The digital space has become a great avenue to market products and services. As more people are using the internet, it’s essential to know how to promote your business online. One way to do this is to have more brand visibility. 

Because of this, search engine optimization (SEO) can help. Simply put, SEO is a strategy that uses free, organic, and natural search results in search engines to get traffic. This is done by getting your website on top of search engine results pages (SERPs). Ranking your website is crucial if you want more brand visibility through SERPs.

There are many ways to conduct SEO. For one, you must perform link-building strategies by inserting high-quality links in your content. Using high-traffic and relevant keywords also helps. Lastly, you can create relevant and engaging content and optimize it for search engines.

That said, if you want to maintain the effectiveness of your SEO strategies, it’s crucial to know how to maintain them. To do this, you must conduct an SEO audit. But what is an SEO audit, and why is it essential? How and when will you implement it? If that’s your concern, keep reading.

What Is An SEO Audit?

SEO audit involves assessing your site to identify various elements that can affect your site’s ranking on search engines. These factors include your site’s off-page and on-page SEO and technical SEO performance.

Other factors that an SEO audit will examine are:

• Content gaps
• Website structure issues
• Competition insight
• User experience issues
• Competitor benchmarking
• Indexing and crawlability

It’s possible to perform an SEO audit through your in-house team. Alternatively, you can hire an SEO company to perform the audit on your website.

Why Should You Perform An SEO Audit?

If you want to update your digital marketing strategy and keep up with the competition, you need to perform an SEO audit. To do that, you have to start with your website. An audit helps you identify the strong and weak points of your website. Knowing those points, you can adjust or implement new strategies to ensure search engines will improve your site’s rank. 

Aside from that, here are two other reasons for conducting an SEO audit:

• It Can Help You Keep Up With Algorithm Updates

Search engines often update their algorithms to offer more relevant search results. They also do it so that people will have a good user experience. Because of major algorithm updates in the past, many businesses have lost significant traffic. This shouldn’t be your case. You should know these changes to keep your website content updated. It’s crucial so you won’t lose a significant amount of traffic that your business has worked hard for.

• It Can Help You Examine Competitors

SEO audit may also involve examining other businesses’ sites. The purpose of this is to identify their strong and weak points. That said, some elements that you must assess on your competitors are:

• Backlinks

This process helps in examining sites that link back to your competitors. You can identify these sites and then forge partnerships to ensure they will only link to your site from now on. 

• Mobile Site

If you notice that your competitors have a mobile site that outperforms yours, you can assess their strategy on why their mobile site is effective. You can use their approach to update yours.

• Keywords Used

You can use tools that help identify keywords used by your competitors and which ones are currently making them rank high. Then, you can search for relevant or similar keywords and use what they’re not using. 

• Strategy

You can determine other competitors’ strategies by performing an SEO audit. For instance, if they obtain significant engagement on social media, you can assess their process for doing so and use that information to update your social media strategy. 

How Will You Conduct An SEO Audit?

Conducting an SEO audit can be done using a tool that will help analyze the website for you. However, you should look out for the following factors:

• Look For Technical Issues

Some examples of technical issues that can happen to your site are errors with your site’s performance, security, mobile, and SEO. Addressing them is crucial as it will affect user experience. If you see more bounce rates and abandoned shopping carts on your site because of these issues, identifying broken links and site errors can help.

• Audit Your Site’s Page Speed

Page speed is vital as it can improve user experience. Having a slow page can increase bounce rates from users with limited attention spans. A slow-loading page can also affect accessibility customers will most likely abandon your site out of frustration. You don’t want this to happen, primarily if you rely on your site to increase conversions.

• Assess If There Are Duplicate Pages On Your Site

You might not have known it, but some of your pages could have duplicates. Fortunately, an SEO audit can help identify that. Identifying and deleting duplicate pages from your website is very important because duplicates can affect your rank and cause you to lose website traffic. Worse, some search engines penalize websites with duplicate content. So, make sure to remove them once identified. 

When To Conduct An SEO Audit?

To ensure that your site’s SEO is performing well, conducting an audit every month is vital. But if you have a large website, it’s ideal to do this weekly. Ultimately, doing an SEO audit regularly prevents significant issues from affecting your site and conversion rates. 

Moreover, if you notice there is a significant drop in your rankings over a period of time, you need to conduct an SEO audit as soon as possible. You need to identify the root cause of your site’s decreasing rank and address them. Otherwise, your competitors will outrank you and get more traffic. 

Wrapping Up

Conducting an SEO audit regularly is crucial to ensure your website remains relevant to search engines. If your website has not been updated regularly and it’s rank on search engines has been decreasing over time, then an SEO audit might be in order. This helps you identify your website’s strong and weak points and address them to improve search engine ranking.