If your website isn’t ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs), you aren’t hitting the goals you should be. By performing an SEO audit, you will be given measurable results as to whether your site is following best practices. Specifically, it targets issues that are technical and structural. It also reveals competitive insights and content gaps. If you are hiring a digital agency for an SEO campaign, this is your first step. By looking at your website’s foundation, the agency aims to devise a successful plan for your future web presence. Here are four ways that performing an SEO audit with an Austin SEO company will help strengthen your online strategy.
Optimize Your Content
By performing an SEO audit, you will be able to see the keywords and phrases that have the highest value for your business. These should be placed in your meta title tags and across your web pages so you can gain more organic reach. Industry-specific keywords will also provide you with the opportunity to develop a stronger content hierarchy through the use of an internal linking strategy. If you have a blog where you are posting professional articles, of course you want someone to be reading them. The same sentiment goes for an e-commerce shop, where you want consumers to be looking at your products. By executing the right content optimizations, searchers will be more capable of finding the pieces that respond to their needs and questions.
Improved User Experience
Internet users appreciate websites that are responsive to all devices. Not only that, but responsive web design benefits designers and developers. They no longer have to create websites with every single device in mind. Instead, responsive design scales everything appropriately. From the text to the images, your users are able to get more value out of your site because they can see and interact with it all on their mobile devices. You can tell if they are enjoying your website if they are spending a longer time on it. However, make sure that this time isn’t spent on a loading screen. In a report by HubSpot, it was stated that the highest impact on conversion rates comes from the first five seconds of loading time. Performing an SEO audit will show you which errors to remove so that you minimize the risk of users leaving quickly.
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Awareness of Competitors
Identifying who your competitors are will help tremendously with determining what you should be doing to get the attention of customers better. Let’s think about McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Whataburger. Although they have very different brands, the idea of “fast food burgers” still comes to mind. Are there any competitors in your niche, with similar products, that are directly targeting your audience? By performing an SEO audit, you can see exactly how you stack up against them. You may even find that there are businesses competing with you on an indirect level. This is when their product may be in a different category, but it’s an alternative choice that satisfies the same needs as your own. Knowing what keywords these other businesses are ranking for, as well as what their strategies consist of, can be a game-changer. Take what they are doing well and put your unique spin on it.
Overall Enhanced Performance
An Austin SEO company will keep up with every SEO update so that you don’t have to. They will do what they can to ensure that your site is healthy. Search engines have changed a lot since day one. These changes have been in terms of keywords, mobile usage, spam, links, and local targeting. Knowing what search engines expect is critical to your performance, which makes regular auditing a must. A big concern today is website speed. In an age where someone will click off due to frustrations at the loading screen in a matter of seconds, you can’t risk having a slow server. An SEO audit will show whether your content is loading as quickly as possible. It will also show whether the server is being overloaded with questions to the databases. Consider going with a web hosting plan that can best support your traffic.
One of our approaches at WEBii is performing an SEO health check audit, which provides reports based on both human analysis and the results of external tools. From there, we will make recommendations about improved metadata and any on-page issues we find. Check out our approaches today if you are interested in receiving the comprehensive details of your site.