The Top 4 Aspects of a Website Audit Service for SEO

Overview

With the task of impactfully implementing a digital marketing strategy often becoming overwhelming, a Website audit service for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a great way to get started. 

This post will highlight 4 key aspects that will get you well on your way to an enhanced online presence, and how those aspects will ultimately drive decisions for your overall digital marketing strategy along the way. 

It’s important to not just know how an audit can help you but also how a website audit will help determine decisions that are made within your organization. Each aspect that this post goes through will break down 2 key areas; The value it provides as well as how it will help drive decisions across your overall digital marketing strategy. 

Let’s get started.

Website speed

The value of website speed

We talk about this a lot, but competing for user attention has never been more difficult and the challenge will only continue to grow in the years to come. 

According to Hobo, 53% of users dropped off of a website if it took longer than 3 seconds for a page to load. Essentially you have less than 3 seconds to ensure that the user doesn’t drop off, and then you have the challenge of ensuring that they’re provided with value once they decide to stay.

With website speed being just the first part of the battle, it’s crucial to continuously test the speed of your pages. GTmetrix is an industry leading analyzer and will provide insight on your site speed, as well as recommendations for improvement. 

How website speed will drive decisions

Once an analyzer is run on your site, you’ll receive steps for improvement such as:

• Optimize images
• Leverage browser caching
• Defer Javascript 
• Leverage a CDN (Content delivery network) 

Some of the recommendations will fall outside of your skillset and you’ll need a marketing consultant or developer to help you address the issue, but the point is that you now have actionable steps to take in order to improve your website.

The next time you’re developing a landing page or working with someone to help you develop your website, you’re more prone to ensure that all of the issues you faced the first time you ran an analyzer on your website are addressed within the development of that page.

You’re now putting yourself in a position to continuously monitor and enhance, rather than fix past issues. Better yet, being proactive rather than reactive when it comes to providing a better website experience for your audience. 

Keywords and Competitive Research 

The value of keywords and competitive research 

You’re now confident in the speed of your website; It’s time to determine how to put the website audit service for SEO to work by determining which keywords your top competitors go after, and establishing a plan of how to outrank (take some of their traffic) them and more effectively deploy the keywords. 

There are many audit tools out there that enable you to enter in a competitors domain and obtain the following insights:

• The keywords they’re targeting
• Traffic that it’s generating for them 
• How difficult the keyword will be to rank for
• Similar keywords based on their traffic/industry

An example of one of these tools that we use to run audits is SEMrush. The audit tools provide so much value, but a lot of organizations are turned off due to the cost (these tools can range $400+ per month to use their features). 

To avoid paying these fees, you may opt to schedule a consultation with a marketing company that already pays for these tools regardless and can help you meet your goals. 

How keywords and competitive research will drive decisions

The first part of keyword research is honing in on exactly what value your organization provides to the customer. Disregard buzzwords that are used within your industry because chances are your customer doesn’t care about them and large organizations are already aggressively competing for those buzzwords anyway.

Example: 

Within the technology industry the term ‘digital transformation’ has become incredibly popular and large tech manufacturers compete for outranking one another for these terms. 

The problem? The customer isn’t searching online for digital transformation, they’re more likely searching for a technology consultant or IT provider. 

Concluding, identifying keywords and performing competitive research will help you determine what keywords your organization should be targeting, and effectively implement a content creation strategy that captures audience (and Search Engine) attention.

Tracking Backlinks

The value of tracking and obtaining quality backlinks

A backlink is an additional source of driving website traffic. With the E-A-T ‘algorithm’ (the introduction of this post will further explain what E-A-T is) in mind, it’s important to obtain high quality backlinks that drive traffic to your site from valuable websites. 

Leveraging the appropriate website audit service for SEO will help you keep track who is linking to your site and whether or not those links are valuable to your business. Here’s what that looks like.

Above you’ll see a page that is linking to an article that we recently published; The AS represents authority score, and the closer it is to 100 the better authority the website has. By virtue of a website with a higher authority linking to our website, they’re passing along higher quality traffic that ultimately increases the authority of the domain that they’re linking to (in this case, Rubicom Digital) as well.

You essentially have two ways of gaining backlinks:

1. An organization finds your content online and determines it’s valuable to reference within their own website
2. You generate backlinks via an outreach strategy

Acquiring backlinks is a difficult task, but it’s a necessity as you seek to navigate your way up in the search engine ranks. That is why it’s best to have the two methods mentioned above complement each other.

How tracking backlinks will drive decisions

Also within the website audit service, you’ll receive recommended backlink targets. In other words, the software will recommend companies with established authority in your industry that would be worthwhile in your efforts to obtain additional backlinks.

From those recommendations, you can execute on an outreach strategy with a goal of not just increasing the authority and traffic of your website, but also providing value to those websites you’re targeting for a backlink.

Rather than just attempting to have those sites link to your article, you’ll want to establish high quality content that is valuable to those target sites as well so that the relationship is mutually beneficial. 

Just by virtue of needing to provide more value to obtain backlinks, your organization will be forced to create higher quality content. 

Position Tracking 

The value of position tracking

Now that you’ve optimized your site speed, have done competitor research, are tracking backlinks, and determined that you must create more high quality content, it’s time to start tracking where you rank within search engines.

When first starting out, this can be frustrating as you’ll likely want to see better results than those that initially show up but don’t be discouraged by the task at hand. 

The appropriate website audit service for SEO will track where your predetermined keywords rank, as well as keywords or phrases that you have a goal of targeting. The above example shows a keyword that has moved up 19 places within search engines over the past week (from 53 to 34) and a keyword that has dropped 7 places as well (from 43 to 50).

Showing up within the first page of Google usually means you need to be in the top 1-10, so there’s clearly some more work to do here for the two keywords being analyzed. 

While monitoring position tracking is incredibly important, it can be frustrating when you see rapid fluctuations within a keyphrase; It’s encouraged to not get overwhelmed by a position drop but to rather focus on long term trends.

How position tracking will drive decisions

By ignoring daily fluctuations and focusing on keywords that steadily do better or worse over time, you’ll be able to further dive into which keyphrases did well, and why; And additionally, which keyphrases didn’t do so well within rankings, and why. 

Within your position tracking strategy, you’ll be able to better target competitor keywords, produce higher quality content based on what has produced the best results, and ultimately continue to enhance audience visibility as you become better at delivering value to your audience.

This aspect is where the auditing software really shines at it gives significant detail behind where you stand within search engines, and actionable steps you can take to get even better. 

Deliver Value

The majority of this post discussed technical factors that you can leverage within a website audit service, however the underlying thing that will help you rank well more than any other aspect is providing quality that drives more value for your audience.

Website speed, keyword and competitor research, tracking backlinks, and position tracking are incredibly valuable, but are meant to complement and drive decisions that ultimately help you deliver more value to your target audience. 

Websites that continue to monitor their website performance with the end goal of making decisions to provide a better user experience will outperform even the most tactical search engine optimization professionals that fail to strive for user-value.

Contact us to learn more or get started with implementing your audit for decision making.