Most companies that are looking to elevate their digital marketing strategy are not starting from scratch. Unless your business is brand new, you likely already have a website and a library of existing content. If you’ve been around for a while, you might have a LOT of existing content, and odds are some if it is neither fresh nor relevant.
Conducting an SEO audit is a key practice for gaining a firm grasp on your company’s website and digital assets, their performance, and where the opportunities lie to grow your impact in search.
What is an SEO audit?
Whereas a site audit analyzes website health and opportunities more broadly, an SEO audit serves as a comprehensive assessment of your site specifically with respect to its performance in search.
Why is this so important? Research has found that organic search accounts for more than half of all website traffic globally.
Although there are tools and technologies that can support an SEO audit, expertise is required to ensure the project aligns with key business goals, and that the findings lead to strong, actionable recommendations.
What are some components included in an SEO audit?
There are many different factors that can affect your website’s search performance, so in order to be effective, SEO audits need to be thorough and wide-reaching.
Examples of techniques and elements of a typical SEO audit include:
Keyword research and analysis: Which keywords are you ranking for? Where are you lacking visibility with your target audience? Which opportunities stand out as quick wins?
On-page SEO optimization: This process surfaces issues with meta titles, meta descriptions, headers, and keyword usage that might be impacting your site’s performance in search.
Technical SEO: Impediments to SEO success are often unseen – site speed, mobile responsiveness, indexing, etc. Assessing your technical SEO helps ensure these issues aren’t holding back your quality content.
Link profile: Quality backlinks remain a staple of SEO in B2B marketing. This analysis identifies opportunities to gain authoritative backlinks from other websites.
Content relevance and optimization: An SEO audit will evaluate the full spectrum of content on your website – blog posts, resources, product pages – to ensure it meets E-E-A-T standards and matches search intent.
Competitive analysis: To know where your company stands in search, and where it makes sense to focus, you have to know where your competitors stand.
Site structure and navigation: If search engines can’t easily find their way around your website and contextualize the content, users probably can’t either.
Schema markup: Implementation of structured data helps search engines understand and display website content in rich snippets and featured snippets.
Reporting and analytics: As SEO tracking and measurement evolve, running an SEO audit provides the chance to enhance your depth of analytics and set up ongoing reporting.
What can you learn and achieve with an SEO audit?
We’ve established that an SEO audit can provide a lot of information to your company. How does this information support your marketing strategy? There are a few key learnings and actions that often emerge through an expert SEO audit.
Turn around negative organic search trends
If your business has seen downward trends in organic traffic over the past year or so, you are far from alone. We’ve observed this trend with many of our clients, and it’s being talked about across industries.
While there are several macro trends and factors affecting the search landscape, Google’s Helpful Content update – launched in late 2022 – has had a significant impact on many search rankings.
This is not necessarily a bad thing! Google is prioritizing content that provides users with a relevant and rewarding experience, which is exactly what your content should be striving to do. (It’s also a specialization of TopRank Marketing’s content service.) Still, this major algorithm update has altered many previous rankings, and may have even impacted some of your top-performing content.
An SEO audit will help illuminate and explain any negative search trends your brand might be experiencing as a result of algorithm updates or otherwise, while helping you chart a course to reverse them.
“An SEO audit will help illuminate and explain any negative search trends your brand might be experiencing as a result of algorithm updates or otherwise, while helping you chart a course to reverse them.” — Nick Nelson @NickNelsonMN Click To Tweet
Uncover key opportunities to make fast gains
As any B2B marketer knows, organic SEO tends to be a long game. But when we conduct SEO audits for our clients, we almost always discover opportunities for quick wins and short-term impact.
Achieving quantifiable progress and results can help fortify your immediate search footprint while building confidence toward your long-term strategy.
Find white space and differentiate from competitors
If a competitor is beating you out in the search engine results page (SERP) for a term with commercially valuable intent, that means they are siphoning away qualified traffic and potential interest from your brand.
Without a competitive analysis, it is difficult to know which important keywords you’re getting beat on, and what it will take to win them. Additionally, SEO audits are great for surfacing key insights around unaddressed white space that you can tap into with your SEO content strategy.
Eliminate technical issues impeding your content
It’s really easy to overlook technical issues that affect SEO performance on your website, even if those issues are being directly experienced by your users. For example, if your marketing team usually interacts with your website and its content via desktop computers in the office, they may be unaware of prominent mobile accessibility issues.
The objectivity and comprehensiveness of a data-driven SEO audit – especially when overseen by a specialized third party – can help ensure you’re not missing hidden problems that are diminishing your organization’s search visibility and organic acquisition potential.
“The objectivity and comprehensiveness of a data-driven SEO audit can help ensure you’re not missing hidden problems that are diminishing your organization’s search visibility and organic acquisition potential.” — Nick Nelson @NickNelsonMN Click To Tweet
Step up your brand’s search impact with an SEO audit
The bottom line is that without an SEO audit, your marketing team has a limited understanding of how your company’s website and content are performing from a search standpoint. That means leaving valuable opportunities on the table.
At TopRank Marketing, we’ve helped countless clients solve their SEO problems and drive powerful, sustained organic traffic. Learn about this and other SEO services we offer.
About the author
Nick Nelson is our friendly neighborhood writer-man. As the Associate Content Director at TopRank Marketing, he is on a mission to energize brand narratives with smart, fun, sharp wordplay. In his free time, Nick enjoys basking in the misery of Minnesota sports fandom, making cringeworthy puns, and smothering all types of food in buffalo sauce.
