You’ve read guides, listened to podcasts, and put in the work to improve your small business SEO. Having great search engine optimization is the ultimate goal, but once you’ve got it, it’s important that you maintain ranking. The most efficient way to test your small business’ SEO is through an audit. If you are serious about growing or maintaining your ranking, then you should perform a routine audit, and the best part is – you can absolutely do it yourself!
What is an SEO audit?
An SEO audit is an analysis or test of your website to ensure that it’s performing to the best of its ability.
How will an SEO audit help your small business?
Whether you have already won favor with the SEO gods or you’re still chasing that first page ranking, you should be conducting routine SEO audits on your website. Doing this will help ensure that you are exhausting all efforts to grow or maintain your SEO for your small business and keep up with new search engine demands. It’s recommended that you perform a website audit every six months.
The SEO audit can be broken down into four parts:
1. Technical
Small business SEO can often feel intimidating because it has a technical side, but there is nothing you should fear! Crawlability, site indexing, site-load time, and mobile friendliness are all technical aspects you should be aware of that will help increase your search engine rankings. But with the help of Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you can master these technical aspects of SEO in no time!
2. Page properties
Page properties include proper tagging of text (titles, headings, etc.), meta and alt descriptions, URL structure, and more. This may seem like a small part of SEO, but it is just as important.
3. Content
Adding new content to your website will also help your SEO as a small business. The best way to incorporate content into your website is by blogging. Make sure to consider keyword research, quality of content, relevancy, and search demand whenever you create new content.
4. User experience
User experience is what we often think about when referring to our website’s rankings. Unique users, session duration, bounce rates, and click-through rates are a few of the most important things to consider for SEO. These stats can be seen through your Google Analytics account. Your website’s design, captivating copy, page-load times, easy-to-use site navigation, and more are all things to consider that will help improve your user experience and therefore your SEO.
How do I perform an SEO audit?
There are many ways to perform an audit and many online guides or checklists that you can download for free. However, here are 5 steps you should always take when performing a website audit for your small business:
1. Start with crawling your website to evaluate your small business SEO.
The website crawl is the most important part of your audit. A crawl will find errors on your website, including poor keywords, bad images, title issues, broken links, and more. You can perform a free website crawl through Screaming Frog SEO Spider and get an idea of what Google is crawling through the Google Search Console.
2. Check your SEO score.
See your SEO performance through the SEO SiteCheckup. Your check-up will consider bounce rates, load times, and more. It will also reveal any broken links that your site may have, identity your most-used keywords, reveal coding errors, and more.
3. Check your page properties.
When you have completed a crawl of your website, examine your results and look for duplicated pages, titles, headers, and any other text tags that you should fix or improve. Checking your page properties has the potential to be the most time-consuming, but it is still incredibly important and shouldn’t be overlooked.
4. Evaluate your links.
After you have properly completed your website crawl, you will be able to determine any broken links on your site that need to be changed. Any broken links that redirect to a “404 not found” label have the potential to negatively impact your small business’s search engine optimization.
5. Test your site’s speed.
You can test your site’s speed through Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. The best way to improve your site’s load speed times is by keeping your images under 500kb (but closer to 300kb is best!).
If you want more website traffic, then performing a routine website audit will shine light on ways you can improve your online presence and small business SEO. Remember, performing some type of audit, even a DIY one, is always better than not performing any audit at all. Completing a website audit can help your business and lead to more customers and sales.
Still not on board with the DIY thing? If you’d like to have an expert take a look at your website, you can apply for a free 1-hour website audit here.
Want to learn more about boosting your small business SEO? Get our Ultimate Guide to Small Business SEO here.
Plus, 5 more posts you might like:
