The Advantages of Conducting an SEO Audit

When we think of the word audit, some of us may be thinking of a time consuming process, or a boring procedure of regulation which needs to be carried out. However, spending just twenty minutes or less on conducting your own SEO audit for your website can be hugely beneficial. Why you ask? Because an SEO audit will improve the ranking factors which will help your site climb up the SERPs.

Conducting a short search can help you to discover some issues that are holding your site back from reaching a larger audience and having higher visibility in search engines such as Google. This is something that you should ultimately be aiming for, so what are the suggested techniques?

A good place to start is your website Homepage. This is usually the first port of call for people when they are looking at what a website has to offer. Scroll through your site and have a general look at the site and overall feel. Is it an engaging site that you would trust and is it visually appealing? Recommendation can also be a powerful way of promotion these days, so ask yourself if you would tell your friends and family about the website.

The user experience on site is important, especially since the introduction of Google Panda in April 2011, which focuses on quality control within Google and punishing sites with duplicate content. The user interaction can be an important indication for SEO rankings so make sure your site fits the bill in all of these areas when visiting the Homepage.

Having good quality content, reliable and decent links to other pages, as well as removing duplicate content and checking all URLs are working will also make your site more SEO friendly. Therefore have a quick check through the site pages and ensure these techniques are carried out.

Next up, it’s important to consider whether each page has decent content to the point where you think it would be worthwhile to link to that page form other sources. If not, then go back and consider changing the content, making it unique and engaging. If you do believe that the content is relevant then try to feature a category or subcategory page with the most important information placed in the subcategory sections. This will give more meaning for having these pages and also will allow search engines to take note of them when crawling for relevance on any given search.

Again on the point of layout, make sure there aren’t any big blocks of text and that they are displayed in an easy to read format. Content close together in small text will put users off and divert their attention elsewhere.  Make sure links are worthy and don’t link to content that is not relevant as this won’t do anything to help with the optimisation of your website.

There are also a few more detailed checks to make and getting in the habit of doing these on a regular basis will prove beneficial. To start with make sure that your title tags are keyword specific and there is no duplication on other pages, make your Meta descriptions detailed and include keywords were possible and also include Alt tags for images.

Now that you have read how to carry out your own SEO audit, make sure you take time out of your busy schedule to conduct one for your own website. Implementing these techniques and keeping your website up-to-date will be advantageous for optimisation purposes.