Making a complete SEO audit of your website is something every business needs to do on a regular basis. It can be time consuming and rather intensive but, in the end, your website, and your company will be the better for it. It gives you the opportunity to really delve in to the effectiveness of your business and your SEO marketing efforts. You can see where you have been strong and where you have been falling short and where you need to overhaul and improve.
It is a forensic endeavor best left, perhaps, to an experienced SEO firm to handle for you. It could be done internally but it will only be as effective as the skill set of your people will allow and will be crushingly time consuming and costly. There are certain points you need to hit and discover how they are stacking up against your rivals as well as with your industry in general.
- One of the most important metrics to be aware of is the bounce rate at your site. Are your visitors spending any time on your site? Are they reading your content? Is it easy for them to navigate around and to make a purchase? How has your actual traffic been? Has there been dips and lulls? If so, when? Is it a seasonal thing or are you just not engaging the traffic that comes there?
- Checking on the condition and the effectiveness of some basic technical benchmarks is also critical the health of your SEO marketing efforts. How are your links? Links have become so important in recent algorithm updates that they can no longer be ignored or just slap dashed together. The are hugely important to your future. Also, how is your caching and how is your server and hosting situation? Are they reliable and long term assets or do they need to be reviewed and overhauled?
- SEO has become so fluid, and changes happen so quickly, that you will need to consider, quite soon, whether you should seek help from an outside firm that does all of this all day every day. The complexity of it, as well as constant algorithm updates and preferences from Google, can’t be underestimated. Google dictates what happens in search and you need to stay abreast of that.
- Finally, take the time to see what your rivals are up to and how your company and site measure up against them. What have they all been doing that you haven’t even thought of? Are they driving more traffic and making more conversions that you? If so, why? Maybe there are best practices in your industry that neither you or your competition are integrating? If not, get to it and, perhaps, gain an immediate competitive advantage.
-Written by Kevin Sawyer
SearchPro Systems
2024