Yes, the word audit doesn't sound so good, but you need to know that when it comes to a good SEO strategy, you need an audit for your website. By everyone's understanding, you need an SEO audit when you have a website that does not bring any profit even though you have had it for a long time.

What is a Website SEO Audit?

SEO sounds like something tough to understand, and it is, indeed, if you do not know this field. However, SEO is a complex process that specialists use to improve a website and increase the number of visitors and customers. A website SEO audit means researching and examining your website with specific tools that will allow you to find out where problems are. After this audit, you will have a report with all the issues you must fix for your website to gain more visibility and bring gains.

What Should an SEO Audit Include?

A thorough audit needs planning to make sure you don't miss anything. Before diagnosing site problems, you need to know what you're dealing with. Therefore, an essential step is to scan the entire website. Certain stages need to be done before starting an audit. When you work with an SEO agency, you must let them know everything about your business. It would be best if you detailed to them what your business is and what you expect from it after the entire SEO process. The better they understand your business, the better it will be for them to develop viable solutions.

Keyword Analysis as Part of the SEO Strategy

Your monthly traffic is influenced by the quality of the keywords you use. Therefore, it is essential to analyze them because you need a lot of traffic if you want your website to increase your gains. A good SEO strategy means proper optimization related to the correct positioning of specific keywords that will help establish the product's identity for your customers. Good positioning of your products/services is determined by many elements closely related to your customers' and direct competitors' needs.

Analysis and Study of the Competition

Studying the competition is not an awkward thing to do because everyone does it. In any business, you need to check your competition if you want to be better. Usually, when market research is done, it considers a maximum of 5 competitors whose business is analyzed in detail. That is necessary for experts to devise a different strategy that will differentiate you from them, so clients choose you despite them. By studying competitors, you can understand what you need to improve at your company, and with all the information gathered, you can come up with new ideas to implement.

Technical Analysis of Your Website

This part of the website SEO audit is the most complicated and requires you the most because it includes numerous technical terms that are primarily used in an audit. The technical analysis of your entire website is fundamental because you will find all the technical errors you need to correct for proper indexing by search engines. That is what an SEO audit does: see all the mistakes and devise a strategy to solve them. It can be a couple of issues or more; no matter their number, there is much to work on in an audit.

While many errors aren't an issue for SEO agencies, when it comes to your visitors, that is not the case. How often didn't you want to buy something from your favorite website, and that 404 error page encountered you? It is disturbing. And you need to keep all your visitors happy if you want many customers. Visitors hate being redirected to other pages; they don't like when they find duplicate content or your website doesn't load fast enough. That is why you need to optimize your website.

A well-developed SEO strategy means that your website will have a fast loading speed. Potential customers will disappear if they wait too long for your pages to load. You know this is true because you were more than sure at least once in that situation. Not all users have fast internet speeds; heavier sites usually take longer to load. In the audit process, the SEO experts evaluate and analyze the site's loading speed. If there is any problem, they come with all sorts of recommendations. For example, eliminating technical impediments for your website to work properly.

Analysis of Your Website's Links

Google updates its algorithm frequently, but not all these changes have affected the search results. When Google decides which website deserves to be ranked higher, it considers hundreds of factors. One of the factors and an important one is related to the quality of a website's links. Google determines if your website will be at the top of the searches, which only has to do with link quality. In a website SEO audit, the link analysis is an essential issue because relevance and quality, not the number of links, are the keywords for SEO.

Hiring an SEO agency is one of the best decisions you can make for your website, but when you have done that, you need to know that once an SEO strategy is implemented, you must keep monitoring and measuring its results. For example, once you identify your website's technical problems, you must monitor what happens to ensure everything works properly. In addition, you need to know that the links you use make your site strong and increase its authority because there are links that can affect your website's image and trust. And you don't want that to happen. So keep this issue in mind. 

In an SEO audit, you will get a full report about how your website stands regarding its link profile. That report will include all the discovered links, the external and internal ones. You will have valuable information about your website's online presence. If any problems need attention, the SEO team will offer you a strategy for acquiring or obtaining links. Knowing the number of links to a site and their quality is essential because this is strongly connected with your website's positioning in Google results. The higher you are in search engines, the more increases the number of potential customers.

Analysis of Off-Site Factors

There are so many essential factors that you need to analyze when you do a website SEO audit: keywords, backlinks, your website's presence on Google, and much more matter. Today, if you want your business to succeed in the online environment, you need it to be present in the Google My Business catalog. If you are there, you will be one click away from those clients that need your type of products or services. So keep that in mind if you want to do the audit yourself. On the other hand, if you hire an agency, don't worry; they know that a website's presence in Google My Business is vital these days.

Many people ask themselves how hard it is to make an audit. Is it so complicated that you need to call in a professional, or might you be able to do it yourself? SEO is a complex problem, but at the same time, the basic principles that allow you to do a first analysis of the sites can be done by yourself. However, for an in-depth analysis, it is necessary to call an SEO specialist, which has its price. Today, thanks to so many tools available on the Internet, even for free, you can succeed in improving your site, at least in the most accessible critical problems to solve.

Online Reviews from Your Customers

In the audit report, you will have a section highlighting the importance of online reviews and what SEO strategy to implement if reviews are missing. To be able to get reviews from your customer, it is necessary that before the business, you have to be validated by Google. After that, your website can receive online reviews and ratings from your clients, satisfied or not. If your business does not have reviews, at the end of the audit in the report, there will be indications about the steps you need to do to receive reviews.

These are just some of the points covered in the website SEO audit. The audit also includes many other elements to help a website function properly. An audit requires time and skills because the report must be comprehensive and provide concrete recommendations to help your website get ahead of the competition. If you want a quick website evaluation, you can do a free web analysis, but you should ask for an expert audit for the complex version.