7 Reasons You Need an SEO Audit

Intro

One of the most common mistakes in the online marketing world is that many new marketers assume because they're a small business, they don't need an SEO audit.

The truth is that smaller businesses are much more at risk of not succeeding if they lack understanding and awareness when it comes to the importance of SEO - as well as how much easier it can be for larger companies with dedicated marketing budgets to outrank them on Google.

You might be surprised by the number of companies that don't do regular SEO audits these days.

After all, why go through the trouble when you're already ranking well, right?

Wrong.

The benefits of doing an SEO audit are many and varied:

• You will learn what your site needs in order to rank better
• You will find gaps in your site's position in comparison to your competitors that need to be addressed immediately, and most importantly,
• You will avoid making costly mistakes that can lead to loss of budget, traffic and poor ROI from your efforts.

So, this article will outline 7 reasons why you should have an SEO audit performed.

Let’s dive in.

7 Reasons You Need a Technical SEO Audit

1. Detecting Indexability Issues

When we look at the big picture, we can say that indexability equals ranking potential.

Without Google indexing your page or posts, forget about ranking!

What it means is that in order for your content to be crawled and indexed by Google, there are some technical factors that must be adhered to.

You could have the best, most relevant content in the world, but if Google can't access and index, then you won't get any traction at all.

So the first thing you should do if your site isn't ranking as well as you'd like is to find out if there are any indexability issues with your web pages.

When you do a technical audit, you'll be able to pinpoint exactly which pages aren’t indexable and how to fix them.

For instance, one or many of your site's internal pages could be blocked by the robots.txt file and that could prevent Google from indexing them.

As a result, you wait and wait for them to show up in the SERPs, your competitors are getting the traffic and you’re leaving money on the table.

2. Enhancing Your Site’s Overall Performance

If there is anything that you should be focusing on in order to improve your site's performance, then it is a top-notch user experience (UX).

The more engaging your site is, the better users will respond to it – and that means more traffic and potential conversions. We all want this, right?

This is because providing a stellar user experience has a two-fold effect.

Not only will users be more likely to consume more of your content, stay longer and even come back but Google will also reward you for it.

It does so by ranking you higher in the search engine results pages.

Why? Because Google is all about its users and providing them with the best possible experience.

So, when your site offers an excellent UX, it sends some very good signals to the algorithm on your behalf.

A technical SEO audit can help you with this.

Accurately checking for the existing issues on your site is a comprehensive way to determine the extent of its current problems and what needs to be improved.

Only through an SEO audit that you’ll be able to pinpoint just what bugs or glitches may be altering your overall performance – so you can immediately fix them.

No more guesswork here, cause they are all here in front of you! And this is just one example.

Obviously, you'll find that there are many more technical SEO issues on your site than you think.

Assaf Cohen, who runs the gaming company Solitaire Bliss, found many opportunities to improve during his technical audit. “We found numerous pages without title tags and meta descriptions when we reviewed all the pages on our site. When we added this, we found our overall traffic started to improve.”

Maybe when you were planning how to rank better on Google, you were only looking at the big picture and not giving any attention at all to the back-end systems of your website.

When you do a technical SEO audit, you'll get a more detailed and accurate picture of your site's performance.

This will help with identifying the root cause of what is causing your site not to shine on Google.

3. Uncovering Duplicate Content

One thing Google hates is content or keyword cannibalization.

This is when various pages of the same website target the same keyword(s), thus competing against each other.

What will happen is that Google, as smart as it is, will get confused not knowing which one to rank, and will decide not to rank any of them.

Well, many business owners don't even realize that this is happening on their website.

While Google does not penalize websites that produce a lot of duplicate content, it sure will affect your SEO efforts.

Sometimes it's deliberate and happens in order to make the site look bigger and more credible - but often times it's just an oversight.

A technical SEO audit will lead to uncovering the exact duplication issues on your site.

4. Discovering Internal Linking Opportunities

Internal linking is a beneficial factor for any website's ranking potential – but only if done correctly.

New content marketers often focus more on acquiring backlinks and overlook this on-page SEO factor which is internal linking.

Ideally, you need to be giving equal importance to both.

Linking internally is as crucial as the external links pointing to your pages.

A well-structured internal linking strategy can have a big impact on your rankings - and that's a fact!

It is mostly used as a user experience strategy where it makes the user feel like they are further down the rabbit hole, almost like they've discovered something new!

So they stay longer and return often.

However, internal linking is a great asset that you can control and therefore use to improve your SEO results.

So it's important to do quality internal linking in order to boost keyword rankings and bring in more traffic.

Only through a technical SEO audit that you'll be able to discover those internal linking opportunities.

Hone in on this simple yet effective strategy for a big boost!

5. Avoiding Javascript and CSS Conflicts

Oftentimes, your site's Javascript or CSS code can conflict with other elements on the site, affecting how well your pages and posts load.

This is a big issue that can create a lot of problems for your site ahead, especially if you are focused on speed - which you should.

Google has a preference for fast-loading sites and if your page takes too long to load this will definitely affect (negatively) your SEO efforts.

So if you want to make sure that the search engine bot can crawl every bit and byte of your website, then yours must be free from any speed issues.

This is one of the reasons why you should make the effort to do regular technical SEO audits, so you can determine if there are any conflicts within your site’s coding structure, and get instructions on how to fix them for better performance.

6. Better Adapting to Algorithm Changes

Google's algorithm is constantly changing. Many SEO experts tend to believe that Google’s algorithm goes through 500-600 changes every year.

This is enough to say that performing regular SEO audits is more than essential if we really want to stay in line with Google and get its favor!

As a matter of fact, the algorithm updates force us to stay up-to-date with every new change so that we are also more aware of how these changes affect our SEO efforts.

And so that we can exploit these algorithm changes and use them to our advantage.

A technical SEO audit will help you see the major algorithm changes and adapt your website accordingly.

You see, Google keeps an eye out on the types of websites they rank, and they only want to rank those sites that can provide real value to their users.

These are some of the ways that companies can make the most use of their ranking data and identify where improvements can be made to improve their search engine results.

This is the reason why it's best to stay on top of your game by checking and rechecking your SEO performance regularly.

Make sure that you are adapting to these algorithm changes so as not to lose traffic and money.

Better be safe than sorry!

7. Analyzing Your Competitors

One of the crucial benefits of performing an SEO audit is getting to know and gauge the competition in the market.

Once you do a competitive analysis, you will be able to know the strengths and weaknesses of your website and how they compare to those of the other websites that are ranking well on Google.

This kind of audit will open your eyes to what you could be doing better on your site, and it will also help you become more aware of your site's standing compared to your competitors' sites.

There is no better way to learn to get ahead of the competition than by analyzing their points of strength and weakness and learning from them!

This will also help you to go after your competitors' traffic by:

• Creating better content
• Improving your on-page SEO
• Improving your content promotion
• Strengthening your backlink outreach process

…and so much more!

Closing Thoughts

A technical SEO audit will give you an overview of how your website performs in the search engines and provide you with the insights and directions you need to take in order to improve online marketing and SEO efforts.

Identifying and solving the major SEO issues will ensure that your site is always at its optimal performance level.

Mind you, this is not something you should be doing once and then forgetting about.

You should make it a regular activity to ensure that your website is always in tip-top shape for higher rankings, more leads and sales.

Feel free to try Ranktracker's web audit tool to get an in-depth health check of your site.