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The digital world is super competitive, so unless you have a nearly unlimited marketing budget you need to be technically savvy about attracting potential customers to your website. For most business owners, the only way to ensure likely customers can find your business is through ongoing digital marketing efforts. Finding and fixing issues with your site will help you rank higher in Google search results. Doing an SEO (search engine optimization) audit will lead you to find opportunities to improve your site. Doing one should be a regular part of your digital marketing efforts. If you haven’t done a systematic review of your site’s technical and on-site SEO in a year or so, an SEO site audit should probably be a priority.

What an SEO Audit Is

In short, these in-depth site reviews help business owners avoid losing traffic, which means fewer leads and sales. The audit will invariably uncover issues with site design, coding, and content that might hurt the site’s search engine rankings. Search engine rankings are only part of the picture. Technical and design errors can hurt in other ways. You could lose lots of web traffic because your site isn’t indexed properly. Usability issues can cost leads and customers, in part because Google will penalize your site and in part because clunky websites annoy people.

What you get from an SEO audit may vary. Software tools and digital marketing companies do these audits following various definitions of what a proper audit includes. Nevertheless, most any review will cover some standard elements:

• Technical issues with the site
• Gaps in content
• Website structure issues such as broken internal links
• On-site issues like badly written page titles
• Off-site SEO issues like links from irrelevant sites
• User experience issues, including pages that load too slowly
• Insights into competitors’ keyword usage

You can use online tools to “crawl” your site and deliver results. The report will vary in structure and in the details it provides, but you should get a good breakdown of on-site SEO, off-site SEO, and technical elements. You may get a different kind of audit by hiring a digital marketing firm to analyze your site and using those results can be a challenge. Let’s take a closer look at how an audit helps fix issues in those areas.

How to Use an SEO Site Audit

The audit results will provide several insights into improving your keyword usage, your site’s structure, and your content. You need quality, up-to-date content, even if you don’t have a blog. Your site needs certain coding done to ensure Google indexes all of it properly. You also want to eliminate any broken links. That covers some of the technical and on-site SEO elements of an audit report.

You should be employing several tactics when you incorporate keywords into a site. Your audit results will help you figure out how to do that. Pages that are slow to load, for example, make a bad impression. That’s also true for a site that looks bad on smartphones. A little expert research will help you understand what your competition is doing to be found, keywords focused on, content topics, and so on. You can use that information to create new pages or to update existing pages. If you have a blog or want to start one, an SEO audit can help you think about what to write because the audit will also point out gaps in your current content or new content opportunities that draw on popular keywords relevant to your business.

Regular SEO Audits

Your website will change over time. In short, this is why an audit should be a regular digital marketing task, ideally done once a year. As pages change, URLs change, and new pages come online, the site changes in ways that aren’t always obvious. Internal links break, for example. Employees might upload images without adding tags. Page descriptions may be missing or page titles may not have relevant keywords. Those things, over time, will undermine your digital marketing efforts by hurting your search rankings.

Some of the results should be super easy to understand, while others take some technical skill to implement. For example, a missing page description is easy to fix. Right a description in plain English that includes a keyword. You may also need to increase page-loading speeds for some pages full of images. That isn’t difficult but it might require some technical knowledge. The same is true of generating an XML sitemap and submitting it to Google. However, if your audit reveals multiple issues with keywords, it might take editing and writing skills and a significant amount of time to make your site content the best it can be.

One Key to Effective Digital Marketing

Making sure that the right people can find your site is going to be an ongoing challenge. It can be easier if your site is optimally designed to be easy to read and easy to find via Google. An SEO audit tells business owners what is good and what needs work. Use the audit as a regular site check-up, just like routine maintenance on a car. If you want search engine optimization help, new content, or social media marketing help, contact our digital marketing team to set up a short discovery call.

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• How Search Engine Optimization Can Improve the ROI on Your Business Site

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• Questions to Ask When Hiring an SEO Agency