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1. What Is an SEO Audit and Why It Is So Important?
SEO is one of the most popular marketing methods. More and more online businesses choose an on page SEO proposal from an agency. . The main factor of its popularity is the massive potential that this marketing method has shown over the years. Search engines are an incredible source of traffic for any website.
If you can make use of them properly, then you will be able to become the best in your industry. Although SEO is considered a new industry, the competitiveness of the field reaches a very high level.
For this reason, you need a skilled professional to be able to compete for the best keywords and take care of any Google penalty recovery process. So, you should look for an SEO agency. And before you start a long-term collaboration, you should perform an SEO audit.
A website SEO audit is a preliminary step that any agency should do before starting any SEO campaign. It has many roles and uses. And all of them are essential in establishing the right direction of your website.
An audit will be able to find out the pros and cons of your site. The information should be the foundation of the strategy that you are going to use. Every website needs a personalized SEO strategy, and the information you will obtain from the audit is essential for this process.
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Depending on the agency that will perform the audit, you can get a varying amount of information. And you can use it for many purposes. For example, you can find out what keywords your competitors are using.
You will get an advantage and make it easier for you to compete with them on equal ground. Or, if your business is new, then you can avoid the keywords fought by your biggest competitors and go for those that have smaller competition first.
Many site owners are using monthly SEO maintenance, but why is the difference between them so big? Well, there are many reasons, but the main one is the lack of experts that can perform a thorough audit or make use of the information obtained from it.
Not everyone is willing to spend money on this marketing method because the prices can reach a very high level. For this reason, you will find a lot of websites that are trying to take care of their SEO by themselves. Unfortunately, most of them are not even able to reach the first page of the search results for their chosen keywords.
2. 5 Main Benefits Brought by an SEO Audit
Now that you know what a technical SEO audit is, you may want to find out what are the benefits it brings. There are many benefits, but five of them are the main ones. Their quality will depend on the quality of the audit.
• More traffic. A proper audit will be able to increase the traffic that you will get from your SEO campaigns. How so? Well, there are many reasons for this. For example, the keywords chosen will resonate better with your site, and you will attract the maximum amount of traffic on your website.
• Better leads. You cannot consider the traffic obtained from search engines as leads. You still need to qualify your website visitors. With a proper audit, the qualifying process will be smoother, and you will be able to get better leads. You will be able to find those that need it the most and promote your products and services in a targeted way.
• Branding. An essential part of any business. A strong brand can increase the price of any product by itself. Any company should strive to brand itself as much as possible. The SEO audit will help you personalize the SEO strategy. So, you will be able to use methods that will grow your brand together with your site.
• Faster results. SEO is an equilibrated field. Any low-quality part of your SEO will drag your ranks down. Also, you need to know the pros and cons of your site and create a strategy that will cover all the shortcomings. Without an SEO audit, you will not know what your website SEO truly needs.
• Higher site quality. The quality of your site is not only important for SEO. It is essential for you as well. Your website is like a showroom. You need to build a solid image of your business and your brand in the mind of your visitors. An audit will help you personalize your site based on your business particularities and show you how to optimize it for SEO.
3. What Are the 5 Main Steps That Any Website SEO Audit Must Contain
There are many agencies on the market, but not all of them offer the same website SEO audit services. The quality differs between the services suggested by different agencies.
If you want to fight for the top ranks, then you need to find and use one of the best options. A thorough audit must have five sections. Each of these sections has an important goal that will reduce the SEO effort that your company will use in the future.
Technical on-site SEO audit
Many SEO agencies use this method as a full SEO audit. Although it can be helpful, this inspection has much more potential. A thorough one will take care of all parts of your online business. And it will ensure that you get all the information needed to create the best-personalized strategy. Doing this is essential if you want to reach the top of the industry and the top ranks in search engines
This type of SEO audit will search for all the problems that your site has. It will test two main components. The first one is the technical part of your website, and the second one is the on-site content. Both segments are essential, and the results will showcase all the problems that you can solve. A reliable agency will also propose solutions that you only need to implement.
The agency will check your website, and it will find all the factors that draw your ranks down. These factors can be technical errors, slow loading speed, mobile compatibility, and many others. Each one of them affects your site negatively. The more problems you solve, the higher your rank will rise. It is in your best interest to make use of the information to improve your site as much as possible.
