How to Audit Your Website Before Starting an SEO Campaign

Do you feel like your SEO campaign hasn’t been performing to your liking?

Are you a business owner that’s ready to start taking SEO seriously?

Regardless of where you find yourself, the answer is clear: you need to do an SEO audit for your website.

Doing A Website Audit For Your SEO Campaign

You may need help putting together a plan, but going to an agency with a list of things you’d want to improve SEO wise can do a lot to help the process.

If you’re working with an agency they’ll do a thorough audit of their own, but this audit can give you an idea of where your website needs the most help.

Be sure to take extensive notes on whatever you’re examining to get the most out of it. Once you’re ready, make sure you cover those areas when you’re performing your audit.

Look At Page Meta’s

You may not know what a meta description is, but you’ve probably seen them many times when you’ve performed online searches. Meta descriptions are short text descriptions that come below the page titles in search results.

They’re a great way for people to know if the page they’re viewing is relevant or not, and they’re also a way for Google to learn more about the page.

Think of your meta’s as 50-300 character long descriptions that can sum up page content for someone that’s reading it.

People hoping to build a strong SEO campaign will pay special attention to their meta’s. Putting the right keywords in the descriptions can help increase your ranking for certain terms. Including a strong call to action (CTA) can also encourage higher click-through rates (CTR’s).

Check Your Current Standing

Before you make any SEO campaign plans, assess how your website is currently performing.

Take some time to utilise Google Search Console and see how your website ranks. See if your site is currently being crawled or indexed.

This may sound strange, but it’s possible to have a website that isn’t properly listed or indexed on Google. Your site may have been crawled a long time ago before you had better content.

After you’ve done that, it’s time to check out analytics.

Google Analytics can tell you a lot about how your current site is performing. You can see which pages get the most hits, what links get the most clicks, referral traffic, and how much time people spend on your website.

You can also utilise tools like Semrush. They can give you a real understanding of how your website currently does or doesn’t figure on the competitive landscape of your niche. You can make a couple of searches for free on Semrush without signing up for a plan or better still take advantage of their free trials, click the banner below.

See What The Competition Is Up To

You won’t be able to outrank your competitors if you don’t know their current rank or what keywords they’re bidding on.

A competitive analysis can tell you everything you need to know about competitor keywords, estimated monthly search traffic, inbound links, domain authority, and anything you’d want to know about SEO.

There are plenty of free online tools you can use to see what the competition is doing. If you’re really interested then check out pro tools such as Semrush or Moz Pro.

The key to making a competitive analysis effective is to keep it consistently updated. Check in on it every couple of months to make sure that you’re still making the right SEO decisions.

Examine Your Title Tags

All kinds of content are important when you’re planning an SEO campaign, but title tags may be one of the most critical aspects of your campaign.

Title tags don’t just show up in search results, they’re also the text that’s displayed in tabs when people open website pages.

Like meta descriptions, these short snippets of text should be viewed as a quick way for you to tell people and search engines about the page content they’re about to read.

Don’t make the mistake of making every title tag on your website the name of your business. It won’t do much to boost the SEO ranking of your business, and it’ll take up valuable space that could be improving your campaign.

The easiest way to make the title tag descriptive and use the keywords you’re trying to rank for is to place them in the title tag. Choose the one keyword you think best fits the page content.

Check Your Site Speed

Site speed is an important ranking factor for Google and other search engines.

Search engines don’t just want to display sites that best fit people’s search terms. They also want to display websites that work well.

A slow website speed has nothing to do with internet connection, and everything to do with the website itself. Long server response times, 404 errors, and slow page loading times can all make your site load time slow.

Google’s PageSpeed Insight tool is free to use, and a great way to see how fast your site is performing. Alternatively, check out GTMetrix which can process speed tests from various locations and save your speed test history so you can track improvements.

Analyse Your Keywords

When was the last time you took time to refresh the keywords you’re aiming for in your SEO campaign? Can you remember when you checked to see how you’re ranking?

Keywords are the lifeblood of your SEO campaign. They’re going to be what people use to search for your business, so you need to make sure that you’re aiming for them properly.

Google Search Console or Analytics can easily tell you what you’re already ranking for, and what you should try to rank for in the future.

Analyse Your Keyword Usage

You’re pleased with the keywords in your SEO campaign and don’t see much room for improvement. You may be happy with the words you’re using, but that doesn’t mean that you’re using them correctly.

Keyword density still plays a major role in search rankings. Keywords that only appear once in the body copy won’t do much for SEO, but the opposite of that can be even worse for rankings.

Content that has too many keywords can look “keyword stuffed” to search engines.

In the past keyword stuff was a popular black hat SEO technique that would bring in more traffic. Google heavily penalises pages it views as being keyword stuffed.

The key to properly using keywords for your SEO campaign is to use them sparingly. Put them in your title tags and metas and sprinkle them throughout the copy, but don’t load your page with them.

Check Out Content

Now that we’ve dealt with some of the nuts and bolts of the average SEO campaign, it’s time to look into the actual content of your website.

Are your photos high resolution and properly cropped, or do they look low resolution and stretched?

Is your content well written, or is it full of typos and errors?

Sites that rank well aren’t just SEO powerhouses, they’re also well-built and look appealing to the viewer.

If you feel like your site could use some help, there are plenty of web designers and content writers you can lean on.

Next Steps

After you’ve completed your SEO audit, you’ve only just begun your journey into proper digital marketing.

After your SEO audit, you’ll need to add new and improve your existing content, make sure that your website looks great and runs well, and make periodic improvements.

Contact us so we can be a part of your digital marketing team.