SEO strategy creation: If you run a business, you can’t compete unless you have a website that works for you.
A good website attracts motivated visitors who will likely buy your product or service. To achieve this, it must rank well in search engines. Therefore, you should always look for ways to improve your digital marketing efforts, including website content, design, social media, email marketing, etc.
An SEO audit helps ensure that all your SEO strategy creation works together towards that goal. Anyone who markets online can benefit immensely from understanding how to conduct an SEO audit and read the results.
What is an SEO audit?
You run an SEO audit to analyse how well your online presence performs and whether you follow best practices. As part of a comprehensive SEO strategy creation, these best practices can help you achieve the measurable results you are looking for. What is an SEO audit?
Much like a financial audit, it is used to identify any structural issues with your search engine performance. Using that information, you can make positive changes that get your website to the top of the rankings.
These issues include website structural issues, SEO content issues, gaps in your content, technical issues, user experiences problems, etc. (seo strategy creation)
How to perform an SEO audit
When a marketing team or an agency conducts an audit, they usually follow an SEO audit checklist to make sure that everything is covered. Generally, an audit should follow a thorough step-by-step process.
1. Crawl your website
This is the most important step for an SEO audit. Crawling your website can help you identify several issues. There are many SEO audit tools available that you can use to crawl your website and save time. You just need to enter the URL of your website and let the tool do the rest. It will run through your site like Google or other search engines do and assess your site in the same way.
As soon as it’s complete, it will give you a breakdown of several components of your website that will help you identify problems. These problems could include missing links, inadequate word counts for content, duplication in content, too many redirects, etc. Once you get this data, you can make changes to your website to fix those issues. (seo strategy creation)
2. SEO strategy creation: Check Google for indexing issues
You can also search your website using your preferred keywords. Count the number of pages that rank for those search results and evaluate where they appear. Are they at or near the top? This will give you an idea of your website performance.
This way, you can also check if your site is indexing properly. By searching for your website’s primary URL, you can see how many of your pages are being indexed by search engines. If you don’t see one of your pages, you can enter that specific URL to see if it appears.
If a page isn’t being indexed, there could be a problem with the meta robots tag. This tag tells search engines how to treat the page’s content when indexing it. Your page will not be indexed if it’s broken or used incorrectly. (seo strategy creation)
3. Make sure you’re ranking on page 1 for your business
The most important thing in SEO strategy creation is that nothing you do is in a vacuum. Yes, it’s crucial to improve your website and other digital marketing efforts but remember that your competitors are doing the same thing too. Search engine rankings make a comparison of how different websites perform within a given industry. You can’t guarantee that you’ll rank first for all your keywords, but by following best practises, you can maximise your chances. (seo strategy creation)
4. Do on-page SEO checks
An on-page SEO audit will ensure all the elements you need to optimise your website are in place and performing well. This involves analysing all the source code as well as all the content of your page. If your site is optimised properly, search engines will have the information they need to index it accurately. The content will be relevant to what users are looking for, making them want to interact with it, and it will help search engines identify your page as authoritative.
This means that you have strategically placed high-value keywords in your high-quality content in your posts and pages. (seo strategy creation)
5. Look for duplicate content on your website
Duplicate content can damage your SEO strategy creation. You will be penalised if search engines find identical content on your site. Ensuring your content is original is an important part of creating relevant and trustworthy content. Businesses may not even realise they have duplicate content, so it’s critical to check your site thoroughly. Rewrite or delete anything that could be considered a duplicate.
6. Check your site and page speed
It may surprise you how quickly users will leave a page that doesn’t load quickly enough. You may think you have a minute or even thirty seconds, but you don’t. In fact, in as little as two to three seconds, a user will decide that waiting for your page to load isn’t worth it. You will surely lose visitors if your website takes too long to load.
Assess all the elements that affect page load speed. This means that your images and videos should be smaller, and your website should be hosted on a server that is fast enough for your needs.
7. SEO strategy creation: Perform a backlink audit
A backlink audit analyses the links that point to your site. Basically, you are putting their authority and credibility to the test. If search engine algorithms do not respect the sites that link to you, your site will also suffer.
You want the pages that point to you to rank well on their own and have high domain authority because backlinks from sites that don’t have content relevant to yours or are no longer updated regularly are most likely bringing your site down. The backlinks with exact or nearly identical anchor tags to yours are the best.
8. Analyse your organic search traffic
Organic search traffic is any traffic to your site that doesn’t come from paid ads. These are users who visit through search engines. In theory, organic traffic will convert better than paid traffic since those visitors are more motivated to consume your content. They would have looked for something related to what you offer on your website. You can use several web tools to track your organic traffic and understand your SEO strategy creation efforts.
9. Find and fix broken links
The user experience is important in SEO. People will quickly click away if anything on your site doesn’t provide an easy and engaging experience. Broken links frustrate visitors and can make your page look unprofessional and neglected.
A broken link is any link that leads to an error like 404. Therefore, check all the links on your website, both internal and external, to ensure that they are leading to the right content and that it exists.
10. SEO strategy creation: Look for content gaps and opportunities
An SEO audit is all about finding gaps and opportunities. After your audit is complete, you will be able to identify the flaws in your SEO strategy creation. It could be about inadequate page speeds, or you’re not using certain keywords, etc.
The best part about SEO audit is that every gap or issue you find will only lead to better results. Every problem and flaw is an opportunity to improve. You just need to conduct an SEO audit and properly analyse the results in order to find success for your website.
Final Words
Things change quickly in the online world, and your SEO strategy must be up to date if you want to keep up with your competitors. An SEO audit is a perfect way to assess your website’s ranking and determine what you need to do to get it to page one.
