An SEO audit can be a roadmap to success. But only if it is used correctly. You could easily fall victim to analysis paralysis where you spend more time figuring out the problems and not enough time addressing them. Or you could make SEO audits so routine that the results that they lose all meaning.
The best SEO audits are unique to your company and offer actionable insight. This means that every single SEO audit will feed back into your marketing strategy and help you to refine your efforts.
SEO audits can cover many different things, including website design, content marketing, links to your website and how your website performs in search results. This is why it helps to get multiple departments involved in deciding what you need in your audit, and implementing the suggested changes.
Another benefit of regular SEO audits is that you will have a roadmap of website changes. You’ll be able to understand when and why changes happened, so if something goes wrong, you can easily change course.
If you’re interested in making SEO audits a regular part of your marketing activities, we’ve put together this simple guide to help make the process easier.
What should an SEO audit include?
As we mentioned above, your SEO should be unique to your website and business goals. If you don’t have a content marketing strategy in place, regularly auditing the same blog content isn’t going to do much good. Think about what you are currently doing and what you would like to be doing and focus on these areas. Your SEO audit could include:
- An overview of the technical health of your website. This should include page speed, indexation issues, redirects, status codes and more.
- A closer look at your website content. Does the content structure make sense? Are you linking internally? Are your meta titles and descriptions working?
- A look at off-page activity.
How often should I do an SEO audit?
Large websites with lots of content and frequent changes will benefit from more frequent SEO audits. This could be anywhere between every month and every 3 months. For smaller websites, and those that aren’t updated very often, you might only do an SEO audit every 6 months or even every year.
If you have made any major changes to your website – such as implementing an SSL certification – you might want to conduct an audit to make sure everything is working correctly.
If you have a brand new website, there’s little point in conducting an audit. It can be helpful to check that the technical side is set up correctly, but beyond this, you probably won’t have enough data to make a full website audit worthwhile.
Who is best placed to do the audit?
SEO audits often fall under the remit of digital marketing, but developers may want to get involved with the process. In an ideal world, the task will be shared between multiple teams. The outcome of the audit should also be shared with relevant departments.
Your marketing team should pay attention to the content side of things to ensure that core messages are consistent at all stages in the journey. Development will want to ensure that the website is performing well from a technical perspective. Key decision makers may wish to get involved to understand how the website feeds into the wider strategy.
Looking for support with your SEO strategy? We’ve got you covered. Try our FREE digital marketing audit tool to put you on the right track.