Top 7 Benefits of SEO Audit for Your Business Website

Do you know the number of searchers that click on page two of Google search results is less than 1%?

This means if your website fails to appeal to the visitors, you may lose potential customers.

But how to find out if your website is good enough to make it to the first page of search engine result pages (SERP)? Well, conducting an in-depth SEO audit will provide you with the answers.

One of the top benefits of SEO audit for your business is that it uncovers technical issues and areas where your website needs improvement. It helps you implement the right SEO strategies to improve your website’s visibility and performance.
Moreover, reviewing your existing content and SEO framework also help make the necessary changes to drive organic traffic and increase conversions.

Before we delve into the benefits of an SEO audit for businesses in detail, let’s discuss some basics.

What is an SEO Audit?

The main purpose of an SEO audit is to evaluate your website’s performance in search engines. When you hire professional SEO audit services, experts perform a detailed examination of your site. The results of the report include analyses of the different elements of your website that affect its ranking in SERPs.

For instance, auditors examine your website’s structure, content, and design to identify potential issues. Usually, the process includes:

1. Technical SEO Audit

First, experts evaluate the technical elements of your site and determine if they meet the best SEO practices. These factors include your website’s speed, mobile responsiveness, backlinks, indexation, schema markup, and crawlability.

2. On-Page and Off-Page Audit

As the name implies, an on-page audit focuses on the content of your site, such as Meta tags, descriptions, headings, and internal links. The on-page audit also examines:

• Image optimization
• Keyword placement
• Content quality

On the other hand, off-page audit involves checking SEO activities taking place externally, including:

• Link building
• Increasing social media engagement
• Encouraging branded searches

3. Local SEO Audit

This part deals with checking the relevance of your business and website content within your location. Your Google My Business page, citations, and keyword targeting are some of the factors covered in local SEO audit.

4. Backlink Audit

While quality backlinks improve your site’s visibility and rankings, harmful links negatively impact your SEO efforts. During a backlink audit, experts review all of the links pointing to your site. The report identifies the bad ones and helps you develop a better backlink strategy.

Importance of SEO Audits for Business Owners

Suppose you’re launching a new product in the market, such as a headphone for gamers. Your team has done extensive research and made a better product with improved features and quality than your competitors.
While you’re confident about your product, you may fail to hit the sales target and attract buyers if you don’t market your headphones following the right SEO practices. For instance, you may not use the right keywords, headings, or images to sell your product affecting its position in SERPs.

An SEO audit assesses the effectiveness of your website and gives suggestions regarding content and technical matters. You can develop the right strategy to improve your site’s visibility, drive more traffic, and enjoy increased conversions based on the audit report.

Remember that you may lose many potential customers if your website does not achieve a higher ranking in search results. So don’t delay the process as auditing a larger website takes more time and effort.

We suggest performing SEO audits periodically depending on your website’s traffic growth, changing algorithms and guidelines, and competition analysis.

Wondering how to conduct an SEO audit? Well, you can do it yourself using a comprehensive checklist or a free SEO audit tool. But it is best to leave the job to professionals and get help from an expert in the field.

Overview of the Benefits of SEO Audits

With regular SEO audits, you can identify and respond to sudden dips in organic traffic, assess your competitors’ SEO strategy, and improve your site’s visibility. Moreover, you can develop an effective plan to boost your website’s traffic and conversions.
Let’s break down each of these benefits in detail for better understanding.

#1: Opportunities for Smooth Crawling and Indexing

Identification of technical issues is one of the main findings of an SEO audit report. A thorough assessment of your website’s technical aspects may reveal many problems, such as:

• Crawl errors
• Broken links 
• Slow speed

Fixing these issues will help ensure smooth crawling and indexing, leading to higher chances of improving your site’s ranking.

