Why Do Small Businesses Need an SEO Audit Regularly?

In this modern world, people rely on search engines when looking for information, services, or products they need. A report shows that Google, the biggest search engine today, is estimated to process about 63,000 queries every second. That’s up to 5.6 billion searches a day and over 2 trillion searches a year. 

With online searches becoming a common practice, you want your business to receive a high-ranking search result to reach potential customers and thrive. This is why most businesses plan and execute a solid SEO strategy. That said, any effective SEO strategy will require a regular SEO audit. 

In this article, we’ll cover the basics of SEO auditing, enumerate its various benefits, and how often you need it. 

Understanding An SEO Audit

An SEO audit is the full analysis of all factors that impact your website’s visibility and ranking in search results. Doing an SEO audit helps in creating an implementation plan to improve SEO performance. 

In general, an SEO audit reviews three elements:

Technical Analysis

A technical audit allows you to look at the bigger picture of your web page elements including URL structure, site speed, crawlability, page speed, responsiveness, duplicate content, canonical tags, and more. 

On-Page Review

On-page SEO audit deals with the content of your site. The main goal of doing an on-site SEO audit is to help search engines understand the meaning of your web content. On-page SEO reviews may include checking and optimizing titles, descriptions, text formatting, headings, content and image SEO, internal linking structure, and more.

Off-Page Analysis

Off-page refers to techniques and methods you can use to promote your site on the internet. At its core, an off-page SEO audit focuses on checking and optimizing link building. 

The Benefits Of Regular SEO Auditing

Let's discuss these in detail, one by one.

Improve The Overall Website Performance

It’s no secret that search engines like Google love healthy websites. Website performance is a key factor in search rankings. By running an SEO audit, you can find weaknesses in your SEO strategy or flag up any problems in your websites such as issues with sitemaps or unresponsive design. Also, it can bring up any security issues that your site may be facing. 

Even if you think that your website and SEO strategy is already impressive, there’s a chance that you’re still using traditional and old-fashioned methods that are no longer supporting or even pushing you lower on search ranking. 

Increase User Satisfaction

In connection with the previous point, by improving your overall website performance, you can also increase user satisfaction. 

With SEO auditing, you can check for issues and implement SEO recommendations and solutions that will make your website user-friendlier and increase user engagement. 

Analyze Competitor

What’s worse than not ranking high on search engines? Seeing your competitors dominating the search results, which also means you’re losing customers and revenue. 

By performing an SEO checkup, you’ll be able to spy on your competitors and learn their secrets. You’ll be able to identify your competitors’ top-performing keywords, backlink sources, content types, most popular pages, and overall SEO strategy.

By learning and taking advantage of their experience and tactics through competitive SEO audits, you’ll be able to apply effective strategies that can help you rank better and improve your search position. 

Understanding The Right Keywords

Keywords are one of the most important aspects of your SEO strategy. By doing an SEO audit, you’ll be able to understand which keywords are bringing you traffic and converting leads and those that are only wasting your resources. 

SEO audit allows you to review and optimize your keyword research and planning for SEO and website content. It helps you understand the right terms and variations that your target customer is using. This way, you can optimize your content accordingly and get found on search results. 

Plan For Your Next Moves

With SEO audits, you’ll be able to know where you are with your SEO efforts. It allows you to track your progress in improving your SEO strategy but also gives you a better idea of what you should do next. 

Since SEO is a long-term and continuous digital marketing process, SEO auditing allows you to monitor your development, catch potential opportunities and plan for your future campaigns. 

How regular should an SEO Audit be?

Doing an SEO audit for your business is like spring cleaning. You don’t have to do it every day. But if you avoid it, you’ll soon notice issues.

How often you need to do an SEO checkup will depend on several factors. These may include:

Size of Your Business Website

In general, a larger website with numerous contents published every month will require more frequent audits than smaller websites. 

Current SEO Health

A website with poor performance or SEO health score will need more frequent audits until it reaches the minimum threshold. 

Industry Benchmarks

If your competitor is keeping on top of their SEO ranking, you’ll need more frequent audits to level up your SEO game. 

The Need for Conversion and Web Traffic

If you have a website that relies heavily on online revenue, for instance, an e-commerce store, then SEO issues will need to be addressed more quickly through SEO audits.

The general rule of thumb is that small, local businesses can complete an SEO audit every 6 months. However, larger service websites or eCommerce sites with regular content marketing schedules and lots of moving parts will require monthly audits to catch and correct errors. 

In addition, you also need to perform an SEO audit when there’s a significant change to ranking algorithms or your website itself, or if you see a significant fall in your organic traffic and ranking. 

Take Away

You may have a powerful SEO strategy in place, but without regular auditing, you may be missing out on important metrics and opportunities and/or losing on key areas in your SEO campaign.

SEO audits allow you to diagnose issues with your strategies and fix them to earn better visibility, ranking, and traffic to ultimately boost your conversions and bottom line.