SEO Health Check – Why an SEO Audit is Important
An SEO audit is not only important for the assessment of a website before optimising (the website) but also for ongoing Search Engine Optimisation.
Optimising a website or doing an SEO audit is like servicing a car; you need to have regular checkups and finetune your car to make sure that it is running properly. Likewise, a website needs to be regularly maintained and tweaked to check and improve the SEO of the website. Google released a report of their SEO to identify potential areas for improvement in Google’s product pages. So isn’t it about time you did an SEO health check of your website?
Competitive keyword selection
Constant monitoring of keyword selection is important for the ongoing optimisation of your website. Realistically, you should do a website analysis and check the keywords you should be targeting every six to 12 months to see if they are the best keywords that you should be aiming for. Find out more about Keyword Research Tools and how you can conduct an SEO audit of your keyword strategy.
SEO copywriting & on page content
It’s always a good idea to go back and check your on page content from time to time and cast a critical eye over your content regularly. Look for opportunities where you can add fresh content to your website and update your content. Websites that are always reviewing, testing, monitoring and rewriting their content achieve strong conversion rates:
Find out more about SEO copywriting and how you can conduct an SEO audit of your copywriting and on page content.
Images
Image SEO is often overlooked on a website but searches on Google Images are also an important referrer of traffic to websites. Always keep in mind that Search Engines cannot read images, they can only read text. This makes optimising images all the more important to maximise every bit of your website SEO. Find out more about image SEO and how you can conduct an SEO audit of your website images.
Link Profile
Link building and maintaining your link profile is an essential part of SEO so checking your profile is an important part of the SEO audit. It’s also important to focus on your link building strategies. To create a natural link profile, you need to check anchor links have different variations, the type of links must include both dofollow and nofollow links and the links pointing to your website must be from a quality website related to your industry that is credible and trustworthy.
Internal link structure
It’s also important to check the links on your pages and how they measure up. The first thing you need to do is check whether there are dead links on the page by seeing what links come up with a 404 error. This is an important part of your SEO audit as Search Engines prefer websites that are well maintained.
Webmaster Tools makes it easier for you to detect whether the 404 errors or crawl errors are limited to your website or from external websites. You’ll have the information you need to contact them to get it fixed, and if needed, you can still put in place redirects on your own site to the appropriate URL.
Site speed
Google recently announced that site speed would be included in the search ranking algorithms. Site speed reflects how quickly each web page responds to web requests. Intensive research on site speed done by Google shows that users have a tendency to spend less time on a site that is running slowly.
Google has also blogged about free tools as part of your SEO audit that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site performance and how this affects your Search Engine ranking. However, while Google sees site speed as relevant, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page in Search Engine rankings.
Contact us to find out how we can conduct a full SEO audit of your website. This may be needed when you have just created a website, if your website suddenly loses traffic or your traffic is not growing steadily. The website analysis starts from a 50 point checklist of your current website, rankings and competitive analysis. From there, we’ll be able to customise an SEO program to suit your needs and budget. Doing an SEO audit of your website is a good risk management strategy and ideally should be done every six to 12 months.
