Monitoring your SEO performance closely is critical to understand the health of the campaign and count the gains. However, suppose you are not happy with your SEO performance as it fails to meet your expectations against various metrics like the growth in organic traffic and lead generation. In that case, it is time to conduct a health check of the campaign by undertaking a free online SEO audit.
There is no reason to doubt the power of SEO because the fault lies in implementing it. On conducting an SEO audit, you can identify the root cause of the problem, and addressing it correctly should give better results. Although there are many aspects of SEO audit, it primarily helps to evaluate your website’s search engine friendliness by pointing out the lacunae so that you can plan for improvement.
Usually, you view the SEO campaign from one side only but conducting an SEO audit gives you the view of the campaign from the other side. You will come to know how well your website is performing from the perspective of search engines. It is like a health report of the campaign that identifies the strength and weaknesses to work on the latter to make the campaign more effective.
Based on the findings from the marketing audit, you can devise and implement your SEO strategy in a new way that boosts your inbound marketing.
Having understood the importance of SEO audits, let us now look at the takeaways from the audit.
Overall performance improvement of your website
To rank well in search results by gaining high visibility, it is crucial to have a healthy website that performs well and delivers the expected results. Conducting an SEO audit is like visiting your physician for a health checkup who checks the vital parameters and other parameters that contribute to your overall health. The audit will reveal any issues that the website might be facing, from low page speed to under-performing site maps and many more issues that had escaped your notice or did not surface at all.
Knowing the list of issues will help create an action plan for correction by prioritizing the most critical issues for your website. The time taken for correction will depend on the issue. Some issues might get rectified soon, while some others can take a longer time.
Abandon unfriendly SEO practices
SEO is constantly evolving, and you must stay abreast with the latest Google updates to tune your campaign accordingly. However, remember that change is only constant in life as well as SEO. It means that strategies and techniques that worked well some time ago might no more be effective today. However, unknowingly you might be continuing with it. The SEO audit will help identify many such redundant practices that you should discard immediately as you run the risk of earning a Google penalty. For example, Google attaches more importance to the quality of backlinks over its quantity. It is a significant shift from the earlier days when the number of backlinks prevailed over its quality and more links translated into a better ranking. Therefore, you must now gather fewer but high-quality backlinks instead of amassing numerous low-quality backlinks.
Identify the ranking keywords
Most website owners who run SEO campaigns are unaware of which keywords contribute to the site’s ranking. On conducting an SEO audit, you will gain valuable insights into the impact of your organic presence. When you know which keywords are pushing up your ranking and not contributing at all or having a negative impact, you can optimize your content strategy by knowing the right keywords to consider. Optimizing the content for the right keyword is key to drawing maximum attention to the content. Acquiring the skills to ascertain search trends should help identify the most trending keywords that can boost your content strategy.
Identify the keywords that generate traffic
Keywords are the lifeblood of SEO as it has a far-reaching impact on the overall SEO performance and not ranking alone. While you must focus on keywords that help to rank well, you must also know about those keywords that drive the right kind of traffic to your website. Look at the keywords that drive low traffic and try to identify the reason. It might be that there is some mismatch between the buyer personas and the keyword or that the keyword has low search volume. The SEO audit will give you a better understanding of the search terms and highlight the variations that searchers are using. It will widen your choice of keywords. The information gathered from the audit should help you modify your SEO strategy by creating and optimizing content to bridge the gaps.
Know your current SEO standing
SEO audits are routine activities that you must undertake at regular intervals. SEO audit is not a one-time affair because the changes you implement today are in the context of the existing Google algorithms that set the rules of the game. As Google updates are more frequent and an ongoing process, to know where your SEO campaign stands today, you have to depend on an SEO audit. It will help track progress and make ongoing changes to make the campaign more effective. As changes happen to the SEO landscape regularly, you must be aware of the best practices and align them with the campaign to stay ahead of the curve and maintain the momentum of the campaign.
Peep into the world of your competitors
While it is good to work out your ways for improving the SEO campaign, there is no harm to take out a leaf from your competitor’s book and implement it with suitable changes to match your business goals. Look at what your competitors are doing, which keywords are most rewarding for them, and try to follow in their footsteps as it has a proven track record and will make your task easy.
Besides running an SEO audit for your campaign, you can do the same for some of your competitors to analyze the competition and extract the information you can incorporate into your SEO strategy.
