SEO Audit: Why is it Necessary to Regularly Audit Your Website?

Understand SEO Audit

You can understand it as an evaluation of a website that grades it for the ability to appear in search engine results. The auditing gets completed by checking each step on your audit list and finding issues that need to be fixed.

This kind of auditing looks at a website and tries to identify its weakness. Now, we are not only talking about aesthetics because a website is more than a mesh of shades and graphics.

This audit takes into account the totality of a website.

5 Reasons Why You Must Perform It

These reasons will make you feel the need to perform SEO auditing. Have a look at them!

1. Identifies the technical issues of your website

Ideal auditing is one that helps to identify the technical issues of SEO. These issues relate to helping search engines to crawl better on your website. You can understand SEO as building a house.

And technical SEO is about building a solid foundation. Also, you can understand it to be anything, which is different from the content.

Here are a few examples of technical SEO elements that an audit tries to discover:

Website speed: Have you ever thought about how much time does your website takes to load? You must know that Google takes into consideration. This is done because it prioritizes UX over other things.

When we talk about a fast website, it means a better user experience. Besides this, the fact is known by all that a website with a longer time to load will experience more bouncing rates.

Even if you have the best content on your website, the effort will go futile if your users will bounce. Some elements that make a website long to load are:

Large images
Redundant JavaScript
Server response time

The architecture of the site and URL structure

The use of subfolders is a must for your website to maintain a good architecture, and URLs must be short.

Crawlability

This refers to how easily a search engine can crawl your website. If you want to ensure good crawlability, then you need to correctly use the robots.txt file.

2. Identifies on-page issues

These issues refer to any optimizations that you can implement in your content easily. SEO audit covers the following elements:

Meta titles and descriptions- these titles should be written around between 35-70 characters and should include keywords. Descriptions should be under 160 characters.
Headers- the H1 header is the one that makes the biggest announcement about the page. So, make sure you optimize it.
Content- it is always a king and will remain in the future as well. Make sure that the content has all the keywords included in it.
Internal linking- it helps a user to navigate a website better by inserting internal links.

3. Identifies the competition

When you try to build your online presence, it is vital to look at the competitors because without looking at them, it is like trying to build the tallest skyscraper in the world but not having any idea of how tall the other skyscrapers are.

It is significant that you identify the competition. But if you think the task is enough, then NO! You must also try to identify what is being done by your competitor.

A good SEO audit is one that discovers the competition, identifies its strategy, and comes up with a plan to build a tall skyscraper.

4. Identifies your backlinks

These are a major part of algorithms since 2017. As per the trend, the more reputable links you have, the better your site will rank. It is crucial to know where you stand. A good SEO audit answers the following questions:

Number of links that your website have
Are there spammy backlinks?
Number of backlinks that your competitors have as compared to you

Having said all this, it doesn’t mean that you should focus only on backlinks. The content of the website also matters. If your content is great, then backlinks will come naturally and your content will be shareable.

5. Help you to build a content strategy

What have you learned from the above points? What will you do with the data that you have collected from the above points? You need to use everything to learn about the technical issues of your website, on-page SEO, and backlinks.

You can use this data to build an awesome content strategy. In terms of keywords, you can have a look at your competitors. Beef up your content, optimize your meta descriptions and titles.

Lastly, figure out where you can gain backlinks. This audit helps businesses to stay focused on their content strategy.

There is no time to wait but to take action!