Is your website’s SEO strategy up to date and following the latest best practices? It’s okay if your answer is, “no clue.”
Google and other search engines don’t make it easy. Their algorithms are notorious for changing on a dime and, as a result, SEO best practices and web standards evolve just as quickly.
For business owners and marketers looking for their websites to rank, convert, and drive sales (in other words, every owner and marketer), regular site updates and ongoing optimization are the name of the SEO game.
But what parts of your site should you update? That question can only be answered after performing a thorough SEO audit.
The Benefits of an SEO Audit
SEO audits are like the first step to giving your website a thorough spring cleaning.
During the audit process, you’ll dive into every page, image, meta data, and line of code to make sure the site is properly optimized to the latest SEO standards and following best practices.
At a minimum, you’re likely to identify tweaks you can make to drive page rank and, therefore, more organic traffic to your website.
In other cases, you may discover link breaks, pages in need of content updates, incomplete meta data, or even file issues causing slow page load speeds – all of which will decrease web performance and make it harder for your site to serve as a stellar sales tool.
Three Types of SEO Audits to Consider
At WTM, we perform three types of SEO audits — Technical, Page Performance, and Pre/Post Site Launch.
Each serves a different purpose. Together, they ensure your website operates like a well-oiled machine and delivers the results your business needs.
Technical SEO Audit
A technical SEO audit looks for issues that prevent search engines from properly indexing your web pages. This includes broken links, duplicate content, and domain security and encryption just to name a few.
Page Performance SEO Audit
A page performance SEO audit looks at your website’s page load speed. Google won’t hesitate to ding a website with slow page loads, sending your rankings tumbling. And for good reason. A slow site negatively impacts the user’s experience which can decrease your conversion rates and lead to lost revenue.
Pre/Post Launch Audit
The purpose of pre- and post-launch SEO audits is to catch potential pitfalls before they happen. A pre-launch audit helps ensure you don’t lose organic search rankings and don’t jeopardize traffic or general site performance when you go to launch. Then, once the site is live, a post-launch audit makes sure your site is running smoothly with key elements like its site map and crawl accessibility in place.
Once you’ve completed the audit process and identified areas for site improvement, implementing those recommendations can give your website a big boost over time.
Spring Clean Your Site’s SEO Strategy
SEO audits must be thorough to be meaningful. A full technical and page performance audit includes evaluating the over 150 factors responsible for where your pages sit in the SERPs. And if you’ve just launched or relaunched your site, there are 70 more.
Our team is here to help you conduct a thorough SEO audit so you know exactly what updates to make and issues to tackle to keep your site performing for your business.
It’s a great time to spring clean of your website’s SEO strategy. Contact us and let’s get started.