With online searches becoming a common practice among people to look for information, products, or services on the internet, ensuring your website to feature high on search results has become imperative to remain competitive. Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process to improve the quality and quantum of traffic to your website or webpage from search engines. It focuses on organic traffic as opposed to paid or direct traffic. Hence, in order to achieve higher visibility on search results and deliver a better user experience, you must conduct periodic SEO audit for your website.

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit reviews your website and identifies its strengths and weaknesses from various perspectives. It determines if the website is optimized for search engines with regard to various ranking signals. Running an SEO audit will give you a roadmap to improve the performance of your website and witness an increase in traffic and conversions. As a successful business, you need your website to be accessed easily by users and search engines. So, optimizing your website through SEO audits is a critical requirement to maintain high levels of traffic.

How often an SEO audit to be conducted?

Since an SEO audit checks the health of your website and highlights the areas of improvement, it should be done periodically. You may do mini SEO audits monthly or bi-monthly to ensure your website is optimized for the changes in search engine algorithms and technology. A full SEO audit, on the other hand, should be done every 3 – 6 months or after your website had undergone any major changes in terms of design, technology, or content.

Why is it important to do an SEO audit?

An SEO audit helps to keep your SEO strategy updated and lets your website get noticed by search engines and potential customers. The many reasons why an SEO audit is important for your website are:

• Algorithm changes: Search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo keep on changing their algorithms to offer better user experience and optimized search results. An SEO audit helps your website to remain compatible with such algorithm changes. Also, webmaster tools from Google and Bing change continually and require your website to remain compliant to the changes and get a better ranking.
• Addressing website errors: The navigability of your website leading to better user experience is an important ranking criterion for search engines. If your website contains errors such as broken links, the impact could be felt in terms of increased bounce rates. However, by performing an SEO audit such errors can be identified and fixed. This leads to reduced bounce rates and better conversions.
• Meta tags: Meta descriptions and title tags are the first source of information any potential visitor gets about your website when it shows up on search results. By running an SEO audit you can find out if the meta tags of your website are relevant and fix them. Further, it is important to have unique meta tags for each webpage containing the search terms.
• Outdated content: One of the reasons your website may be losing traffic is the presence of outdated content. It is important that the content of your website remains fresh and relevant to the search engines as well as users to gain high ranking and visibility.
• Text formatting: The importance of text on your page is understood by the presence of H tags, for these are arguably the first elements users see on landing on a page. A proper headline can lead the user to the correct content thereby boosting user experience. An SEO audit can highlight the presence of irrelevant H tags in the website, which can then be remedied.
• Page speed: The users of today want a quick download of information and are likely to quit visiting your website if its page load speed is more than 2-3 seconds. As per statistics, 25% of users to your website may leave if the page load speed is more than 4 seconds. There are several tools to help you identify such issues and you may need fixes in the form of minimizing HTTP calls, minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML, reducing redirects, optimizing images, or using compression plug-ins, among others.

Conclusion

SEO audits are the best way to diagnose issues with your website and fix them to earn better ranking, visibility, traffic, and conversions. It is an important activity to conduct once every 3 to 6 months in order to ensure optimized performance of your website and better ROI for your business. Do you want to have an SEO check for your website? Don’t hesitate to contact us.