Why is it Important to Perform an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is used to take stock of the SEO of your website and to build your SEO Action Plan.
Doing an SEO audit allows you to assess the strengths and weaknesses of your website. It aims to adjust your content strategy to improve your placement in internet search results and grab your target's attention.
The SEO audit analyzes your website and aims to study the competition, especially its success factors. This competitive intelligence allows you to define your potential visitors' expectations and adapt your content accordingly.
You will thus be able to identify your areas for improvement with precision and put concrete and effective actions to increase traffic to your website.
Before starting your SEO audit, You will have to determine the reasons which push you to take this step. Your action plan will depend entirely on the goals you are aiming for.
# 1 - Increase your SEO performance
To do this, type in Google all the queries that seem relevant to you in your industry, and study the pages of your top-ranked competitors. Examine the themes they tackle, the lexical field they use, the titles they display in their articles, etc.… Take note of all their strengths to be inspired by them. Be careful not to plagiarize their pages word for word!
Then compare your competitive analysis to your site, and identify what needs to be added, removed, or improved. Also, take care to put internal links to direct your visitors to other pages of your site that may be of interest to them. This prevents them from taking the information they need and then leaving your page directly. The more time they spend surfing your site without leaving it, the more search engines will find your site to be interesting and worthy of good placement in their results.
# 2 - Retain your visitors
Determine the topics and forms of content that appeal to your audience. If they like informative articles, you can create a news page or a blog that will keep them constantly updated. For visitors who prefer audio or video media, you will need to create or improve this type of content to integrate it on your site's certain pages.
In summary, you need to adapt the themes and formats of your site to what your target audience is frequently looking for. The more your visitors fall on your pages and find their happiness there, the more they will come back and trust your content and what you offer. Frequently returning visitors to the same site will attract the attention of search engines to your web pages.
# 3 - Turn your audience into customers
For your audience to buy, your site will have to inspire confidence and offer a top user experience! So take care of your pages' ergonomics and make sure that the navigation from page to page is intuitive. By observing your most active competitors, determine what content drives you to buy, adopt the same formats and the same ways of reaching your potential customers.
Does your website need an SEO audit?
In general, it is preferable to conduct regular SEO audits of your site because the internet is a constantly evolving source of information. Even if you have the necessary basics internally to optimize your content, you may not have the skills required to take care of your SEO. You can quickly be overtaken by the competition and find yourself too far down in search results.
If your site is losing an audience or not enough to generate the expected profit, you will have to review your SEO strategy. Before going all over the place and risking making a few missteps like over-optimization, you need to know what the brakes are to your SEO and how to remove them. An SEO audit is done to make the redesign of your web content as efficient as possible. Likewise, if your site has been online for a short time, or if you have made major changes, the SEO audit will allow you to assess the impact of your site's structure on your natural referencing.
Should I be accompanied to carry out an SEO audit?
You can choose to conduct your SEO audit internally. There are perfectly designed tools to support you in this process. For example, Semrush, Semrush can analyze the efficiency of your backlinks, your website, and your SEO positioning. However, these tools are intended for people who still have a solid knowledge of SEO and IT. Plus, the most effective tools are expensive and just give you big numbers.
By using an SEO agency, you will benefit from a clear and detailed audit. The information collected will be put at your fingertips in a vocabulary that you will understand quickly. You will also have all the advice on the actions to be implemented and their priorities.
The SEO service provider who will conduct your site's audit will also make the changes that he will advise you under the best conditions. It will allow you to avoid wasting a lot of time trying to understand what the SEO audit tools will give you as information. You will also save time on improving your content since you can entrust it directly to the person who analyzed your site.
You must see the use of an SEO service provider as an investment that will guarantee you better visibility on the internet, thus gaining productivity. You have the choice of calling on an agency specializing in digital marketing, which brings together a multitude of resources available internally, or freelance who will be a privileged interlocutor to personally support you in the management of your web content.
