Unlike the internet of twenty years ago, today’s internet is vast and dynamic. If a business made a website in 2021, it probably didn’t change much over the following year. In 2001, the vibrant world of online advertising was in its infancy. While pay-per-click advertising emerged as a popular online advertising practice decades ago, 2021 highlights many online marketing tools that businesses never dreamed possible.

The critical point here is that your website needs to keep up with today’s vast and dynamic internet aspects. Although having a proactive webmaster helps, your website needs more. Your website needs tools that keep up with today’s internet. The best action you can take for a website is performing regular SEO website audits.

What is an SEO Audit?

Regardless of what type of website you have, you’ll need it to be search engine friendly for your audience or potential clients to find you. In other words, your website should follow search engine optimization (SEO) recommendations and best practices. A website designed with SEO in mind is not a one-and-done process. Information, and sometimes websites, found online continually changes and evolves. An SEO audit ensures your website stays updated. 

Elements of an SEO Audit

When a business performs an SEO audit, the auditor looks at the technical aspects of how it functions online. While this begins with how the business ranks in search engines such as Google, other website elements enable a high search engine ranking page (SERP). The auditor performs analyses across four elements. These include the technical elements, on and off-page elements, and analyzing how well keywords perform against competitors.

• SEO and the Technical Elements of a Website – When doing an SEO audit, the auditor must begin by looking at the technical sides of the website. The main categories are indexability and accessibility.

o   Accessibility refers to how users and search engines find websites on the internet. Several things influence accessibility. For instance, the webmaster must format the XML sitemap properly for search engine web crawlers. Redirects could cause accessibility issues if the content were moved or deleted. User experience is key to auditing a website’s SEO. Users have a very short attention span. So, you want them to stay on the page as long as possible.

o   Indexability is vital for website rankings because Google and other search engines rank content depending on how the web crawler presents it to the search engine. Noindex web pages can lead to Google penalties, preventing web page web crawler search queries.

There are many more aspects of an SEO auditor’s look at the technical side of an SEO audit. Since so much might go wrong with the technical side, doing a regularly scheduled SEO audit is crucial to keeping your website healthy and accessible for users and search engines.  

• On-Page Analysis – Typically, websites have several pages. Many, but not all, have blog pages. Most have some sort of an “about us” page. If you have an e-commerce website, you probably have product category landing pages and product description pages. The words on these pages are “content,” which should be recognizable by search engines. Blogs should always stay with a general topic and contain specialized subtopics within the general topic. Otherwise, search engines get confused and only lists the better subtopic. The same goes for keywords. Each article needs its own specialized keywords. The on-page analysis checks for these issues and others to ensure the best chances of landing high on SERPs.
• Off-Page Analysis – Generally, an auditor performs an off-page analysis for the purpose of understanding how a website performs via search engines. Google and other search engines use intelligent algorithms that are getting smarter every year. Thus, these algorithms know when website content creators use tricks to achieve high SERPs. For adding example, adding irrelevant keywords to increase page hits. Don’t cloak using trick keywords, the practices of tricking those who found a website wanting information on one topic then presenting the user with something different. Off-page analysis ensures Google and other search engines trust the website.

• Keyword Analysis – Keywords are probably the first thing that comes to mind when you think of SEO. Keywords are the words associated with products or services that users and search engines use for SERPS. However, keywords help keep a website competitive. By looking at what other websites use for keywords, a business can adjust its keywords accordingly. An SEO audit for keywords keeps a website updated with keywords that help users find businesses online. The crucial aspect is finding keywords that perform better than your competitor’s. In other words, gain more hits.

When to Perform an SEO Audit

When to perform an SEO audit depends on the size of the business and its needs. Medium and larger websites with lots of traffic should perform an SEO audit regularly. Start at a quarterly interval and see how things go. You may notice a drop in traffic between quarters. At which time you’ll want to run an SEO audit to find out why.

Conversely, small websites may only need to do an SEO audit as needed, for example, after a noticeable drop in sales. The e-commerce business wants to understand why to fix things before losing too much traffic that the business suffers.  

The SEO Experts

Owning an e-commerce business means you must be proactive and stay competitive. The best thing you can do is develop a strategy for SEO audits. More than that, you need to hire a company that specializes in SEO audits. Web Rocket Media is the company to count on. They dive deep into your existing e-commerce presence on the internet and find ways to improve search engine visibility. From keyword research to examining your website for issues that hinder online visibility, the SEO experts at Web Rocket Media get the job done. And because they are a full-service digital marketing agency, Web Rocket Media connects SEO best practices with other forms of digital marketing.