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What you Can Expect to Find with an SEO Audit and How to Make your Site Better

What you Can Expect to Find with an SEO Audit and How to Make your Site Better

A staggering amount of attention in digital marketing is paid to SEO and that’s for a reason. SEO is a massive lead generator, brand visibility builder, and easily the best organic search strategy there is. If you have recently partnered with a digital marketing agency like Unlimited Exposure and/or are using a software to conduct an SEO audit, there are several things you should expect to see.

A comprehensive website crawl.

Any SEO website audit will begin with a full site crawl to identify any overarching issues which could be plaguing your SEO. A crawl provides a baseline for a site, scanning every URL and delivering an analysis on which the rest of one’s audit can be built. A crawl will locate on-page errors, including broken links, page titles, and duplicate content.

Checking your website loading speed.

Loading speed is a huge factor in SEO as search engines like Google want to give their users only the best websites in response to a query. The faster your overall site speed and individual page speed are, the more positive the user experience is assumed to be and the better your ranking will be. A speed test may identify areas of improvement relating to speed, such as coding or hosting issues.

Site architecture.

A strong SEO website is going to have a site architecture optimized for their user. A website’s journey should not be complicated. Any information should be accessible within a few clicks. A clear, logical, organized structure is recommended, reflected in an XML sitemap. Adhere to relevant URL naming conventions and page titles. All the main web pages should be reflected in a navigation menu at the top of your website so that site visitors can locate any information efficiently. Doing this, believe us when we say, will help your SEO.

Evaluating site content.

On-page SEO is a big influence – as one would expect – on a site’s search engine rank. An SEO audit can identify keyword stuffing, how successful you are at ranking overall for the keywords you’re using, whether your content can be considered ‘spam’, how relevant the content is to what your site is about, and content length. A site with a ton of pages with too little content are going to see minimal SEO movement whereas pages 500-2,000 words are going to see much larger jumps in where they rank.

Tags.

Tags help search engines determine what a piece of content is about. Title tags should convey the content beneath them, meta-tags should include a keyword-driven description of content, image tags should be used to classify images on Google, and other tags in your coding can also affect where elements of your site rank. For example, every page should ideally include a ‘rel=canonical’ link in its HTML as to prevent duplicate content.

Checking backlinks.

Lastly, an SEO audit will verify whether your backlinks are working. Backlinks are valued today by SEO algorithms as quality over quantity. If you are being linked to by questionable websites, it’s considered a bad sign that your site is also questionable.

An SEO audit is worth having done as it gives a close look at how your site’s SEO is doing and where you might have gone wrong. A simple, unintentional mistake in your on-site SEO can produce major consequences, positive or negative on your search engine ranking. To speak with an SEO expert today, contact Unlimited Exposure.