Industry competition analysis
Another essential part of a website SEO audit is the competition analysis. SEO is a very competitive industry. If you want to reach the top in the ranks of a search engine, then you need to know your competition better than you know your business. So, thorough research about your competitors is mandatory. The more information you get, the higher your winning chances will be.
There are two pieces of information that you will need from this part of the audit.
• List of competitors. It is essential to know all your competitors. The list includes those stronger than and those weaker than you. It is good to have your sight towards the top, but you still need to cover your back. So, the analysis must provide you with all your organic competition.
• Competition keywords Knowing the names of your competitors is not enough. You also need to know their keywords. By knowing them, you can estimate how big your competition is as well as how much traffic and profits they get from search engines. You can also approximate how much you need to invest and how long it will take to overcome all your competitors.
Website Keywords and Traffic Analysis
Depending on the level of your company, you should choose the keywords appropriately. If your online business is still small and new, then you may not want to fight for the top keywords. Why? Because it will be much harder, and you will require more effort than your competitors to reach the top. You need to find a reliable agency that will be able to recommend you the best keywords for your online business.
But before you choose the keywords, an analysis of your current keywords and traffic volume is needed. In this section, you will be able to find all the results that your company gets from search engines. The information will show you which keywords are more beneficial, and which ones are useless. After you discard all the low-performing keywords, you can replace them with better ones.
But to replace useless keywords, you need to find the good ones. You can take the best-performing ones that your competition uses. Or you choose others that give you confidence that you will reach the top ranks, and the traffic will still be big enough. Both choices are good. But the results that you will be able to get from each one of them will depend on the abilities of the SEO agency and the amount of money that you are willing to spend.
If you have enough funds to invest in the SEO campaign, then you can try to compete for the best-performing keywords. In the long run, the returns that you will get will be much higher than what other keywords will bring to your business. But if you can’t invest enough, then you should go for different keywords and make sure that you reach the top Anyone can use this method if they use the results from a thorough website SEO audit.
Website Copyright Check and Keywords Integration
The content on your site needs to meet some requirements set by search engines. The most used regulations are those imposed by Google. A thorough audit needs to ensure that all the content used on your site meets the requirements. The results will reveal the effects on your ranks. They can be either positive or negative.
The agency will test four factors in this section.
• Copyright. Search engines require all the pages indexed to be original. Otherwise, they will penalize their ranks. So, the agency must test all the pages of your website for originality. If there are pages that have sections plagiarized, then you need to modify them asap.
• Consistency. Some sites used low-quality articles, full of empty words, to increase their ranks. In the beginning, that was a useful technique, but search engines found the loophole and patched their algorithms. Now, all the content on your website needs to be consistent and offer real value to your visitors.
• Relevancy. Another important aspect is the relevancy of your content. You must never lie to your site visitors or give outdated or irrelevant information. Keep in mind that search engines give answers and solutions to their users. If you use false data in your articles and Google puts them on the first page of the search results, then its credibility will drop. So, if they find on your site articles that do not pass their relevancy tests, then they will penalize your ranks.
• Keyword integration. You need to guide the algorithm of the search engines. Keyword integration is the best method to do this. By using this method, your page will show search engines the keywords for which it wants to compete. Without proper integration, you will not be able to rank for the chosen keywords.
Detailed SEO Plan Proposal
A reliable agency will include in their SEO audit a plan that you can use to optimize your website further. Of course, they will recommend their services for that purpose. You can choose to do your SEO or use the services offered by the agency. But if you want to be at the top, then you must use the services of a top agency.
The plan will have several parts. The first one is for the technical optimization of your site. If you are willing to let the agency optimize your website directly, then you will not need to do anything. Otherwise, you will need to follow a guide and solve all the problems and make all the optimization by yourself.
The second step of the plan will most likely be the optimization of the content present on your site. The same principle applies to this part as well. You can either let the agency optimize your website, or follow their guidance. Some low-performing pages will be deleted completely, or remade from scratch. So, if you want to take care of the tasks by yourself, you will need to develop your SEO skills.
