3 Major Benefits of an SEO Audit Every Company Should Know

January 9, 2015

An SEO audit is a comprehensive website analysis which helps you assess the performance of your current on-page and off-page activities. For example, a SEO audit can help you assess whether you’re earning qualified inbound links from reputable sites or including Alt Txt for on-page images.


An SEO audit contains the following eight components:


• Backlink Competitive Analysis: This analysis helps you assess the quality of your backlinks and compare them with your competitors.
• Poisonous Link Analysis: This analysis helps you determine whether you’re receiving poisonous links – links from bad neighborhoods such as link farms and spammy directories.
• Content Keywords Analysis: This analysis helps you determine how Google interprets your website based on the content provided on your site.
• Site Speed Analysis: This analysis helps you assess the speed of your website and ways to improve it.
• Social Sharing Button Analysis: This analysis helps you determine whether you’ve included social media sharing icons on your blogs and other pages of your website.
• Duplicate Content Analysis: This analysis helps you determine whether there’s more than one version of a webpage indexed by Google.
• Javascript Test Analysis: This analysis helps you assess whether content on your website still appears when Javascript is disabled.
• Content Audit Analysis: This analysis helps you determine you’ve included unique and relevant meta descriptions, meta keywords, SEO-friendly URLs, title tags, and other attributes on your website.


By performing a SEO audit, you can gain the following three benefits:


1. Determine current SEO weaknesses
A SEO audit helps you identify SEO activities that aren’t performing well. For example, you may discover that you haven’t included relevant meta descriptions or keywords, social media sharing buttons, or targeted keywords on your webpages. You may also discover that you have duplicate content, relatively slow site speed, or poisonous inbound links directing to your website. Discovering these issues is the first step in implementing a successful SEO strategy.


2. Identify the strengthen of your competitors
A SEO audit also helps you discover SEO activities your competitors are performing well in. For example, you may discover that your competitors are earning links from qualified and relevant websites, achieving relatively fast website speed, or including proper attributes on their sites. This discovery helps you find ways to improve your own SEO performance.


3. Focus Your SEO Strategy
Once you’ve identified SEO activities you’re performing well in, you can focus your energy on improving these areas.


Examples include:
• Going back to all your blogs and including meta descriptions and tags on all of them.
• Including Alt Txt to all images posted on your website.
• Installing social media button plug-ins such as ShareThis or AddThis.
• Earning backlinks by getting featured on local newspapers or magazines.
• Including targeted keywords more frequently on your website.
• Writing major keywords in HTML instead of Javascript.
• Removing duplicate content issues by using a 301 redirect.
• Disavowing poisonous backlinks in Google Webmaster Tools.
• Increasing your site speed based on the suggestions made by Google’s Pagespeed Insights.


Engaging in these activities will help increase your chance of ranking higher on Google search results!

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