SEO Audit

4 Reasons To Do An SEO Audit

Why should you do an SEO audit of your website? How about these:

  • Troubleshoot ranking issues
  • Figure out why traffic to pages is declining
  • Document requirements for a website redesign
  • Determine SEO priority action plan

Help! My Site Is Dropping In Rankings!

You should do an SEO audit to uncover technical issues that may be blocking the search engine crawlers from indexing and ranking your content. Some of these technical issues include:

  • A robots.txt file that's not needed for certain pages/parts of your website - make sure that if a robots.txt file exists, it's not overly aggressive on what it's blocking. Important pages, posts, images and videos that promote your products and services should not be blocked.
  • 404 errors - if there a lot of 404 pages that are still being crawled, this can hurt your rankings. Do a thorough house cleaning and get rid of them!
  • Broken links coming into/within your site - do an in-depth link analysis and make sure there are no broken links coming into site, or within your internal linking structure.

SEO AuditI'm Steadily Losing Website Traffic Every Month!

In addition to any technical issues, you may also consider doing a content audit to see which pages are no longer attracting visitors. Is it old, outdated content? Is the content too "thin," or too short? Target priority pages for re-writing, and be sure you have some keyword phrases that will draw traffic to those pages.

  • Slow loading pages - speed is critical nowadays to keep visitors on your site. Be sure your web development team has designed your site to load fast for laptops and all portable/mobile devices, including tablets.
  • Poor user experience - if your site is hard to navigate and information is hidden, visitors are not going to put up with it. Look at your site's navigation and information journeys through their eyes, and see if you can make it better for them.

It's Time For A New Website Look and Feel

Audit the site for technical issues that can be fixed during the re-design, and plan your content marketing strategy accordingly. Be sure to have a mobile-friendly design as well, and again, ensure the navigation is easy to do, and your most important information can be found ideally within one click.

It's Time To (Finally!) Create An SEO Priority Action Plan

So, you've never planned out your SEO? An audit can help you prioritize what needs to be done first. Typically, you'll do keyword research, decide if you want to polish up existing content and/or develop a calendar to publish new, updated content as well.

If you uncover multiple technical issues and get those fixed, you should see improvement fairly soon. Once you regularly published optimized content and do social media distribution as well, you should see your traffic to individual pages and posts increase.

If you'd like to know more about how to do search engine optimization in depth, let Invenio SEO teach you the basics. At the end of one day, you'll be ready to do all the on-page optimization needed to get better rankings and more traffic to your site. Alternatively, you can learn SEO basics online.

Until next time, keep it safely between the ditches,

All the best to you,

Nancy McDonald

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Written by

Nancy McDonald owns and operates Invenio SEO, an SEO training and consulting business in the Washington DC area. She trains you on SEO in 1, 2 or 3 days. When not teaching or doing SEO consulting, Nancy can be found sailing on the Chesapeake Bay or flying a Cessna 172 to earn her private pilot's license.

View all posts by:

Related Posts

Comments are closed.