Essentials of an SEO Audit for Businesses
One of the most impactful strategies that companies can utilize to improve their website traffic is conducting regular SEO audits. An average SEO audit can take anywhere between a few hours to six months, depending on what the company is trying to fix and achieve. Since it’s a relatively long process, it’s important for companies to prepare before starting the audit to ensure that the entire process is going to be addressing the right issues, is organized from start to finish, and saves as much time as possible. That means before a company decides to conduct an SEO audit it’s first important to outline the goals of that audit and which problems the company is trying to solve. It should also determine the metrics that are going to be used to measure the effectiveness of the audit, decide on a time limit for the website’s performance audit, a plan for data analysis, and the tools that are going to be used.
Meta Descriptions and Titles
If the meta descriptions and titles on a website aren’t done well, Google actually ends up rewriting them completely. In fact, according to reports, Google ends up rewriting website meta descriptions over 60% of the time, which means companies that aren’t using their website meta descriptions to share important keywords or main selling points with search engines are missing out. The meta description is what invites potential website visitors that are simply scrolling through search results to a company’s website. It should be short yet detailed enough that it will hook potential website visitors and get them to open up the website. TO optimize meta descriptions and titles, companies should be using an on-page SEO checker tool that’s going to generate meta description ideas and optimize every page. Then they can review those ideas, remove any unnecessary information, and optimize their SEO.
User Experience
Search engines are becoming increasingly smarter, which has turned the user experience into an important website ranking factor with them. In fact, user experience is an important factor in whether consumers decide to make a purchasing decision too. That means if a company’s user experience isn’t up to par, the website ranking and SEO efforts will end up suffering. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways that companies can improve the user experience of their business website. Those improvements can include anything from the color scheme of the website, the headings, and fonts, the images and videos that are used across pages, the forms, and more.
Indexing
If a company has noted that its website traffic has suddenly stopped performing as well as it used to, it might be a sign of some common indexing errors, such as missing pages, duplicate content and crawl issues, 404, or server errors. Other things that can cause a website to have indexing issues include too many permanent redirects, low-quality content, slow loading time, or a lack of mobile-friendliness. There are several tools that companies can use to figure out what’s wrong with their website, which makes it easier to fix any indexing issues once the problem has been pinpointed.