There are platforms like Malt to find available freelancers, where you can consult freelance professionals' CVs and contact them to give them an SEO audit assignment.
Zoom on the content of an SEO audit
The SEO audit is divided into several stages of analysis. We want to know why your site is not well referenced and what areas for improvement to consider. SEO doesn't stop at textual content. A set of technical, visual, and strategic elements must also be studied.
# 1 - Technical SEO audit
The loss of referencing of your website can be due to a permanent or occasional technical problem. It is, therefore, necessary to verify that all your pages are functioning correctly, including the links and the SSL certificates guaranteeing the safety of Internet users.
# 2 - Site architecture audit
HTML tags are there to structure your internet pages. In terms of SEO, they are used in particular to highlight titles and keywords. They are also useful for ensuring a pleasant and consistent layout of your articles. Therefore, they must be used correctly so that search engines analyze your site and understand the subject you are dealing with.
Your site must also be intuitive, navigation must be done very easily, and the Internet user must find the information they need in a maximum of 4 clicks. To do this, a menu and sub-directories are strongly recommended to easily filter the themes you are discussing.
Your internal links must also be relevant and lead your visitors to find additional information on your site's other page. The more your visitors move from page to page without leaving your site, the more your site will be considered trustworthy by Google.
Also, remember to optimize the URL addresses of each page. Ideally, they should not contain stop words (for example, the, he, have, etc.) nor numbers. The URL should include the key elements of the main title of your page.
# 3 - Auditing your Google settings
For good SEO, it is essential to use Google Analytics and check that it is correctly configured. You must have well-defined goals and funnels. You must also have set up the e-commerce configuration of Google Analytics to correctly measure your visitors' conversion rate.
# 4 - The on-page audit
This is the most obvious part, but not necessarily the easiest. On-page auditing consists of analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of your content. You will have to check your keywords, which must be consistent with your main theme. It is important that they are well placed and highlighted repeatedly.
You will improve the pages that have little visibility by restructuring them and adding additional information. This is also the time to correct, replace and/or remove obsolete content. You will also need to make sure that your textual content is unique and that there are no copies of it on the internet. Content that is repeated word for word on several web pages is not considered relevant by search engines.
Your website should also be nice and easy to read on all platforms. So check the size and shape of your fonts.
# 5 - Audit of your titles
The H1 and H2 title tags should appear on all pages of your site. Your titles should be carefully chosen. They must contain the main keyword and be unique (ensure you don't have several similar H2s on your site). The number of characters that make up your titles must be between 30 and 65 characters. Each title must be consistent with your main activity and encourage your target to read your articles or buy.
The meta description is a short teaser that appears below your main title in search results. It should be fairly short (156 characters maximum) and attractive (it should make you want to click on your web page). Each of your pages must have one. Otherwise, the first words of your text will be displayed in Google results.
# 6 - Audit of external links
Make sure you have "backlinks" to sites dealing with topics similar to yours. These links to your pages promote your website's natural referencing by making it "recommendable" in the eyes of Google. Links placed on other websites leading to yours may be broken and no longer work. It is, therefore, also necessary to ensure that all external links are functional.
# 7 - User experience audit
Google makes a point of ensuring that the results it suggests to its users are as interesting as they are pleasant to consult. The user experience should be the best possible. The navigation on your pages must be intuitive, and the visual must be modern and pleasant.
The loading of each page should not exceed 3 seconds, at the risk of losing most visitors. Therefore, you must check that your media are not too heavy and that no technical problem slows down your site's loading.
The content you offer must be exceptional; you must position yourself as an expert in your field. The information you provide must be current and complete. Do not hesitate to go into details to be perfectly understood by your audience, and use a vocabulary adapted to your main target.
# 8 - Compatibility audit on mobile platforms
Today, more than 50% of Internet users use a smartphone or tablet to do their research. Your site must therefore be searchable and fully readable on all media. Your media should also be able to open on any device. Take the opportunity to check that your internet pages contain key phrases that can be requested from "Siri" or "Ok Google."
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