the proper tags have been used (this helps search engines index your site as well). You need to have the right Meta descriptions, URLs that are SEO-friendly, and other related attributes on-site.
Finally, the audit will also help you determine if there’s any duplicate content on your site. This is something that you should not have much off as your website will be flagged as spammy if you do. As a result, your ranking in terms of relevance will surely drop.
3.Code Assessment
It’s important for your content to still appear even if Javascript is disabled so a JavaScript test is something that you should definitely go through when you run an SEO audit.
4. Load Speed Assessment
Apart from good site navigation, you should also see to it that your site loads quickly lest lose visitors because of slow loading speeds. Through the audit, you can determine how fast your site works and identify which areas can be improved on to boost load speeds.
Once you have gone through the entire process, you can then reap the rewards of your hard work. The great thing about SEO audits is that they are highly beneficial. For one, they help companies identify weak points in their system, SEO-wise.
In turn, companies can also gain valuable insights on what makes their competitors’ efforts work better than theirs. Armed with these details, they can then make the necessary adjustments that will give them an upper hand over the latter.
The most important benefit of all is the ability of SEO audits to provide companies with reliable data and stats that can help them develop a viable SEO strategy. Knowing where the problems are, companies can then focus their energies on reworking these components wasting no time pursuing those that are working just fine.