Do You Need an SEO Audit?

Amanda Grinavich

This introductory post marks the beginning of a series of posts that will walk through the process of an SEO audit. Today, we’re going to begin with the big, old question of whether or not your website needs one.

We hear a lot about SEO every day. How to improve it … the changing algorithms … the importance of mobile … much like the majority of the marketing and analytics world, things are always shifting. But the one thing about SEO that hasn’t changed is that strong SEO is necessary in a world where people are producing more content by the second.

Where do you begin? Often times, the best place to start is with an audit. In summary, an audit can point out weaknesses in your current strategy (or lack of strategy) as well as provide guidelines for what your next steps should be.

Even if you have done an SEO update in the past, an audit may still prove to be helpful. Start by going into your Google Analytics account (or whichever analytics platform you prefer to use) and determine where your traffic is coming from:

• If 5% or less of your site traffic is coming from organic search, you should get started on that audit & put together a strategy to help your business move forward.
  
• If between 5% and 75% of traffic comes from organic search, you can afford to be a little riskier in with what you try in your strategy.
  
• If 75% or more of your traffic comes from organic search, you’re in pretty good shape. You shouldn’t have to change much, but it never hurts to take a look at what competitors are doing, how they’re ranking and how you can boost your own rank for the same keywords even more.

Overall, an audit is going to give you a better look at things like:

• Where your website can be optimized (Are there numerous broken links? Do you need to improve speed? Mobile access?)
  
• What people are searching for to get to your website
  
• How certain keywords are performing (and what your competitors are beating you at)
  
• Content topic ideas for future blog posts, white papers and more

In the coming posts in the series, we’ll take a deeper dive into the core components of an audit (including those listed above) and how to conduct each one.

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