THE IMPORTANCE OF THE SEO AUDIT
By Rob Ramirez
Senior SEO Account Manager
So you’ve got yourself a shiny new website and you’re waiting for the avalanche of leads to come in, or if it’s an e-commerce site, for sales to start coming through. However, you soon notice you’re not getting anywhere near the traffic, leads or sales you need to pave the way to success.
Instead, your website has been running for a while and you’re actually seeing troughs in leads, traffic, phone calls, enquires and most importantly, SALES!
Your immediate reaction is to go to Google and search for your core products or services, but you’re nowhere to be found. At this point panic may set in and you think ‘If I can’t find my own website, how can anybody else?’…Right?
Australian’s love Google and according to the team at Clicky web analytics, Google have a market share of 92% in Australia. If you’re looking for a new pair of shoes or you want to know what the internal temperature of those beef ribs you’re slow cooking in your kettle should be (it’s 94°C to 98°C by the way), chances are you are going to Google it.
So we’ve established that if your website will have any measure of success, it needs to be visible on the first page of the Google search results for as many relevant ‘keywords’ as possible (for those of you playing at home, keywords are what you type into the search box of Google to find what you’re looking for, and the results you get will depend on how detailed your searches are. Searching for ‘cheese’ will yield very different results to that of ‘gourmet cheese baskets australia’. Tasty!)
Google has a ton of ranking factors (more than 200) that its algorithm checks your site against which determine if it’s worthy of appearing at the top of results pages.
So where do you start? With a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) audit of course!
So let’s look at this objectively…
An SEO audit (of any value) is designed to help identify any key issues that may be hindering or negatively impacting your websites’ ability to rank in search engine land, limiting the visibility of the site and business to a worldwide pool of users.
A well executed SEO audit will at a minimum look at these 4 main pillars of your website:
- Authority
- Relevance
- UX
- Site Health
Authority – Relevance – UX – Site Health
Under each pillar sit various metrics and checks that need to be performed to get a sense of how the site is performing, not only for users, but also search engines.
Each pillar is also interconnected with the other so let me explain further… You may have a site filled with amazing content about the benefits of buying a house and land package over an existing home, but if there’s no one engaging with it, your efforts count for very little.
On the other hand, if that content is being linked to by leading real estate and property sites, Google recognises these as relevant quality referrals and a vote of confidence towards your site being authoritative on the topic, and are therefore more likely serve that content to users looking for information on the topic.
Taking this further, let’s say someone clicks on the link in the search results and tries to read the article, but it doesn’t appear correctly on their smartphone or takes too long to load. They are likely to hit the back button, or worse, form a negative association with your brand because of the bad experience they had.
With the help of an SEO audit, we can identify issues that may be keeping you from not only developing a strong presence on Google, but are also stopping visitors to your site becoming leads or customers.
SEO is more than just being found on Google and is more about the end-to-end online experience users have with your brand. While it may seem complicated, we’re experts at making search simple. So why not let us help you so you can get back to those beef ribs?
If you’d like to find out how we can help you recover/discover your websites’ mojo sign up for a free 30 min SEO consultation below!