6 Reasons Why Your Business Needs Regular SEO Audits

Reading Time: 5 minutes

The idea that your business needs to run regular SEO (search engine optimization) audits may sound daunting. However, these audits are crucial, and here’s why.

SEO (search engine optimization) audits can be time-consuming and tedious. It also takes time before you can see substantial results, but it’s necessary if you want to achieve success.

With an SEO audit, you get direction and a clear picture of where your website stands in terms of its SEO. Auditing also helps you identify opportunities you’ve missed and activities that could boost your website rankings.

Ultimately, conducting an audit gives you a 360-degree view of your website’s performance and health and that’s why they’re important.

Not convinced yet on why you need regular SEO audits?

Check out the reasons why you need an SEO audit below. 

But first, what do we mean by an SEO audit?

SEO Audits Explained

An SEO audit helps you analyze your website to see whether or not it follows SEO best practices. It also helps you find issues that could prevent your site from ranking higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs). 

But how can you do an audit?

You can regularly run manual page audits by page checks, hire an SEO expert, or leverage tools for SEO audits that can speed up this process.

With a tool, you can examine each page on your domain and get a detailed analysis of your website’s health. It also helps point out issues that need to be fixed to improve your website’s performance.

But why is it crucial to carry out an SEO audit?

Let’s find out.

1. Keep Up with Changing Algorithms

Search engines like Bing, Google, and Yahoo regularly update their algorithms to offer better search results. And if you don’t know about these changes, you may lose out on valuable traffic.

What’s more?

Practices that effectively improved SEO a year ago may no longer apply today.

For these reasons, you need an audit to help you figure out what changes have taken place and how they affect your site so that you can act accordingly.

2. Reveal Technical Issues

Does your site have slow-loading pages, excessive H1 tags, forgotten no-index tags, or faulty robots.txt files?

With an SEO audit, you can identify all of these issues and more that are preventing your website from ranking. It can also help you fix errors that prevent search engines from crawling your site. Spotting these errors can help you rectify and fix them to improve your website’s SEO.

With an audit, you can ensure:

• A crawlable and indexed site
• A secure and safe site
• A healthy backlink profile
• Optimized metadata
• Fast-loading pages
• No duplicate content
• Pages with original, fresh, relevant, and value-rich content
• Great internal link structure
• Pages optimized for mobile

3. Identify On-Page Issues

An on-page SEO audit can help you identify issues that prevent audiences from finding your content or your site from ranking.

But which on-page SEO issues do you need to look at?

• Meta titles and descriptions: You should incorporate relevant keywords in both your meta titles and meta descriptions. Meta titles should be between 55 to 65 characters. The meta description limit is 160 characters and, if relevant, you should include a call-to-action.
• Headers: Optimize these for SEO by including relevant keywords without stuffing them.
• Content: Include keywords naturally in your content, and ensure it serves user intent. It should also be informative and offer value to readers.
• Internal links: Ensure internal links go to relevant articles and remove any redirects or 404 errors.

Identifying these issues can help you optimize your content so that Google recognizes you as an authority on the topic. It also ensures you have no duplicate or outdated content.

4. Monitor the Competition

One of the tactics that can make you a better marketer is knowing what your competitors sell and at what price.

Most importantly, it lies in knowing which strategies they use to outrank you or perform better. This is what an SEO audit can help you figure out.

With it, you can study the overall market, identify where you stand, who your competitors are, and how they rank for crucial keywords. And even if you rank high for specific phrases, there will always be someone trying to outrank you or capitalize on weaknesses they find on your website.

So what does an SEO competitor audit show?

An SEO competitive analysis helps you discover content marketing strategies your competitors use, keywords they focus on, channels they use, etc.

What’s more?

It helps you identify keyword gaps, competitors’ popular pages, strengths, weaknesses, and top-performing content.

You can then leverage this information to discover opportunities you can leverage to improve your strategy.

5. Plan for the Future

Besides helping you identify problem areas, an SEO audit can also help you plan for the future. It offers detailed insights into your website that can help you define your goals and develop tactics to improve your strategy.

How?

Well, an SEO audit can tell a lot about your visitors. Some of the things you can find out are:

• Where your visitors come from
• How long they stay on your site
• What they do once on your site
• Which content receives the most engagement
• How they navigate your website

And based on these reports, you can gain insights that can help you improve your content strategy.

For example, if the content ranging from 2500 to 3000 words gets more engagement than posts with fewer words, you need to create more long-form content.

Similarly, if most of your traffic comes from LinkedIn and not Facebook, you need to invest more effort into creating better content for that channel.

And the best part?

These insights can offer a roadmap that you can use to optimize your website design for increased traffic and conversions.

6. Save on Costs

While you can get great leads from social media, email marketing, and PPC campaigns, SEO trumps them all in the long run.

Organic content gets better with time, and if you invest in the right optimization methods, it can drive business sales.

But the best part?

It can save you money.

How so?

Let’s take the example of PPC campaigns. They require that you invest money in content creation, advertising, account setup, and agency fees, which can cost you a hefty amount. 

And although you can get great returns from it, you need to consistently spend money to get those returns. However, in the case of SEO, you only need to spend money on content creation and promotion. After that, the returns will keep coming for a long time.

Optimize Your Website’s Performance with an SEO Audit

As daunting as the prospect of conducting regular SEO audits sounds, it’s essential if you want to outshine your competitors and rank better.

It enables you to monitor the competition, find areas that need to be improved, and identify opportunities you can leverage to improve your website’s performance.

Need help with running regular SEO audits? Leave a comment, and we can share more tips to help you conduct an SEO audit and craft a successful SEO strategy. 

---