It’s year 2019, if you need to maximize your SEO efforts if you want to succeed online.
Let’s face it. If you don’t, your business will be left behind.
SEO is a top priority for marketers. In fact, 61% say it’s their main focus when it comes to inbound marketing.
They’re all doing it. Why aren’t you?
Ignoring it is basically ignoring sales.
But where should you begin?
Simple. Start by assessing your site’s current SEO.
The easiest way to do this is with an SEO audit. See how your current site ranks and assess what you can do to improve it.
It may sound intensive and perhaps a little scary for beginners, but I’m going to walk you through exactly what needs to be done.
In one hour and with the help of a few tools, you can do this very easily. The time it takes is minimal, but its impact can be huge.
But before we get there, you need to understand the fundamentals of the SEO audit.
Meaning of SEO audit
You want your content to be relevant to the people who show up to your site. The old SEO tactics won’t cut it. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing, setting up multiple pages for different keyword variants, and trying to use multiple microsites to drive traffic. Within the past decade, criteria and ranking factors have changed dramatically. Sites that are mobile-friendly and optimized for user intent are favored. Search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) have algorithms that crawl through your website and compare your website to different ranking factors denoting usability and relevance.
Each accessible page of your site is crawled to figure out whether your site offers useful and legitimate content. While your site is being crawled, search engines are also checking to figure out how secure, fast, and easy-to-use it is. And then each page receives a rank, which determines how high it shows up on the search engine results page (SERP) for people searching related keywords. Long story short, that’s what SEO is all about. However, SEO is constantly changing. Each search engine has its own algorithm, and algorithms get improved or regularly altered with updates. But algorithms aren’t the only thing you need to worry about. Your competitors are racing to a better ranking than you. Old content needs to be updated to remain relevant. And as rules change, you need to be able to adapt to new SEO tactics and avoid red flags. Worst of all, something on your website might be horribly broken, disrupting the flow of qualified traffic to your site. This is why a regular SEO audit is necessary for keeping up with search engine demand. When you conduct an audit, you are checking the health of your website.
Since search algorithms and technology can change at a rapid pace, you want to perform mini-audits monthly. But they shouldn’t take the place of a full SEO audit. Those should take place every 4 to 6 months or after a major change in your website. Personally, I like to do full SEO audits quarterly and mini-audits monthly.
Before we start, let’s consolidate the most important parts of the audit:
What are the key elements of an SEO audit?
There are three key factors to look at during an SEO audit:
Back-end factors such as hosting and indexingFront-end factors such as content, keywords, and metadataLink quality and outside references. Sometimes, you won’t have the time to address each pain point. So, when deciding which audit insights are worth taking action on, I like to use the 80/20 rule.
The most important part of your site’s SEO is the part that your incoming traffic actually sees. That’s all washed away if your site isn’t mobile-friendly, though. With the introduction of the mobile-first index, you need to make sure you understand how your site performs on mobile to ensure proper placement on SERPs. Due to 60% of all searches happening on mobile, Google has adjusted their algorithm to begin crawling on mobile sites.
Keeping this in mind (and checking to ensure your site is mobile-optimized) will help evaluate where you stand once you complete your one-hour mini-audit.
Here are the eight steps you need to take to perform your SEO site audit in less than an hour.
