If you’ve been looking into increasing viewers of your site, you may have heard about needing an SEO audit. However, not everybody understands even what SEO is, much less why they need an SEO audit – so here’s why you need to SEO audit your site ….
What is a SEO audit?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of influencing a site’s listing in search engines (especially Google) by adopting several techniques.
A SEO audit is an analysis of a site’s existing performance as it appears to Google (or other search engines) , often identifying areas for improvements or problems.
Why it’s important to do a SEO audit before starting any SEO
Of prime importance with respect to SEO is strategy; SEO is more a collective strategy of specific activities or improvements rather than one specific task. More to the point, it’s important to view SEO as not just a ‘one off’ activity but an immediate, short-term and long-term process.
In addition, there’s a lot of spurious information and advice about SEO that could prove wasteful if implemented. For example, Google constantly changes its criteria about how it views sites, so activities that worked for SEO even a year ago may not be as effective today.
When a SEO audit is undertaken, it’s measured against the best practice for SEO today. Therefore it’s vital to undertake a SEO audit BEFORE implementing any SEO practice – not least to avoid wasted effort.
Worse still, if you were to implement SEO BEFORE doing an audit it could even negatively impact your site’s visibility and importance to Google.
Let’s illustrate this with an example – keyword stuffing in META descriptions.
Poor SEO – Keyword stuffing
In years gone by, common SEO advice was to put as many keywords as possible into a site Title or META description (the short space for words that Google shows in the page listings).
The theory was, it would show to Google what the site was about by ramming as many keywords as possible into its allowed word limit – and it worked.
However, as it always does, Google worked out what was going on – and changed it’s crawling analysis to view this practice as negative.
Today, Google prioritises content and user experience of a site extremely highly, so a site that uses a lot of keywords (rather than explanatory text or natural sentence structure) would actually be penalised by Google.
You need to know your SEO problems BEFORE you can fix them
Whilst it’s true there are some SEO practices that every site could benefit from, the reality is that they may not be the ones that can influence your site to Google the most.
Your aim in implementing SEO is to spend your time and energy into SEO practices that will benefit your site, rather than generic SEO advice.
Conclusion: A SEO audit will highlight the major SEO issues your site has
Your site may have specific SEO issues that only a SEO audit could identify. It’s important that you rely on expert SEO advice relevant to your site – rather than generic advice or even articles or books on SEO.
Undertake a SEO audit, and you’ll know exactly what you need to focus on improving to bring the most traffic to your site.
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