What is the point of going through the hassle of developing, designing and publishing your website on the Internet when you don’t put the same effort to make it visible? Having a website is one thing and making it visible through SEO is another. For a successful online business, you need to pay attention to the technical aspects of SEO. This means observing and scrutinizing how Google, Bing, and other search engines rank websites.
The best way to get the right results is to conduct a full SEO audit on your website. What an audit does measure different aspects such as your domain name, links, tags, content, images, navigation, keyword optimization, CSS codes and social network sharing icons. An auditor will also check your page loading speed to establish whether it is contributing to your visitors abandoning your website. Auditors also check for malware and spam, which also contributes to your website ranking. Although guest posts and external blogs, local SEO with third-party review websites, ongoing content marketing, and social media community building get all the attention also contribute positively, you also need on-page optimization if you want to rank better in Google.
Nowadays, appealing to your website and search engines has more weight than back in the days. The reason being that many people rely on Google to give them proper information that they are looking for. For this reason, you need to employ SEO auditing services from a professional auditor who knows what he or she and offers suggestions on how to improve your SEO.
Table of Contents
Why is it important to audit your SEO?
I know that some of you are new to SEO, and others have never thought of performing an SEO audit on their sites. So here is why to do an audit on your SEO and competitor analysis to establish where things stand on your website. An SEO audit is a process of analyzing your website through the context of current SEO best practices and its performance. The performance is based on SEO rankings, traffic, conversions, and other key metrics. It also involves a comprehensive analysis of your competitors’ websites to see what they are doing right to stay on top of the game. You also get to know and understand the different opportunities they are leveraging or missing out on. The results of your SEO audit will give you a clear picture of how your website stacks up and the different issues need to be sorted out to improve your website’s ranking. Here are the telltale signs that your website needs an SEO Audit.
1. Your Website Doesn’t Get as Many Visitors as It Used To
As time goes by, search engines also change the various metrics used to rank websites. They use almost the same algorithms and approaches to establish the relevance of websites in search engine queries. Search engines usually update statistics like the quality and freshness of your website and off-site factors like links from external sites. If the quality of your website diminishes, this will lead to a reduction of visits among other things. But instead of guessing and second-guessing what the problem is, why not carry out a full SEO audit of your site? It will help you find out what triggered the drop of visitors and what measures to take to return the previous glory of your website.
2. A Search Engine Algorithm Change
Another sign to watch out for is the search engine updates. Search engines constantly upgrade their algorithms to provide users with more diverse and quicker results-oriented searches. This may result in small unnoticed changes to jaw-dropping changes that can move your website from the top spot to the 500 positions overnight. If you have reasons to believe that the system upgraded then goes ahead and audit your SEO. This will help you catch up fast with the new algorithms to ensure you are still visible to your visitors and search engines.
3. Only a Small Portion of Your Traffic Comes from Search Engines
Your website’s objectives should be to maximize the number of visits that you have received from new sources. Traffic from backlinks and other external sources is important, but it’s also good to establish the amount of traffic search engines generate. If you can’t establish this then it means that your website is not doing well or its living to its full potential. For each visitor you are receiving from another website, you could be receiving 10× as much from search engines.
4. Pay-Per-Click is Expensive
SEO doesn’t only increase the amount of traffic your website receives but also plays a vital role in ensuring that your pay-per-click costs are as low as possible. It does this by optimizing the elements commonly used to see how related your PPC campaign’s target keywords are to your landing pages. Another thing that should trigger an SEO audit of your website is high PPC costs. Analyzing your on-site factors and rectifying them will make your PPC campaigns more profitable.
5. Your Visitors Aren’t Converting to Customers
The major reason to get more visitors to your website is to increase sales generated by your website which eventually leads to high profits that can be reinvested into the company. If you notice that the number of visitors visiting your website increases and the number of sales still stays the same then there might be a problem with your SEO. This should prompt you to conduct an SEO audit if your site. Heavy determinants of who visits your website and their expectations are your page headers and Meta descriptions. An SEO audit will closely scrutinize this aspect so that you will be receiving more customers than visitors.
6. Your Website Is Not Listed on the First Page of Google
For maximum visibility, your website needs to show up on the first or second page of Google when one of your search terms is entered. Potential customers will always click websites appearing on these first pages. If you are still struggling to attain this status then there must be something wrong with your SEO and you need to conduct a thorough SEO audit of your website.
7. Your Visitors Aren’t Staying
If any matrices should be kept as low as possible on your website, then it is your website’s bounce rate. This represents how often visitors click on your website in the search results only to hit the back button. This could be triggered by many things including misleading metadata to a lack of engaging media. If this is one of your suspicions, then you need to do and SEO audit as soon as yesterday to establish the source of high bounce rates on your website.
8. Website Traffic Reaches Maximum
Performing websites are supposed to have a growing number of visitors. Generally, depending on the size of the business you are running, your website should have around 2-10% more traffic with each progressive month. If this increase is not visible, then you need to consider an SEO Audit to establish why this is so. An audit will help determine what needs to be done to increase your holdings on visitors from search engines.
9. You have several Long-Tail Keyword Hits
Long-tail keywords are phrases that state something particularly. If there are many such phrases in your content it means that your SEO efforts are not so efficient. It may also indicate that you need to start targeting these phrases. Enough of these maybes when it comes to keywords. The only way you can get to the bottom of things is to do an SEO audit on your site to establish whether your targeted keywords are working. An audit will be an eye-opener and you will discover how easy it is to rank for these words. This allows you to begin strategizing on how to target new or old search phrases and keywords. The results will be more visitors, which means more business for you.
10. Your Traffic Originates Mainly from No-Follow Websites
Social networks like Facebook and Twitter or any other prominent news websites tend to append “no follow” attributes to links that make their links with no authority and won’t do much as backlinks. The links may end up hurting your SEO efforts. It will make it difficult for you to naturally rank for keywords as phrases when your backlinks primarily come from low-quality links and domain authority.
Conclusion
I trust that you are now convinced how important an SEO audit is for your website. For maximum visibility, your SEO efforts should be effective enough to yield tangible results. Whether it a full SEO audit or competitor analysis or both, you can use SEO tools to help you. As you do this, look for glaring issues that cause significant problems for your website. Ensure that for example, there is only one version of your website to be browsed and seen with both search engines and your web visitors.
Author’s Bio:
Naman Modi is a Professional Blogger, SEO Expert & Guest blogger at NamanModi.com, He is an Award Winning Freelancer & Web Entrepreneur helping new entrepreneur’s launches their first successful online business.
Social Media Links Below:
Twitter– https://twitter.com/namandigital
Facebook– https://www.facebook.com/NamanModiDigital
Pinterest – https://in.pinterest.com/NM_Digital/
Instagram– https://www.instagram.com/naman_modi_digital/
Gravatar hello@namanmodi.com Ebuilderz@naman4090
