Does your website need a smooth, powerful boost to glide past the competition?
With many of the small businesses we work with, we talk about the benefits of SEO and how it can help unlock their brand’s potential. With over 50% of website traffic coming from organic search and 67% of all clicks going to the first five organic searches, SEO is not something businesses should neglect.
One of the most important things you can do to start getting more organic (unpaid) website traffic is to conduct an SEO Audit.
An SEO Audit is an individualized evaluation of your SEO performance. It considers many different factors that influence how your website is currently showing up in search engine results. SEO Audits are crucial because they tell how your specific business can create more organic website traffic based on relevant components and industry best practices.
Want strong SEO? Start with an SEO audit.
Let’s look at the benefits of performing an SEO audit as a first step to knocking this SEO thing out of the park.
They tell you what is working
SEO Audits tell you what you’re currently doing that is helping drive organic website traffic to your site. There are many factors—”checkpoints”—that can positively influence your website traffic, such as your social media activity and weekly blog posts. Since you don’t want to fix something that isn’t broken, knowing what works (to drive organic website traffic) will keep you from messing up a good thing.
They tell you what is not working
There are usually some ways that your site is getting in its own way to limit organic website traffic. Now that you know what works, you need to find out what doesn’t work. Any SEO strategy will be an uphill battle if you aren’t aware of what’s holding you back.
Factors in your backend SEO that are limiting organic website traffic, such as metadata and title tags, may be hard to see without a technical eye.
They save you time
For small business owners, time is often a limited resource demanded by many competing responsibilities. By performing a baseline SEO audit to analyze what’s working and what’s not working, you’ll get a specific plan on how to use your time and resources effectively for SEO, instead of spending time guessing or doing things that won’t really help to bring your website higher in search results.
All SEO audits are not created equal
From many years of doing SEO and understanding industry best practices, we’ve developed and refined our 45-Point SEO audit, which includes 20 frontend checkpoints and 25 backend checkpoints.
What the what? Plain English, please?
Frontend checkpoints refer to factors visible on your website:
- Does your website have a responsive design that is both desktop and mobile friendly?
- Does your website load quickly?
- Is your website updated regularly?
Backend checkpoints include all the things “under the hood” that bots need to understand to crawl and index your site:
- Does your website have rich metadata and title tags?
- Does your copy use heading tags in the HTML so that bots understand what each page is about?
[Go deeper: Eight non-technical steps to boost SEO]
To get this kind of results from your SEO strategy, start with a thorough SEO audit that sets you off on the right foot.
SEO audits are one of the five SEO services we offer our clients to help drive more organic website traffic to their businesses. In fact, simply by leveraging a few basic SEO services, our client’s website jumped from the fourth page on Google to the first!
Would you like to chat about boosting your business’s SEO performance? Schedule a no-cost, no-obligation 30-minute consultation with us to find out how we can help, while also saving you time.
Key Takeaways
- SEO audits are an individualized evaluation of your business’s SEO performance. They consider many different factors that influence how your website is currently showing up in search engine results pages.
- An SEO audit can tell you what’s helping and what’s not helping drive organic website traffic to your business’s website.
- SEO audits are based on industry best practices and professional expertise, which makes all SEO audits not created equal.
Photo credit: Brayden Collum via Unsplash