Common Technical Issues Affecting SEO

Some of the main technical issues include:

• Crawling errors – Search engine crawlers may not be able to crawl or index some pages on your site due to technical issues, such as broken links or improper canonicalization. Consequently, these pages or, in some cases, the entire domain won’t appear in the SERPs, leading to lower rankings and traffic.
• Coding errors – Mistakes in your website’s code impact its functionality. These errors may cause frustration to your visitors and compel them to leave the site quickly. Additionally, these coding errors might sometimes cause issues for the search engine crawlers to understand the site’s structure or even block potential website resources for them.
•  Duplicate content – You may have posted similar content to different pages of your website which is a clear content duplication case and search engines can penalize your website for this. Some other mistakes may also lead to duplication of content. 
• For instance, if a page is accessible with different URL versions, it may appear as the same page to the users but search engines will treat it as multiple URLs containing the same content.
• Users may consider it the same page, but the crawlers will count it as two URLs displaying the same content. 
• Unresponsiveness and page loading issues – Potential clients and bots overlook sites that are not mobile-friendly. The page loading speed of your website impacts a user’s experience and your site’s position in SERPs.
• Security issues – Search engines give better ratings to secured websites with HTTPS protocol and SSL certificate. SEO audit highlights SSL and malware issues. Recent changes or upgrades may also cause glitches.

These technical issues affect users’ experience and lead to lower ranking in SERPs. You can ensure a swift experience for the visitors and achieve higher visibility by fixing all these issues.

#2: Enhanced Website Performance

As discussed, search engines reward well-developed websites that offer a secure and seamless user experience. Audits pinpoint existing and potential issues, giving you a clear plan to make things better.

Assessing your website’s health and functionality tells you what medicine (strategy) it needs to produce optimal results. For instance, your website’s speed and efficiency may be hindering the effectiveness of your SEO and marketing plans.

You may identify if the content is loaded quickly and ensure the queries sent to the database are not overloading your website’s server. Sometimes, poorly optimized code of your website or database may lead to a heavy load, especially when there is an increase in traffic.

These findings will help you use the right strategy to counter the problem and maintain your site for enhanced performance.

#3: Improved Search Engine Rankings

Google leads the global search engine market with a 90% share. Moreover, the estimated number of queries on Google each day is over 3.5 billion. Standing out from the competition requires you to make the right SEO strategy.

An SEO audit comprehensively evaluates your site’s structure, performance, and optimization elements that impact search engine rankings. Besides, the audit also analyzes your competitors and backlink profile and provides valuable suggestions.

Competitor Analysis

What hurts more than a breakup? Seeing your competitor at the top of search engine rankings!

Well, you can claim that position in your niche by understanding your competitors’ SEO strategies, strengths, and weaknesses. With an SEO audit, you can:

• Assess your online visibility in your industry
• Identify the main keywords your competitors use
• Highlight areas where you should focus your SEO efforts

You can leverage these insights to your advantage and devise a better and more effective plan, leading to increased visibility and organic traffic.

Backlink Analysis

The volume and authority of backlinks on a page impact its visibility and ranking in SERPs. Pages with the highest number of backlinks usually appear in the top results. Additionally, having more backlinks on a page may get you more organic traffic from Google.

Audit of your website’s backlink profile may help identify low-quality or irrelevant links originating from spam directories or link farms. Moreover, SEO audits may also analyze your competitor’s backlinks to find who is linking to their pages. Note that Google’s algorithm penalizes sites that use unethical methods to get backlinks.

#4: Increased Organic Traffic

Higher traffic on your website increases the chances of conversion and increase in sales. So, how do you bring visitors to your site and influence them to take the next step, i.e., buying your product or service?

According to a report by BrightEdge, SEO generates 1000% more traffic as compared to organic social media. Conducting an SEO audit shows if your website’s pages have the right keywords and quality content for higher visibility and increased traffic.

Integrating the Right Keywords

As a business owner, you should know what queries your target audience uses when searching for a product or service in your industry. SEO audits help you identify and integrate the right keywords to improve visibility and bring traffic to your site.

Optimizing Content

During the audit, experts assess the on-page elements of your site and give suggestions.

For instance, your meta descriptions may be too long or too short than the ideal length, i.e., 150-165 characters. Moreover, your content may lack value or have formatting issues.

You can make changes based on the suggestions in the report, such as:

• Create engaging, relevant, high-quality content
• Apply defined styles and headings (H1, H2, H3, H4)
• Divide large blocks of text into smaller sections/paragraphs
• Use bullets and numbered lists
• Add graphics (images, infographics, videos)

Optimizing the content on your website, including your brand story, product descriptions, and blog posts, may help you improve your rankings and make it to the first page of SERPs.

