What is an SEO audit and what does it consist of?
If you have ever wondered what an SEO audit is, here you will find the answer. We have decided to start this article about the relevance of an online SEO audit with a series of questions you should ask yourself in relation to your business website.
- Do you know how many users visit your website every day?
- Do you know how long it takes for your website to load?
- Do you know why some users abandon your website quickly?
- How often do you update the content of your website?
- You think you have a good website, but you don't get the expected return in the form of customers and sales?
- If a user performs a Google search related to your sector, do you think they will find your website easily?
- Do you know the average time a user spends on your website?
- Do you know where the users who come to your business website every day come from?
- Do you know who your main online competitors are and how they are better than you?
If you don't know most of the answers to these questions, it may be time to request an SEO audit of your business website.
In MarketZilla SEO Agency, we offer you the possibility of making a Free SEO audit. Perhaps you should not miss the opportunity to learn about the benefits that an online SEO audit can bring you.
If you wish to request a free SEO audityou can do so at here.
For now, in this article you will learn what kind of information you can find in an SEO audit and how you can make the most of it.
WHY I NEED A SEO OPTIMISED WEBSITE FOR MY BUSINESS
In the era of digital transformation, a business website is the cornerstone of a company, as a very high percentage of our customers reach our products or services through the internet.
It is essential that the business website is a letter of introduction, our best salesperson, a tool that attracts potential customers, that can gather feedback from our users and that helps to build customer loyalty.
Designing and creating a business website is more than just uploading information about our products and our contact telephone numbers. The implementation of an SEO positioning strategy in our business website is critical if we want to position and give visibility to our products or services.
If you are not yet familiar with the term SEO, we recommend you watch the following video. Subscribe to our YouTube channel here
It is very important to know what the objective of our website is, what keywords we want to rank for, what type of content we need to include to be able to rank in search results and what reach we want our website to have.
This implies a multitude of variables that must be taken into account in order for our website to fulfil its objective, which is to give you greater visibility and reach for our business.
We will have to continuously analyse and monitor multiple parameters of our website to obtain valuable information. As a result, all this information will help and guide us in making decisions about our business and our customers. Data-driven management helps us to achieve better results.
REQUEST A FREE AUDIT OF YOUR BUSINESS WEBSITE
WHAT IS AN SEO AUDIT
A web SEO audit is an in-depth analysis of all the variables that affect web positioning in search results. Through an SEO audit we can obtain information about which variables of our website are not optimised and correct or solve possible errors and deviations.
WHAT IS INCLUDED IN AN SEO AUDIT
Through an SEO audit we can obtain two distinct blocks of information:
1. TECHNICAL INFORMATION RELATED TO THE "STATE OF HEALTH" OF OUR WEBSITE
The technical part of the SEO web audit is focused on all those variables that can be executed on websites and that help to certify the crawling and indexing of the contents of our website by search engines.
The variables affecting the technical section are:
Loading speed
It is a very relevant factor within the technical aspects of the web. Websites or blogs whose loading speed is faster than 3 seconds are not so "well seen" by search engines, even if they have a sublime content to provide the user.
The loading speed not only improves the web positioning but also helps to enrich the user experience and to reduce the bounce rate or abandonment of the website.
There are free tools available to measure the loading speed of a website, such as pagespeed insights by Google. You can measure the speed of your website here (PageSpeed)
Website structure
Another very valuable information that we can collect through a web SEO audit is related to the interlinking or internal linking of our website and the structure of our page. On numerous occasions, we find websites that require an excessive number of clicks to reach the desired destination or content.
Such complex structures do not facilitate the crawling of our website by search engines and do not facilitate the user experience by increasing the bounce rate.
Ease of indexing
The crawling and indexing of our website are key to improving search engine positioning. We must ensure that there are no restrictions on crawling and indexing.
To do this, we must have correctly structured and configured the sitemap or map of our website and the robots.txt file. In this way, we will facilitate the crawling and indexing, favouring SEO positioning.
Through the free tool Google Search Console we can detect errors in the sitemap and in the robots.txt file.Â
Other technical aspects that an SEO audit offers us
Optimisation of images of our website, detecting images with excessive sizes that affect the loading speed of the website or images without alt attributes that do not help in SEO positioning.
The keyword cannibalisation (trying to rank different urls of a page for the same keywords) can lead to SEO problems.
Duplications in the titles and meta-descriptions of our urls generating conflicts on the web. We must also take into account that some WordPress plugins, or the theme of the website itself, can generate technical problems in the proper functioning of the website of our business.
2. INFORMATION RELATED TO TRAFFIC, COMPETITION, KEYWORD POSITIONING AND ASPECTS THAT CAN HELP US IN THE MANAGEMENT OF THE BUSINESS.
Once the technical variables have been analysed, we move on to analyse those variables that are more related to the interaction between the user and the website. All this information can help us to make decisions in the management of our business. Consequently, we should analyse it in detail.
Some of these most relevant variables are related to:
- Web traffic. Where we will obtain information about the type of traffic we receive, keyword rankings, keyword opportunities, location of the traffic received and content opportunities.
- Bounce rate. % of users who leave our website without interacting with it.
- Competition. Keywords for which our competitors rank, traffic they receive vs. our business.
Web traffic
One of the sections that we analyse in the SEO web audit is the web traffic we receive on our website. The online SEO audit gives us information about the amount of traffic we receive based on defined periods.
The user traffic that we receive on our website we can differentiate it between organic traffic y paid traffic (in case we run paid SEM campaigns).
Similarly, we can obtain information on the keywords that are positioning and the position in which we can find them in the SERPs. This information helps us to determine for which keywords our website is positioning organically.
We will also determine the percentages of branded traffic received o unbrandedthat is, if users search for us by our brand name or if they find us through generic searches thanks to web positioning.
In this way, we will conclude how our users find us on the internet, and thus, decide whether we should work on those keywords without branding to improve their positioning.
We also have the possibility of obtaining a keyword ranking for which our website is positioned on the Internet. This ranking can help us to detect key words of opportunity that we can incorporate into our website and, in this way, improve our positioning through them.
Likewise, we will be able to detect in which urls the most relevant keywords of our website are positioned and, in this way, take advantage of opportunities for improvement in those urls that do not position so well.
Thanks to these opportunity keywords, we will be able to get ideas of contents that we can add to our website to enrich its content and, on the other hand, improve SEO positioning through these opportunity keywords.
Another very useful piece of information that an SEO audit provides us with is the location of the traffic we receivei.e. from which country or cities are the users visiting our website.
With this information we will be able to improve the geolocation of our business in case we find deviations and, in this way, focus on the geographical areas where we really want to focus our commercial activity.
Bounce rate
We will be able to obtain data from bounce rates or user abandonment in certain periods. This data can help us to estimate how the user experience is going when visiting our website and, in turn, determine if it is related to possible problems with loading speed.
Hence the importance of the technical aspects of a website in order to improve the user experience and extend the time spent on our site.
On the other hand, generate content that responds to the searches made by users so that they spend more time interacting with the website of our business, increasing the chances of conversion.
Competition
Another very important variable that we will obtain in a web SEO audit is how we compare with our competition.
We will be able to obtain data on the user traffic received by our competitors, the keywords for which they rank and in which position in the SERPs they appear, as well as the volume of monthly searches for each keyword.
With this information we will be able to compare our web positioning with that of our competitors. In the same way, we will be able to obtain opportunity keywords that our competitors are positioning and that we are not positioning.
Don't leave without applying for your Free SEO Audit at the following link đ FREE SEO Audit