Why Are SEO Audits Important?

SEO (search engine optimization) is a vast digital marketing effort filled with hundreds of different factors that lead to ranking on search engines. You have to be thinking about all aspects of your website from page speed to navigation to content in order to discern how you can improve your organic search performance.

But how can you focus on everything when there are so many moving parts to SEO and search engines changing their algorithms on a daily basis? How do you prioritize which problems to solve first? Having a professional SEO audit can assist you in creating a roadmap for organic search success.

What is an SEO Audit?

An SEO audit is a checklist of items you run through on every page of your site to gather data for what’s working, broken, needs to be fixed, or is jeopardizing your SEO campaign at a higher level.

SEO site audits can be very simple, looking at high-level SEO issues or they can become extremely in-depth jumping into issues like website frameworks and advanced development components that may fall under the skill set of a web developer.

Screenshot taken of UpCity’s SEO performance on Ahrefs.

What’s an SEO Audit Used For?

Much like any other kind of website audit, an SEO audit identifies weaknesses and opportunities on your website and the assets attached to your site. In marketing, we use SEO audits to provide us with a full scope of understanding errors and warnings that could be hurting our website’s SEO.

Why would we want to build out new landing pages and content on a website if we know that the foundation (page speed, page architecture, etc) isn’t optimized?

Without an audit, we’d be shooting in the dark using only our gut instinct to plan for optimizations and roadmaps. With an SEO audit, we have real data to back up our strategies, informing us of how we can move the needle forward.

What Are the Main Components of an SEO Audit?

Good, professional SEO audits cover a variety of topics when it comes to understanding your website’s performance. Over the years, our list has grown massively since search engines like Google have continued to add new ranking factors to their algorithm (CWV being one of the largest updates on Google to date). Nowadays, you have to be fully aware of every aspect of your site to outrank your competition.

A typical SEO audit should contain the following sections for a performance review:

• On-page SEO: On-site optimizations that directly affect the pages you want to have ranked. This can range from content to page load time.

• Off-page SEO: Your backlink profile as it pertains to anchor text and the types of sites that link to your site.

• Technical SEO: Technical SEO deals more so with the structure of the site and how pages interact with one another. 404 broken links, orphaned pages, and the indexing of pages are a few things to look out for when conducting a technical audit.

These are the three pillars of SEO and everything we do and analyze can fit into one of these categories.

Let’s dive into some of the action items and metrics we’d analyze in an SEO audit for growth opportunities:

• Mobile vs desktop page speed and overall site speed

• Responsiveness and accessibility

• Content gaps (keywords)

• Image file size, name, alt text, formatting

• Video propagation

• Metadescriptions

• Page titles

• JavaScript file loading

• Server speed

• Heading tags

• Current running HTML version in-use

• Internal linking

• Nofollow vs dofollow link ratio

• Crawl rate

• SERP CTR

• Search rankings

• Duplicate content

• Canonical tags

• Breadcrumbs

• Orphaned pages

• 4xx pages

• 3xx pages

• SSL

• Anchor text

There are plenty of items to look at when it comes to SEO audits, our focus always goes to which items need to be prioritized amongst others.

Why Are SEO Audits Crucial for Marketing Success?

Know How You’re Performing

Without creating an SEO audit, you wouldn’t really know how your site is performing. Maybe you could see how much traffic is coming in from different acquisition points like ads or Google organic, but you wouldn’t really have any idea as to the ‘why’ and ‘how’.

With an SEO audit, you’re able to fully understand which pages are performing the best, how organic traffic is funneling to the page, what your engagement rate (bounce rate) is like, and what kinds of keywords you’re ranking for.

Set Priorities

One of the most beneficial impacts of an SEO audit is discovering which parts of the site are of the highest priority to optimize. For example, you might have thought that your content was written perfectly and includes the right type of keywords to rank, but you don’t have any H1 heading tags on any of your pages.

H1 heading tags are used at the top of the hierarchy for content on any given page. It’s what search engine crawl bots use first to understand what the page is prioritizing for keywords. Without an H1 tag, crawl bots do their best to identify and rank pages, but there’s no real focus for the page.

Identify New Opportunities

Maybe you thought you were focusing on the right keywords based on your keyword research or you historically knew what type of user interest there was in a particular topic, but that’s the thing about the internet, it’s everchanging. Over a period of time, new keywords appear, other keywords start to diminish, and the world of organic search shifts drastically.

With an SEO audit, you can do a lot more than understand the search volume for a keyword. You can find keyword gaps where your competitors rank and you don’t.

You can analyze data like click distribution to see how users are interacting with a search query. What if more users click on ads vs organic search results for a high-priority keyword? You’d probably want to shift more dollars into your advertising budget.

You can discover where your page will rank in the SERP real estate such as in a rich snippet, People also ask, Google Images or Videos, etc. This will tell you how you should structure your page and how Google will showcase your content to users.

Fix Problems

You’re investing a lot into your website and marketing strategies, so why would you want to jeopardize your investments and marketing budget with a website that’s causing more harm than good?

To give an example, what if you’re ranking for inappropriate keywords that you had no idea about before the audit?

This has happened many times where websites go unmanaged and havoc breaks loose thanks to inappropriate content on the site or inappropriate links that get the site penalized or ranking for harmful keywords.

If your site has problems concerning SEO, fixing them will help your entire marketing strategy as almost everything is interconnected with SEO in some way.

Create New Strategies

Once you’ve identified new opportunities for growth and scaling, you can create new strategies for your overall marketing plan. Knowing how your users search online and what drives their clicks will help you target them better.

Omnichannel Learnings

SEO has bled into so many other disciplines like Amazon for eCommerce or web development to increase page load speed or even social media to improve reputation management. The data you receive from each part of your marketing strategy (PPC, social media, SEO, etc) can elevate your understanding and conclusions. Information you receive from advertising can help SEO and vice versa.

For example, if your audit shows that your web pages are slow on mobile devices, this can damage your PPC campaign and possibly lead to a higher bounce rate.

Or if you know that a keyword has a high CPC in your ads campaign, you can shift your focus to SEO to start targeting this keyword which will potentially lead to a higher conversion rate.

SEO (search engine optimization) is a vast digital marketing effort filled with hundreds of different factors that lead to ranking on search engines. You have to be thinking about all aspects of your website from page speed to navigation to content in order to discern how you can improve your organic search performance.

But how can you focus on everything when there are so many moving parts to SEO and search engines changing their algorithms on a daily basis? How do you prioritize which problems to solve first? Having a professional SEO audit can assist you in creating a roadmap for organic search success.