Why Is An SEO Audit Important?
As the name suggests, an SEO audit is a careful examination of a website. The purpose of this audit is simple: to root out any issues plaguing your website and determine the factors that are impacting your website’s overall ranking on search engines. To put it simply, an SEO audit analysis is a stocktake of sorts to identify pain points as well as opportunities to improve your SEO and organic traffic.
You might be wondering what some of these pain points include. Think of the last time you visited a website.
Do you remember the angst you experienced as the website took forever to load? Pain point number 1!
After entertaining the slow loading speed which seemed to test your resolve to stay on the website, you are finally able to view the homepage. But, you are irritated once again when you realise the content looks duplicated from another website you had visited. Pain Point number 2!
These two pain points, the slow loading speed and the duplicate content, are examples of issues that an SEO audit can pick up on. Therefore, an SEO audit is an important part of your overall SEO strategy. It can highlight any pending issues affecting your website’s ranking and overall user experience.
Here are three reasons why you should conduct an SEO audit before embarking on any form of SEO strategy.
1. An SEO Analysis Helps You Optimise Your Loading Time
Did you know that nearly 60% of visitors will bounce from a website if they have to wait more than 3 seconds? If that doesn’t get you fired up about optimising your website’s loading speed, we don’t know what will. An SEO audit will be able to flag this as an important issue to resolve.
Not only does a poor loading speed affect your user experience, but it is one of the most important factors that impact your website’s ranking on search engines like Google. In fact, Google takes page loading speed seriously. They signalled this when the Search Engine giant rolled out the page experience signal. This update includes a selection of ranking factors (including page loading speed) that enables Google to determine the quality of user experience. Furthermore, Google views page loading speed as one of the four fundamental web vitals that impact a website’s ranking.
When an SEO audit is done, you will be able to determine your website’s loading speed and take advantage of this key insight to improve on this factor.
2. An SEO Analysis Helps You Get Ahead Of The Competition
Another benefit of an SEO audit is that it helps you to understand the competitors around you. Just by conducting an SEO analysis, you will be able to suss out your competitors’ pain points and their strengths. One observable way that this will help your SEO is to consider the keywords that your competitors are ranking for. You could review this list and add them to your own SEO game plan. Alternatively, you could look at keywords which your competitors have neglected and work to optimise your website for those keywords.
If you are trying to rank for similar keywords and not making any headway in your efforts, you can identify what sort of strategy they are employing. Ask yourself certain questions like:
- Have your competitors built a rich concentration of backlinks to certain pages that allow them to rank higher for certain keywords?
- How can you optimise your website to also rank for those keywords?
Another way an SEO audit can help you measure your website against competitors is to understand how your website’s Domain Ranking (DR) compares with the competition. It is important to note that if your competitor has a higher DR it is much harder to rank higher above them. One way to do this is to build more backlinks to your website to cement your website’s authority.
3. An SEO Analysis Helps Root Out Duplicate Or Weak Content
Another benefit of SEO analysis is that it flags website content that has been duplicated. But what’s the big deal about duplicated content? When your website contains duplicate content, it makes it impossible for Google to determine which page with similar or identical content should rank first. Since Google is unable to tell for sure which page produced the original content, pages with duplicate content and unfortunately, even the originator of the content will lose in the race to the top of Google’s search engine results page (SERP).
An SEO audit will also tell you if your content for the page is too weak or thin. If that’s the case, you need to beef up the amount of unique content you have on your website. It’s important to note that Google views thin content as scarce and of poor quality. This determination by Google will cause your website to rank poorly on Google search results.
Get In Touch With An SEO Expert For A Conclusive SEO Audit
Reach out to a local SEO consultant to comb through an extensive On-page SEO checklist and conduct an SEO audit for your business. Before we get started on improving your website’s overall SEO, we conduct a thorough SEO initial analysis report to determine the strengths and weaknesses of your website. This insight helps us to identify pain points that require improvement and opportunities to improve organic traffic. Get your page to Google’s coveted page 1 when you activate our team of SEO specialists. Click here for more information.