Optimizing Your Website: Understanding SEO Audits

You have carefully prepared a content strategy, created valuable downloadable content, reviewed the quality of the writing, and checked the user experience, yet organic traffic could be higher. However, despite your efforts, you may need to see the organic traffic you hoped for.

In this situation, it is essential to conduct an SEO audit to identify any issues with your website or content that may be impacting your search engine visibility.

Why is an SEO audit an important process?

Well, it can provide many benefits, such as identifying technical issues, analyzing your content quality and relevance, and determining opportunities to improve your search engine rankings. An SEO audit is important to optimize your website and maximize its potential.

Understanding the benefits of an SEO audit and why it is important can help you optimize your website and drive more traffic to your content, but it is crucial to understand the following:

What is an SEO Audit?

This is a comprehensive review of the website structure, its pages, and the various components of each page.

You have to conduct an investigation like a detective to know every corner of your website and find any problem affecting the search engine (there are at least 200 Google ranking signals), whether it be crawling or indexing issues.

The goal is to ensure that Google can crawl and navigate your page without problems.

Why an SEO audit is important

Regular audits are essential for monitoring SEO issues before they generate penalties from Google. This will help ensure your page is well-positioned on the result pages, as users are likely to click on one of the top 10 suggestions. To conduct a successful audit, it’s essential to understand how and what Google evaluates. By integrating these strategies, you can say goodbye to poor organic traffic and improve your overall SEO performance.

Google search results for Condor Agency

How Google works?

Google Search operates in three stages, but not all web pages can successfully pass through each one:

  • Crawling: Using automated programs known as crawlers, Google downloads text, images, and videos from web pages it has discovered on the internet.
  • Indexing: Google analyzes the content on the page, including text, images, and video files, and stores this information in a vast database called the Google index.
  • Serving search results: When a user searches on Google, the search engine returns relevant information based on the user’s query, using the data stored in the Google index.

You can review the detailed information on How Google Search works.

If you do this well, you will be able to understand the benefits of SEO audit:

What are the benefits of SEO Audits?

Improves site performance

If you want Google to value you positively, your website must be healthy. This is because Google always tries to offer the best possible experience to the user. Therefore, to achieve better performance, the content of your website must meet Google’s standards, which involves considering factors such as meaning, relevance, quality, usability, and context.

Another variable that improves is the loading time. Google reports that as the page load time increases from 1 second to 3 seconds, the likelihood of a visitor leaving a page without engaging rises by 32%. Furthermore, as the page load time extends from 1 second to 5 seconds, the probability of a visitor leaving a page without interacting increases to 90%.

The easier we make it for Google to evaluate the content, the more likely you are to appear positioned in search engines.

However, not everything is sunshine and rainbows. The truth is, no matter how good your content is, if Google can’t crawl it quickly, it will discard it.

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Improves user experience

A happy user spends more time exploring your website. Unbounce reveals that about 70% of consumers consider page speed as a factor that influences their purchasing decision. Additionally, approximately 50% of consumers acknowledge their willingness to sacrifice animations and videos to obtain faster load times.

By conducting regular SEO audits, you can identify 404 errors and non-descriptive anchor texts on your site. By fixing these issues, you can improve the user experience and increase their time on your site.

Will you make your consumer wait, knowing that you could make them happier?

Improves ranking

Performing an SEO audit can help you identify areas of improvement on your website to increase impressions, clicks, and ranking. Some examples include:

-Ensuring that your sitemap is clean and all pages on your website are correctly indexed.
-Reviewing for missing metadata (title tags and meta descriptions) and ensuring they are descriptive and appealing to users.
-Verify that all images on your website have alternative (ALT) text.

By reviewing these elements, you can improve the visibility and success of your website in search engines.

How do I know if I need an audit?

You can use PageSpeed Insights, a free tool that allows you to check relevant metrics for your analysis. In this case, select the SEO option and check if there are links that are not crawlable or images that do not have attributes.

PageSpeed Insights for desktop

Still have questions? Schedule a consultation with our experts. It is essential to go to a professional to perform a diagnosis with advanced tools and solve the problems.

Performing an audit is essential to identify any problems affecting your website because it is difficult to discover everything that could be impacting its performance without it.

Paola Luna

Client Services Director | Digital marketer with 10 years of experience working with advertising agencies, start-ups, and B2Bs creating data-driven marketing campaigns with ROI focus. Created The Good Marketing podcast in 2020 to help small business owners kickstart their marketing strategy.

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