Should I Carry Out a Website SEO Audit?

What is a Website SEO Audit?

A website SEO audit is a process of examining the health and performance of a website from an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) perspective. If you’re unsure what SEO is, SEO is the practice of improving the ranking of a website on search engines like Google, with the goal of getting more organic (non-paid) traffic from search results.

Why Carry out a Full Website SEO Audit?

A full website SEO audit will help in identifying the areas that are performing well and attaining good placement or rankings in SERPs (search engine results pages). It’s not enough to look at individual pages throughout your website, your website is generally seen holistically by the search engines, so it’s not a matter of having one great page hidden within hundreds, the hundreds of other pages need to have some structure and quality to them too.

A full website SEO audit involves multiple steps and dozens of comprehensive tasks that look at how well your website is optimised now. The results will show you clearly if your SEO strategy is working or not, what needs closer attention and what may need a complete overhaul. If you have a marketing strategy in place, your website SEO audit results should dovetail into these highlighting which areas of your marketing strategy may need attention too.

If you are struggling attaining website visitors, keeping them or, crucially, being found in the first place, you need a full website SEO audit, and we’d recommend a marketing strategy and implementation review too as one doesn’t work to its fullest potential without the other.

In short, a website SEO audit can help a business improve the visibility and performance of its website on search engines, which can lead to more organic traffic, more leads and sales, and a better overall return on investment for the business.

You’ll benefit by:

1. Identifying problems that could be negatively impacting the website’s ranking on search engines, such as broken links, duplicate content, or slow loading times.
2. Discovering opportunities to improve the website’s ranking on search engines, such as by adding keywords to the website’s content or improving the website’s internal linking structure.
3. Making you website more user-friendly by identifying and fixing issues that could be frustrating or confusing for visitors.
4. Understanding how the website is currently performing on search engines and how it compares to competitors.
5. Creating a roadmap for improving the website’s SEO and driving more organic traffic to the website.

DIY Website SEO Auditing – Does it Work?

The answer to this is ‘yes it can’, if you have a very good understanding of SEO, but in most cases, even those working in marketing can struggle.

Most DIY SEO auditing is carried out on the page through SEO plugins or through access to dedicated SEO services.

Let’s start with the plugins. There are many different plugins available, such as RankMath and Yoast for WordPress. They may present the quality of your website pages in a traffic light form or percentage score, pointing out some key markup or content elements that require attention to boost your overall page scores.

An SEO plugin can help you optimise your page around your chosen keyword or keyword phrase, which is great. But what it can’t tell you is if the keywords you are optimising the page for are widely searched or not, this is where you need to work holistically and look at keyword research to ensure the hard work you are putting into optimising the page is actually going to pay-off, after all, if no one is searching using your chosen keyword or keyword phrase you may rank highly but it won’t bring you additional website visitors.

Something that you should also be aware of when not fully understanding the background intricacies of SEO is when you should or shouldn’t follow the plugins guidance. It is possible to attain the green traffic light and think that’s it. But there are 10 million shades of green visible by the human eye and the search engines are no different, so ensuring you have the right combination of elements, keywords and content markup are crucial to attaining the right shade of green that will give you the results you are looking for.

Now let’s take a quick look at SEO services and SEO audit tools such as SEMRush or Ahrefs. Most DIY website owners use the free or low, entry level subscriptions to these services and they are usually presented with pages of information in the form of automated reports or interactive screens full of charts, graphs, and technical information.

Just like the website SEO plugins, you’ll get a lot of information, which, if you have a good understanding of SEO, you may be able to action.

The benefits of both DIY plugins and low budget SEO services are, you’ll get a good feeling for the depth of any problems you may have, and you’ll be presented with several simple actions that you can take to begin to improve things.

We have a lot of conversations at this point with business and website owners that splits them into two camps – Those that think they’ve done enough and those that don’t – it’s that straight a split.

• Those that think they’ve done enough are generally those that underestimate the importance of SEO. They see SEO as a one of action, don’t truly understand the importance of keyword choice and quality content.

• Those that don’t think they’ve done enough are generally those that understand that SEO is an ongoing process that evolves with their website and their marketing strategy, they understand how important keyword choice is and why they need to put some effort into content creation to produce content that will attract the search engines and in turn, engage potential customers.

If you are in the second camp, there is no reason why you shouldn’t succeed and have continued sustained success purely through organic means. If you are in the first camp, well, be prepared only for some short-term organic success and continually repeating the process.

Is it Worth Carrying out a Full Website SEO Audit?

We believe that it is, even for a new build website.

New or old, conducting a full website SEO audit is a necessary step if you want to rank in SERPs.

For a newly built website it is unlikely that you’ll be ranking immediately but knowing that everything is as aligned as it can be gives you the best chances of early success.

For an older site that isn’t bringing you the traffic you are looking for, isn’t ranking, or appearing in SERPs, then it should be your first choice before you consider doing anything else. The audit will inform you what the severity of any problems are, what needs fixing, changing, or adding and, moving forward, you’ll know that you are spending your budget wisely.

We live today, in an impatient and fast-moving world, so being visible online and being found in search results has become a key factor to success both online and off. One of the first questions we’re always asked when working with a client is ‘How long does it take to rank in Google?’. The straight answer is ‘how long is a piece of string?’, it’s not possible to time exactly how long it will take to rank. Back in 2017 Ahrefs carried out a study to try and answer this question and found that the average Top10 ranking page was 2+ years old and most of those ranking in the #1 position were on average almost 3 years old – if fact, only 22% of pages that ranked in the Top10 at that time were created within 1 year.

Reading the above facts does sounds daunting, and to some, SEO may be sounding like a fruitless task, but let us tell you, it’s not.

Yes, there may be more competition online since the study was taken out, but some things haven’t changed at all – knowing who your customers are and knowing what they want from you. Yes, you do need to have some technical structure to your website but knowing who your customers are and what they want from you is the key to your SEO. We can help with your customer profiling but if you already know them and have a marketing strategy, a full website SEO audit that includes looking at how your current keyword strategy is working, and a detailed competitor analysis will enable your ongoing SEO strategy to evolve quickly and efficiently to be ranking in shorter than average times and giving you the best chances of staying on top.

Where do You Start with Your SEO Website Audit?

If you already know that you want to move forwards and you’d like to discuss social:definition carrying out a detailed full website SEO audit, please get in contact with us using the details you’ll find anywhere on our website or using the form on this page. We’ll arrange a suitable time to have an initial Zoom call, go through costings and our SEO audit checklist so that you know what exactly we’ll be doing for you to create the detailed report, and if you are happy to go ahead, we’ll gather some additional information from you to get things started and ask for you to come back to us with some further information and access to accounts where required.

If you’re still unsure that a full website SEO audit is the way to move forwards, why not hop across to our introductory website audit page. When there, just add your domain details, email address and telephone number and we’ll run a 25-page website SEO audit free for your website. You’ll receive an email (usually within 30 minutes) with an overview of how these first 25 pages fair.