You have put your heart and soul into building a website for your brand. You have filled it with amazing content and steered clear of keyword stuffing. And yet, your site is failing to secure a good rank and get the traffic that you want. Wondering what to do in this situation? Well, run an SEO audit and fix the issues that are affecting your site. On that note, read on to know more about the benefits of it.

1. Improve the overall performance of your site

The main reason for so many algorithm changes of Google is that it wants to deliver the finest user experience. Thus, Google will only rank those sites highly that can reach up to the level of experience that it wants to offer.

Now, user experience is a culmination of a lot of factors, right from having relevant content to being mobile friendly. Of course, no user would want to stick to a site that isn’t easy to navigate, takes a long time to load, and is full of broken links. Thus, you need an SEO audit to check the overall health of your website, so that the bounce rate is decreased at the earliest.

2. Understanding the keywords you’re ranking for

When an SEO audit service tells you which keywords you are ranking for, you might be quite surprised. But you are not the only one! Without an audit, most website owners keep on having a wrong idea about their organic presence in Google. As such, it is important to know which keywords you are ranking for or not ranking for before you can consider optimizing your content.

Remember that even the most informative and well-written content will suffer if it isn’t properly keyword optimized. So, one thing is for sure: your target audience might not even find your content with regular SEO audits.

3. Knowing which keywords are getting the traffic

Your websites need to rank well, but they also need to attract the right kind of traffic. And your keywords have a major role to play in that. A situation might arise where you rank well for a particular keyword, but still have no significant jump in traffic. It is an indication that your chosen keyword has a lower search volume or the target audience is not searching for your keyword frequently enough.

In this scenario, you need an SEO audit to understand the kind of keywords you need to both rank well and attract suitable traffic. Once you can leverage the right keywords, along with high-quality content, the web traffic will increase.

4. Rectifying the existing SEO mistakes on the site

In order to get good ranks, you need to capture the best backlinks, keywords, meta descriptions, content strategy, and so on. The list is truly long and exhaustive! Regardless of the effort that you have put in your SEO strategy, there is a high chance that there are still some mistakes that are dragging your rank down.

In the last five years, there has been a sea-change in Google’s algorithms. Gone are the days when you could cramp as many keywords on a page as possible and get a good rank. Now, such keyword spamming can drop your ranks significantly. Thus, you need auditing to know about such trends in SEO.

5. Enhancing the site structure for better indexing

If you have an easily navigable site, with a faster loading time, and great content, you’re off to a good start. But you also need to pay attention to your website structure to keep that momentum going.

As the search engine crawlers try to index your site for ranks, they consider how you have internally linked different pieces of content because that shows the authority and value of a site.

When you run an audit, they will not just focus on external links. In fact, they will also look at internal links between different pages on your site. For instance, if you are a cosmetics brand, your blogs can have separate sections like:

• Makeup tips for beginners,
• Makeup mistakes to avoid,
• Product guides, and so on

Google will find it much easier to just navigate and index the pages this way.

6. Keeping an eye out for the competition

You don’t just run SEO audits on your website. In fact, it’s equally important to run an SEO audit on your competitor’s websites to understand their weaknesses and strengths. Through this process, you will get to learn some important facts about your competition, such as:

The keywords they rank for –

You can figure out the keywords that your competition is ranking for and trying ranking better for them. Additionally, you can bank on their missed prospects and rank for the keywords they are not targeting.

Backlinks –

Once you know who are linking your competitors, you can approach the same sites to get backlinks. Who knows, you might even replace that competitor’s link with your own!

Strategy –

Assessing your competitor’s strategies is all about getting an idea about what to do and what to avoid. Are they excelling at content and getting lots of backlinks? Work on your content strategy. Do they have a wonderful mobile website? Time to polish up yours.

7. Planning the future course of action

Think of SEO audits as a type of customized strategy meant to get you better ranks, better traffic, and more business. It is an action that works not just for now, but also for the future.

As you keep making the necessary changes as per the latest industry standards, algorithm changes, and competitor assessments, your site improves. It looks and works in a much more polished manner and delivers excellent user experience. The visitors keep coming back to the site because of the fresh content, great user experience, faster loading speed, and the absence of any broken links.

By now, you have a fair idea about why SEO audits are so important for your business website. Time to go and hire an auditing agency!