#5: Enhanced User Experience

Your website is more likely to attract visitors if it provides an enhanced user experience across devices. An SEO audit will identify opportunities to improve your site’s mobile responsiveness, enhance navigation, and reduce bounce rates.

Mobile-Friendliness and Responsiveness

Search engines now emphasize mobile-first indexing.
Did you know that nearly 59% of all global website traffic comes from mobile devices? Moreover, 70% of buyers make purchases through their phones.

SEO audits may help you achieve a higher ranking by recommending how to improve your website’s mobile responsiveness.

Site Navigation and Structural Clarity

An SEO audit for business websites highlights their structural and navigational weaknesses. Sometimes aesthetically pleasing websites also fail to impress visitors due to complex navigation. You can resolve these issues and improve your site’s usability.

Bounce Rates and Engagement

Your potential buyers may leave your website quickly if it displays errors or takes too long to load images. The results of an SEO audit can reveal issues that cause slow loading, such as too many plugins or large image files.

Removing these errors improves user experience encouraging them to spend more time on your site. Note that user session time and their behavior on a website are important ranking factors. When a user spends a longer time on a website, search engines perceive the content as valuable and give it a better ranking.

#6: Increased ROI and Conversion Rates

Knowing your site’s performance is the key to finding what changes you need to make to improve visibility and get Return on Investment (ROI). Measuring the effectiveness of your SEO strategy can help to understand if you’re headed in the right direction.

An SEO audit may lead to increased ROI and conversions by:

Identifying Conversion Barriers

The audit report pinpoints the areas causing you to lose potential customers, such as technical or content-related issues and complex navigation.

You can increase ROI and conversions by understanding and addressing these drop-off points.

For instance, you can optimize user experience and encourage a visitor to stay longer on your site, explore more options, and ultimately make the desired move.

Streamlining Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Strategies

SEO audit involves evaluating the on-page elements of a website, including call-to-action buttons, relevant keywords, and landing pages. You can optimize these elements and improve your CRO strategies based on the suggestions of the audit report.

For instance, if you’re targeting local markets, an SEO audit may suggest using location-specific keywords. Improved visibility in local searches may attract more qualified traffic, leading to higher conversion rates.

Tracking Performance

An SEO audit can help set and refine the metrics to measure the progress. With this data-driven approach, you can make educated decisions based on real-time insights. Moreover, you can adapt strategies leading to increased engagement, higher conversion rates, and a better ROI.

#7: Risk Mitigation and Future-Proofing

Conducting a thorough SEO audit may also play a crucial role in risk mitigation and future-proofing strategies for your business in many ways.

Proactively Preventing Potential Penalties

Your business website’s audit report can highlight potential issues that might have led to decreased rankings or penalties. Spammy backlinks, keyword stuffing, or duplicate content are a few issues that need corrective measures.

The reports may also provide insights to avoid penalties in the future and restore your website’s online presence, such as ensuring compliance with search engine guidelines and implementing ethical SEO practices.

Adaptability to Future Algorithm Changes

Google and other search engines keep updating their algorithms, affecting a website’s ranking and visibility. An SEO audit analyzes your current SEO strategies and suggests necessary adaptations, helping you to maintain or improve your search rankings.

Preparing for Future SEO Strategies

The audit report also includes competitor analysis and market research, helping you understand emerging trends. You can develop and implement robust SEO strategies aligning with the evolving industry trends and advancements.

Regular SEO audits will help you manage risks, adapt to changes, and stay competitive. This way, you can ensure preparedness for future SEO changes and thrive in the dynamic digital world.

Should I Hire an SEO Agency for an SEO Audit?

You may perform a basic SEO audit with a checklist or a tool. However, an in-depth SEO audit requires technical experience and skills. A professional agency has advanced tools to perform the audit.

Experts also provide an in-depth analysis of your website’s audit and a customized action plan to make the necessary improvements. So, hiring an SEO agency is a better option than making it a DIY project.

Conclusion

So, why is SEO audit so important? A thorough assessment of your website will give you a clear picture of what’s happening and what needs improvement. An SEO audit will help you identify and address technical and content-related issues, analyze emerging SEO trends, and adapt to search engine algorithm updates.

All these efforts will enhance your website’s performance, generate more traffic, and improve its visibility and ranking in SERPs. So, get help from an SEO agency for your website’s detailed SEO audit.