SEO audits are a valuable tool for business planning and budgeting. They not only help you understand what needs to be fixed, but also provide you with recommendations for improving your website’s SEO earning potential.
SEO is a long-game; a strategy that rewards consistent effort and patience over time to see significant results.
SEO is a perfect continuous improvement program. For example, I include tasks like reviewing my website traffic and making SEO adjustments in my end-of-month activities. Monthly attention works for me.
What can you do with the SEO Audit report?
An SEO audit report from Adventures Online includes two important lists: one of items that need to be fixed/tweaked, and the other of SEO tasks that can be used to improve your website’s SEO earning potential. These two lists facilitate planning and budgeting.
Sometimes the report contains surprising information.
Victoria’s SEO Audit Results
Here’s what happened when Victoria, a new-to-me client, asked me to do an SEO audit on her website in December (so that she could use the results for planning website activities for the new year).
While I was doing the audit, I discovered that her Home and About Us pages had paragraphs about “fish”. The paragraphs were on the code side (back-end) of the web pages and invisible to the public-facing side of the website.
My recommendation was to clean the website (of all things fishy) before adding terms that would help her get found for her real work, otherwise, search engine bot programs (those crawlers you hear about) would have a difficult time knowing how to rank the website due to the mix of fish with the real business work.
During the Cleansing…
After more digging, I discovered that her website had been deeply hacked. I ran some tests and found that the page builder her web people had been using was hacked.
While doing even more tests, I learned that no matter what I did (like removing the fish references from an infected file and the database), the fish paragraph would replicate itself 6 times each time I edited and saved one of the affected pages.
At this time, there is no reason to add SEO to help her get found for her business segment because the fish references will remain in the website until it is replaced.
4 reasons SEO Audits are worth considering
- Identifying Issues: SEO audits help identify technical issues, on-page problems, and other factors that may be hindering your website’s performance in search engine results pages (SERPs). These issues include broken links, duplicate content, slow page speed, improper use of meta tags, and more.
Some of the issues (like broken links) are important to fix as soon as discovered. Why? Because they distract the GoogleBot from reading, evaluating, and ranking our content. Instead, the GoogleBot looks for more broken links because if there are many, it does not want to recommend our website at all.
- Improving User Experience: A good SEO audit not only focuses on search engine rankings but also evaluates the overall user experience (UX) of your website. Improving user experience can lead to higher engagement, lower bounce rates, and ultimately better conversion rates. UX is tested on multiple devices, especially on mobile. Three common UX tests are:
- How fast a page loads
- Visibility of all components on the viewing surface of the mobile phone
- Easily and obviously accessible menu items for navigating the website
- Maximizing ROI: By identifying and fixing issues that are preventing your website from ranking well in the search engines, an SEO audit can help maximize the return on investment (ROI) of your digital marketing efforts. It ensures that you’re not wasting resources on SEO tactics that aren’t delivering results.
- Staying Up-to-Date: SEO best practices and search engine algorithms are constantly evolving. Regular audits help ensure that your website stays up-to-date with these changes and continues to perform well in the search results. And, performing well, of course, means earns high positions in the SERPs.
Overall, while SEO audits may require an investment of time and resources, the insights and improvements they provide can significantly benefit your website’s performance in the long run.
Ahrefs offers a website SEO audit for free using an online tool. Warning: First, you need to validate that you own the website by giving Ahrefs access to data that you may or may not want to share.