Everyone who operates a business online is probably familiar with SEO. SEO is hugely responsible for bringing in people through the (virtual) door. However, those familiar with SEO may not be familiar with an SEO Audit. It is very important to conduct an SEO audit for small businesses to ensure they stay on top of search engine rankings.
The Basics
An SEO audit is just that: auditing a website’s SEO.
It is a process of evaluating the website’s search engine friendliness, so to say. An SEO audit is done to identify problem areas and then identify a set of action items to correct them. The goal, of course, is to improve the website’s search engine performance.
There are many tools available to conduct an SEO audit. Some businesses do it themselves by following a guide while others choose to hire an SEO services agency to do the job for them.
Why hire external SEO Optimisation Services?
-
Save time.
SEO audits take a while to conduct, especially for first-timers. With a hired auditor to conduct SEO audit for small businesses, the owners could focus on running their business, instead.
-
Nitty-Gritty.
No tech background? No problem! An SEO services team will take the data, break it down, analyze it, and explain it to the business owner in English. It is then easier to understand the opportunities for improvement and then come up with a fix.
-
Stay up to date.
The SEO industry changes quickly. Google updates its algorithms all the time. What worked a few months ago, may not work anymore. SEO services, have access to the most current and most effective tools, programs, and systems; making the cost of SEO services totally worth it.
-
Insights.
No matter how awesome an SEO auditing tool is; it can never provide some things only a human can provide: powerful insights and advice.
-
Tools.
There are various tools used to analyze and monitor SEO. These tools can be found free of charge, but those would only give you a glimpse of what is actually available. SEO optimization agencies have many tools that are used daily (and for an SEO Audit) and they aren’t cheap. Paying for all of those tools just to audit one website? Not a great return on investment.
Still, Want to DIY?
While it’s advisable to call in the big guns for such an important job; some might still want to strike out on their own.
Simple SEO audits and improvements, albeit time-consuming and tedious, can be done by businesses themselves. How? Follow these steps:
-
-
Get an SEO auditing tool.
-
Using the auditing tool, crawl the website.
-
Start the audit using a comprehensive checklist:
-
Google Penalties – Find out if the website was penalized by Google and when and why. Then, create an action plan to fix the issues and get the penalty removed.
-
Search Appearance – Do a Google search of the brand name and review the results.
-
Technical SEO – Do a thorough check of the website’s technical SEO. This makes sure search engines can access the pages of the website properly.
-
On-Page SEO – Do a thorough check of the website’s on-site SEO to help search engines comprehend the site’s content.
-
Off-Page SEO – Review all incoming links and remove bad links.
-
Social Media – Check the brand’s presence in social media channels and if it’s easy to find and follow.
-
-
-
Check the results.
In Conclusion
As businesses become increasingly competitive online, their owners must do more to help improve their results. While SEO, undoubtedly, is a huge driver for website traffic; users have to remember that it is a sum of many moving parts, changes hyper fast, and is, like any other system, not perfect. That’s where an SEO audit comes in.
Whether the business chooses to do it on its own or hire SEO optimization services; an SEO audit for small businesses is necessary to make sure SEO is doing its job to bring in as many people through those virtual doors.
Can’t be bothered doing it yourself?