Why you Need an SEO website audit
You’ve built a business website and implemented an SEO strategy. You may think that’s the end of the process. The truth is, even if you’ve done everything by the book, you still need to do a website audit.
It’s easy to believe that what you’re doing is working. Your insights and analytical data may show people are visiting your site. However, it won’t show if your SEO and web design are moving visitors through the site the way you want.
Is your ultimate goal to move users through a sales funnel? Or maybe you want them to register for a conference. Whatever the end goal is, you want to test what you’re doing to ensure the best user experience.
SEO is in constant motion and to get the most out of it, you need to know what’s working and what’s not. Continue reading to learn why it’s important to conduct regular SEO website audits.
What Is a Website Audit?
Businesses invest in national SEO services to boost the visibility of their websites and to increase brand awareness. As with any business expenditure, you want to measure your return on investment.
Too often, businesses fall into the trap of believing as long as they’re making sales, their processes are working. In fact, visitors to your website could be having a less than positive experience in completing their transactions.
A website audit will test several variables on the site to ensure things are working as they should. Here are a few things every business needs to audit.
User Engagement
With an SEO website audit, every opportunity for engagement on the site is tested. Your analytics may show that users engage with a process but abandon the site quickly.
A good example is pop-up windows that encourage site visitors to share their contact information. A spike in site exits could mean visitors were unable to close the window and chose to close the webpage. It could also be a sign that the teaser was not clear or did not entice the user.
Webpages with clunky text and images might distract site visitors. Too many ads or videos on auto-play are other reasons why user engagement drops.
Mobile Responsiveness
Having a website that’s both mobile-friendly and mobile-responsive is important. In our technology-driven society, people are increasingly accessing the internet with their smartphones and tablets.
Responsive web design creates a better experience on devices, regardless of what size screen it’s being viewed on. Everything you see on a laptop resizes to the smaller screen of a phone.
The SEO techniques that work on a desktop or laptop remain in effect on the mobile device. Part of your website audit is to test the site on all types of devices with varying screen sizes and modes.
Website Functionality
A standard audit will test the functionality of the website. Are pages loading quickly and completely? When someone makes a purchase, is the process easy to use?
Businesses that do not have website audits could be missing out on revenue because of poor performing webpages. Put yourself in the position of a potential buyer to see if the process is easy and if you feel your information is secure.
In addition, audit any auto-generated receipts or notifications customers receive at the completion of the transaction.
Sales Funnel
Small business SEO services are used to boost the sales funnel on eCommerce websites. With an SEO website audit, all sales generation techniques used are tested for performance.
It doesn’t matter if the sales funnel begins on the home page of the website or various social media channels.
The user needs to be able to navigate from one point to another. If the strategy has several variables to get the user through the cycle, each one will get tested.
Seasonal or Temporary Content
Affordable SEO services often come with an option to create content for the website. At times, the content may include information geared towards an upcoming holiday. Other times, it’s the registration for an event or maybe a sales promotion.
The website audit will catch seasonal or outdated information. Having a Thanksgiving promotion pop up a week before Christmas isn’t a good look. Worse is having a registration page encouraging visitors to sign up for a conference that took place two years ago.
A regular audit of content will eliminate these mishaps.
Social Media Integration
Social media is huge when it comes to local SEO. It’s also a large part of building brand awareness.
Your social media strategy is dependent on the content produced on the website. A business website relies on its social media pages as a place to showcase its content.
Part of the website audit is testing to ensure branded URLs used on your social media channels include the image and brief description from the webpage. It’s also important to remove social media posts that include deleted content from the website.
If the content has been updated and the URL changed, edit the social media post with the new link.
Link Strategy
Link building is used a lot in SEO. Creating strong SEO-driven URLs for your site and backlinking are two strategies. The SEO audit will measure the performance of both.
Analytic data will track how often people visited their website via a specific URL. This data will also show whether the page was accessed from a search engine or a social post.
For backlinking, it’s critical to test links to ensure they’re working and going to an active website. You also want to verify which websites are linking to your content.
Use Your Results to Grow
Whether your website audit results are good or not so good, take the information and use it to improve your digital marketing strategy. Also, use the information as a guide to ensure you’re using the most current and effective techniques.
Are you in need of affordable SEO services? If the answer is yes, click here to schedule a free consultation.
Efrain Sanchez
Efrain Is the founder and current CEO of Growth Logiq, he brings years of experience working with almost every business vertical imaginable with everything between from small bootstrapped startups to large Fortune 100 companies in both sales and managerial SEO/SEM roles. Growth Logiq specializes in highly competitive markets including Cannabis SEO , Medical, and D2C Consumer products. He previously worked for a large Fortune 500 where he helped thousands of businesses secure their online presence. Efrain lives in Phoenix AZ with his kitten. You can find him on Linkedin