Businesses will spend an estimated $80 billion on SEO this year. And the SEO budgets keep on rising annually with Google in firm control of the search sector and PPC ads increasing in cost.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the core foundation of any digital marketing strategy. With over 1.7 billion websites out there on the internet, it takes optimization to ensure your business ranks high in the search engine results pages (SERPs). That’s why an SEO audit is so important for your website.
Over 51% of all website traffic comes from organic search traffic. Without SEO, your website isn't going to rank on page one of the SERPs. If your business site isn't ranked, then it's going to miss out on that fifty-one percent or more portion of the traffic.
Here are five reasons you need to take a look at the existing SEO on your website before doing a full redesign:
1. An SEO Audit Will Find Issues With Your Site
If you want to do a full redesign of your site, you’ll need to set aside a portion of your budget for the custom web design cost. However, before you take that step, you need to first invest in an SEO audit that’ll save you money in the long run.
An SEO audit can find existing issues with your website that a redesign may not fix. These issues can include things like:
- Broken links
- Page title issues
- Bad keywords
- Unlinked pages
- Duplicate content
There are many other factors that a search engine optimization audit can focus on as well, but those are some of the top SEO concerns.
There are several different variations in which your web address could display and how a person could type the address into the browser to find your business.
These variations are:
- http://www.domainname.com
- http://domainname.com
- https://www.domainname.com
- https://domainname.com
3. An SEO Audit Will Make Sure All of Your Website's Pages Are Indexed
If one of the pages on your website, or your entire website, isn't indexed, then it'll have a negative impact on your rankings in the SERPs. You can't rank for a keyword if Google hasn't crawled the content.
To do this, you can make use of Google Search Console. Another option is to type "site: domainname.com" into your browser. (Note: Don't include the apostrophes and change the domain name to your site's address.)
Once you do that, the web browser will display how many pages are indexed in the results.
4. You'll Be Able to Make Sure Your Brand Name Is Ranking
Google the name of your business. Unless it's generic or brand new, you should appear in the search results, hopefully on page 1.
If you find that you rank low in the SERPs because a word in your domain name was too generic, there are steps you can take to improve it. You'll want to work on increasing branded backlinks, get citations on business directories, and have a Google Business listing that appears on Google Maps and searches. Getting your website mentioned and linked in the top 10 business directories will significantly help your site SEO.
5. An SEO Audit Will Help You Remove Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is frowned upon by Google. So much so that, if it discovers your site contains a lot of it, you can be penalized by the algorithm titled Panda. The penalization will be that your ranking will drop in Google searches. So take duplicate pages and blog posts seriously and make eliminating them a top priority. And if you see another blogger or webmaster copying your content, use whatever legal means necessary to get them to remove it and/or link back to your page as the original publisher.
Do an SEO Audit Often
Your website is the foundation of your online presence and digital marketing efforts. You need to conduct an SEO audit every few months to ensure your website remains in proper working order.
We hope you found this article helpful in explaining why an SEO audit is so important. Before you go, take a moment to browse our website for other related search engine optimization tips. Click on the SEO or Web Dev section of our website right now to learn how to grow on Google!