The next part will be a recommendation for writing services. If you want to reach the top ranks, then you need to post high-quality articles regularly. Also, you need to build your online business image on the internet. The best method is to use guest post services to attain your goal. The results that you will get from this choice will be much higher than any other alternative.
4. Can You Use an SEO Audit to Find the Best Agency for Your Company?
You can separate most SEO agencies into two groups, lousy and reliable agencies. Because of the high number of options that you can find on the internet, it will be hard to make the difference between these two types. And if you make the wrong choice, then your company will suffer losses. Luckily, there are several methods that you can use to find if an agency has what it takes to take your site to the top.
One of these methods is to use the SEO audit as a test. Most of the time, the quality of all the agency’s services is the same as the quality of the website SEO audit. So, the reports that you will get are a good indicator of the rest of the SEO services Australia offered by the agency. But can you determine if it has high quality before you try the service? Yes, two factors will show you if it is thorough enough.
• Agency’s promises. Most agencies will tell you about the audit that they are going to perform on the dedicated page. You will find there are all the promises about it. From these promises, you can determine how good the results will be. If the agency includes all the steps mentioned above, then there is a high chance that the audit will meet all your requirements. Otherwise, if not even the promises are not thorough enough, then you should search for another agency.
• Audit resume. You should not base your decision on the agency pledges alone. Good agencies showcase the resume from one of their past clients. There you will be able to see all the issues that the agency found and how good will your audit be. If you can find all the steps promised by the agency, then it is almost guaranteed that the SEO audit will be of high quality and you can test it safely.
Although the audit is a good indicator of the quality of the agency’s services, you should look for other factors as well. There are two other influential factors that you should take into consideration before you make your decision. Do not be afraid of losing your time. It is better to waste a few days to find a reliable agency than use a bad one.
5. Check the Website of the SEO Agency
The best example of the quality of the internet marketing service offered by an SEO agency is its site. How can an SEO agency promise you through optimization when their website does not have it? So, you should first check the quality of the agency’s site. There are serval factors that you should check. You do not need to be too thorough. It will be easy to make the difference between an optimized site and an unoptimized one.
• Content. The first indication that you can use to make the difference between an optimized site and a lousy one is the content used. For example, you can test some of the articles used by the agency and see if they plagiarized them. If all of them are original and their consistency and relevancy are high enough, then you can trust the skills of the agency’s writers.
• Results. Most agencies will showcase their past outcomes. You can check them and find the capabilities of the agency. But you need to make sure that all the results are fresh ones. You should not take into consideration the ones that are older than six months. Why? Because SEO is an evolving field, the skills needed more than six months ago will be obsolete.
• Guarantee. Does the agency offer guarantees? You should know that reliable agencies that have enough trust in their skills will promise a money-back guarantee to their clients. By doing this, they can prove their trust in the agency’s abilities. And for you, that means that you will not risk your money. If you do not get good results, you will at least get your money back.
The Opinion of the Agency’s Clients
Besides the site of the agency, you should also take into consideration the opinion of its clients. In the future, you will be one of them, so by knowing their view about the agency, you will be able to predict if you will be happy with the results that the agency will produce for you. There are two main ways through which you can check the satisfaction of the agency’s clients.
1. Reviews. Most of the time, you will be able to find the reviews on the site. There you will be able to see how satisfied are the companies that used the services of the agency before you. The better the reviews are, the higher the chances that you will also be happy at the end of your collaboration.
2. Calls. Checking reviews is not always enough. If you think that they are not truthful, then you can find the contact details of the agency’s clients and speak with them directly. You can send a mail or call them. Doing this will offer you the opportunity to ask for even more information about the agency. For example, you can find how good was the communication between the clients and the agency during the website SEO audit or the long-term collaborations.
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About the Author
I am responsible for data analysis of the completed projects to identify the main factors which contribute to the Google ranking improvement process. Together with my brother skills and my detailed analysis, we can assure all our customers that our services are bulletproof and that you will always get the desired results.
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About Author
Mihai C. Tudorache
I am the president and co-founder of GAMIT. My business administration background is important in understanding our client’s necessities, so my expertise includes building comprehensive and all-inclusive SEO strategies for lead results. Our advanced SEO solutions are developed through extensive analysis and complete SEO improvement audits.