The internet is an incredibly busy place. Google alone processes upwards of 3.5 billion searches each day. When each one of those queries is typed into the search bar, the person on the other side of the screen is expecting Google to provide the results that answer their questions or point them in the direction they want to be going. Now factor in all the activity on other search engines, and the number of people looking to engage with businesses on the internet daily skyrockets. An SEO audit can help you interpret this data as it is relevant to your business.
Appearing in search results isn’t a matter of luck or chance. Each one of the websites that appear on page one of search results accomplished their rank by committing to an SEO strategy that landed them there. Every business with a website needs to understand the importance of search engine optimization, and most do. The problem is that understanding it and implementing it successfully are two entirely different concepts.
One way that you can make the leap from understanding to successful implementation is by having a professional SEO analysis of your website. An SEO analysis is a tool that identifies ways to help optimize your website performance from an SEO perspective.
What Is An SEO Audit?
Let’s say you’re reasonably pleased with the performance of your SEO strategy, or maybe your business is growing without devoting much in terms of resources to search engine optimization. If everything is going great as is, why rock the boat and look for problems?
The simplest answer is that you don’t know what tomorrow brings for your business. Maybe a new competitor enters the market that knows how to sweep your shared target audience off their feet online. Maybe your business is gradually changing, and the SEO strategy you’re using today isn’t going to work tomorrow. Then there’s the fact that SEO is constantly in a state of flux, and even the most effective strategy needs to be assessed regularly and adapted to generate even better results.
An SEO audit involves a digital marketing professional coming in and looking at every single element of your SEO strategy. This includes the architecture of your site, all the content on your website – along with the content you share on other platforms and offsite SEO factors. Search engine optimization has an incredibly far reach and measuring the effectiveness of each layer is something most businesses don’t have the bandwidth to handle on their own.
After auditing all the various components that matter for search engine optimization, an audit provides you with an SEO score, which is essentially a measure of how competitive you are online in comparison to your competitors. This score can then be used to create an SEO blueprint that positions you to achieve greater success online. An SEO audit identifies your strong points and weak spots, which enables you to develop a strategy that helps you rank higher among search engines.
What’s the Goal of an SEO Audit?
At first glance, this question seems almost too easy to answer. The goal of SEO is to boost organic search engine results, right? An SEO analysis is a tool that will help you accomplish this. Fair enough, but sometimes it helps to break that larger goal apart into smaller pieces that you can really focus in on. The reality is that while SEO can improve your search ranking, that alone isn’t enough to spark growth for your business. It’s these separate elements of an SEO strategy that really count for building connections and conversions.
An SEO audit should cover a lot of territories, but these are a few of the primary objectives:
● Assess your current search engine ranking. This is the basis of SEO, without a prominent rank in search results, the other objectives are difficult, if not impossible, to obtain.
● Build organic traffic. Once you’ve achieved visibility in search results, the next objective is how to get more people to click. An SEO analysis measures your traffic and works towards solutions to increase it.
● Lead generation. What are you doing with that traffic once it lands on your site? How can you increase the lead potential of the visitors to your site, and how can you more effectively entice traffic with a lead generation strategy.
● Conversion potential. How can SEO help you nurture those leads to conversion, and eventually help build revenue for your business?
These are the core objectives of search engine optimization, and an analysis is key for ensuring that your current strategy is helping your business reach each of these objectives – or assisting you in developing a strategy that enables you to meet your goals.
What You’ll Learn From an SEO Audit
Of course, you’ll want to make sure you’re gaining valuable insights from your SEO analysis. Having a professional come in and analyzing your website for search engine optimization from top to bottom is an investment of resources, and you want to make sure the insights gained will actually be of value to you moving forward.
When you contact a digital agency in Atlanta for a complete SEO audit of your website, here are the basics of what you should learn.
SEO Competitiveness
One of the first elements that a digital agency should look at is how competitive your website is online, especially in comparison to your competitors. This involves identifying your top competitors, where they rank in search results, and what keywords strategy is or isn’t working for them. The point isn’t necessarily to copy what they’re doing, but rather to gain better insights into what motivates – or fails to motivate – your shared target audience. Competitor analysis also provides a baseline of search engine performance to work from.
Important details that your digital agency will analyze when looking at your competitors include:
● Whether their website is optimized for mobile consumers
● If they’re stuck on HTTP, or if they’ve moved on to providing visitors with extra security with HTTPS
● The age of their domain – older domains typically rank higher
● How many web pages are indexed
● Are they leveraging call to actions throughout their site
● The general service area
● Have they included a site map
● Is their website linked to social media, and if yes, how effective is their social media strategy
Keyword Research and Performance
You need to know your target keywords. Why? Because all the effort you put into SEO is essentially in vain without them. Yes, you can do some keyword research on your own. However, a professional digital agency that specializes in search engine optimization has access to more tools, and the time and resources to use them to your full advantage.
In addition to identifying the keywords you should be ranking for, an audit will also look at the current rank of your primary and secondary keywords, along with how difficult those keywords are to rank for, how many monthly searches those words or phrases are a part of, and the organic click-through rate they produce. Understanding search volume related to your industry is critical and we have the SEO audit tools to improve your keyword performance.
Backlink Assessment
Backlinks are arguably one of the most important components of a successful SEO strategy. They’re also something that many businesses struggle with building and managing on their own. Generating backlinks is hard enough on its own – managing the backlinks you do have is another beast altogether.
An SEO audit will help you identify spammy, or low quality, links that are detrimental to your search engine performance. Search engines look at the quality of your backlinks, along with the relevancy and authority of the sites they come from when determining your own credibility as a website they want to promote.
Content Audit
Quality content is crucially important for SEO. Not only is content your main mechanism for tapping into keywords and helping search engines understand what you’re all about, but it’s also your primary vehicle for connecting with your target audience and providing them with an exceptionally valuable experience.
When an audit of your content is conducted, the SEO professional is looking for glitches that could be hampering your search engine performance. For instance, duplicate content – whether you’ve duplicated your own content or have created something that’s a little too close to something else out there – has a negative impact on SEO. In addition to identifying content this is negatively affecting your SEO, we’ll help identify which types of content you should be building on.
User Experience Insights
This is a rather broad category, but every element of user experience (UX) is important to your search engine performance, so it’s important that the agency conducting your audit carefully looks at all the UX factors and helps you understand where you can improve and why it’s important.
A few key UX factors that the agency handling your analysis should provide insights on include load speed, mobile responsiveness, average page visit length, which can help identify where you’re losing visitors, and information about your website’s architecture that either enhances or detracts from quality UX.
Turn to the Trusted SEO Agency In Atlanta
When was the last time you had a complete, professional SEO analysis completed on your website? If your answer is that it’s been a while, or maybe even never, now is the time to get in touch with the digital agency in Atlanta that’s ready to roll up their sleeves and get to work building a successful SEO strategy for your business. Reach out to Double Up Digital and schedule an SEO analysis today.
