The Importance of an SEO Audit for Your Business
In 2020, the Internet is everything. As the younger millennials would say — that’s it, that’s the Tweet; pure and simple. If you want to do business in today’s world, there’s no avoiding online marketing and advertising. The businesses that don’t use the virtual world quickly go the way of the dinosaurs, because their competition won’t make the same mistake.
Indeed, it’s incredibly important to utilize the Internet as a tool for lead generation. After all, most consumers that want to find a service provider or a product vendor will search online first. But how can you make sure that you come out on top when it comes to search engine rankings? And what is the importance of an SEO audit for your business? We’ll explore all of this in detail below!
What Is SEO
Just in case you don’t have a passing knowledge of the world of digital marketing — SEO is an acronym referring to search engine optimization. If that seems like a mouthful, don’t worry; we’ll take a step back and explain it all.
As in the olden days of analog marketing, the first step to success is considering and shaping your customers’ journey. In other words — how do consumers interact with your product or service?
If people want to buy the newest Converse sneaker in 2020, they’ll simply type “newest converse sneaker” into Google, and voila — they not only learn what specific product they’re looking for, but they also get results on the nearest vendors and their prices.
Google is indeed the marvel among search engines, with complex algorithms that determine which website should rank the best for every single keyword you type in. But at the end of the day, these algorithms are a set of rules. And that’s where SEO comes in, to make sure that your website follows as many of these rules as possible, ensuring the highest rankings in your niche.
SEO Audits
Keeping all of the above in mind, SEO audits represent the regular practice of reviewing your website’s status in the context of SEO. Once you perform your first SEO audit, you will learn of the most glaring mistakes that prevent your website from achieving higher rankings. However, there are reasons why SEO is a long-term strategy rather than a short-term fix — and we’ll take a look at all of the factors that point you towards the importance of regular SEO audits for your business.
Changing Algorithms
If you consider everything that we’ve said so far, you may be thinking — but why should you ever perform more than one SEO audit? After all, if the first one finds all of the relevant issues regarding your website, where does the need for the next SEO audit come from?
The first and primary answer is — because Google doesn’t stand still.
Of course, search engine optimization is performed for other search engines as well — such as Bing or Yahoo; but Google holds such a lion’s share of the market that “googling” has become a bona fide verb for finding things online.
And big search engines make constant changes to their algorithm, meaning you can’t just adapt your website to the current norms once and call the whole thing done. On the one hand, Google continuously strives to make its user experience as good as possible — that’s the company mindset that allowed them to rise to the top, after all. But more importantly for your business, Google doesn’t want you knowing *all* of the rules that govern their ranking algorithm. If the search engine had rules set in stone and everyone knew them, gaming the system would be far too easy. And at the end of the day, Google wants its search results to be as organic as possible, meaning that the most relevant companies appear for the right search keywords.
So, what does this mean for the importance of an SEO audit? If you want your business to rank high on Google and keep that position, you and your SEO experts will need to continually follow new tendencies, track the latest changes Google makes to their algorithms, and adjust accordingly.
Avoiding Errors
Conducting an SEO audit doesn’t just mean reviewing and altering the content on your website. In reality, SEO efforts can be of enormous help on the technical side of things as well. Once an audit is complete, you’ll learn if you need to deal with a bunch of broken links, bad redirects, or 404 errors. If any other technical issues are negatively impacting your website’s traffic, an SEO audit will reveal them quickly.
Staking Out The Competition
SEO audits aren’t all about your business and its website either; they are also useful when it comes to the competition. Just like you perform an SEO audit on your website, you can do the same on your competitors’, gaining valuable insight into what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong. Plus, you can learn what keywords your niche competitors are trying to rank for; chances are you should focus on the same ones as well.
Or, if the competition is too strong, you could optimize for a different set of keywords that they’re ignoring; the possibilities when it comes to an online marketing strategy are practically limitless. And as in all other aspects of running a business, knowing what your competitors are up to always brings a nice advantage.
Wrapping Up
As you can see, the importance of an SEO audit for your business cannot be underestimated. The logic here is pretty straightforward — if your business is going to succeed despite its competition, it needs to have a visible online presence. And to do that, optimizing for search engines on a constant basis is an absolute necessity.
Photos used
https://www.pexels.com/photo/desk-laptop-office-friends-4960464/
https://www.pexels.com/photo/traffic-internet-blur-airport-4960438/
