The Importance of the Website Audit for SEO.

How do you know if your website is performing as desired and that you are maximising your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) opportunities? The first step in understanding where you are is to get an audit of your website status that will help identify next steps and help you formulate a plan of action to achieve your objectives.

Whether you're trying to generate leads or build a brand it's key to establish clearly what your website objectives are. An audit can then help to show how you measure up against those objectives and assist in setting key goals going forward. SEO is broadly the impact of your online activities that affect and increase or decrease your organic search results. Increasing organic search is good because you are potentially increasing quality traffic without spending money on advertising. When thinking about SEO it’s important to consider this in two separate aspects, On-site SEO and Off-site SEO.

A lot of work and effort goes into making a website optimized for search and it is therefore prudent to conduct a regular audit using a service like Diib. Run regular audit reports and monitor performance over time against benchmarks set.

On-Site and Technical SEO.
Technical SEO measurement indicates how HTML elements contribute to your site’s usability and is a reflection of how easy (or not) your site is to crawl and be indexed. These are the things you can fix on your website that impact on how well your website performs in search for example:

• Page titles H1 and H2 tags and meta page descriptions.
  
• JavaScript errors, the coding of your website. 
  
• Page Load Times, image heavy pages that are slow loading will deter visitors.
  
• SSL Encryption, make sure it’s up to date. It may or may not affect your SEO.
  
• SEO driven content is key to how your website performs on search engines. Google for example uses an algorithm that checks for relevance in your content and the overall domain authority in deciding if the page should be presented in search results.    
  

Off-Site SEO.
This is the measurement of the prevalence of external links back to your site and external site rankings. This is by far the most challenging aspect of any site SEO because this is where you have to do all the work. There are several approaches on how to tackle off-site SEO. You can create quality content and get that content published on sites that have a high domain authority, sites considered as key influencers in a specific area. You can do this by negotiating with a particular influencer site for publication, they will demand high quality content and, on most occasions, will ask for a fee too. If your budget doesn’t stretch to paying influencers you can try posting your content on an article site with a high domain authority. Whatever way you do this the objective is to create quality back links to your site that in turn improves your domain authority and as a result your page ranking and organic search results.

If you are not sure how to go about auditing your SEO or just don’t have the time to do this yourself it’s easy to reach out to RDM (Robertson Digital Marketing) in London and they can get you started straightaway. The guys at RDM have been working with some of the world’s leading brands guiding their SEO and digital marketing efforts for over three decades. If you want to know more get in touch with RDM or to see how you can get started with your free website audit check out what Diib can do for you.