With the explosion of the internet and the importance of it to companies looking to market their products and services worldwide or locally, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important forms of digital marketing for your company today.

SEO is a set of strategies and tools designed to help move a company’s web pages higher on search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. With more than a billion active pages on the internet, and those searching for information likely to only look at the first and second page of a search, being able to get your pages to rank higher on a search can make the difference between your company being seen or not.
Understanding and utilizing the best SEO practices and working with the top online marketing agency to help you implement SEO strategies is the best approach.
In order to determine if you are maximizing your SEO strategy, you should first get them to do an SEO audit of your website and web pages.

An SEO Audit
Like any audit, an SEO audit seeks to evaluate how you are actually doing. In the case of an SEO audit, it checks your website’s SEO guidelines, including your appearance on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and also if your web presence is leading the most traffic possible to you.

The results of an SEO audit will reveal to you how much web traffic you are getting, what elements of your website are maximized and which are not, and your standing in search page results. Once you understand the importance of these results, the importance of an SEO audit is obvious.

Your digital marketing agency will perform the following in an SEO audit:

1. Increase the speed of your website
The average person will only wait four seconds for your website to load before they move on to a different one. If your web pages take too long to load you will be losing customers who never see your products or services. Additionally, the speed of your site affects your SEO score. The SEO audit will reveal your site speed and compare it to other websites.  

2. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly
Today people use mobile more than ever and mobile SEO is becoming the biggest version of SEO. In fact, 70% of all web traffic occurs through mobile devices. An SEO audit will assess the usability and accuracy of the mobile version of your website to make sure that it is user friendly.

Mobile SEO is more important than ever. And you need to know that your website is working best for mobile devices.

3. Ensure that there is only one browseable version of your website
This is a common problem that most companies do not realize they have. The problem is that if your website has more than one URL, search engines will be confused. They will vacillate back and forth between URLs causing you a negative ranking. If you have more than one URL, they should all be directed to a single one.

4. Improve Your On-Page SEO
Perhaps the most important reason to do an SEO audit is to make sure your On-Page SEO is optimized. This element is designed to make sure that your content is readable, that internal link structure is accurate, headings are used properly and other key aspects of your web content. The better it is the higher search engines will rank your pages.

5. Improve your meta descriptions
The content that you see under a search title is the meta description and it is what makes you want to click on that particular site. When it is done well, it leads to more traffic. The best uses of phrases and keywords can make all the difference here and an SEO audit will tell you how you are doing with your meta descriptions. If things are not optimized you can change your meta description to a better one.

Your SEO audit will provide you with a checklist of any issues and give you suggestions on how to make improvements to your digital marketing.