It’s about time you have yourself your good ol’ fashioned audit. No, I’m not talking about an audit in a traditional sense, so you can stop burning those receipts and allocating your funds into those secret bank accounts, I’m talking about an SEO audit for your website. Before we get into things, however, I’ll give you a brief rundown of what an audit is, and what it will do. An SEO audit essentially combs your site to find areas where you can improve your onsite and offsite SEO. You’ll be to identify broken links, pages that aren’t optimized, and duplicate content among other things. While everyone should perform an SEO audit every now and then no matter how successful your site is, below are a few warning signs that you should perform an SEO audit ASAP.
5 Reasons You Need An SEO Audit
1. Broken Links
If you notice, or if your audience is noticing a lot of broken links, it might be time for an SEO audit. Broken links are a nuisance for visitors to your site, and they can often deter viewers from staying on your site. Essentially, broken links can decrease your conversion and lose you a lot of money if you let them get out of hand. An SEO audit will essentially find all of these broken links so you can repair them as soon as possible.
2. Algorithm Updates
These updates are constantly occurring, which changes the things that you need to rank well on a SERP. Things you may have done in the past could be hurting your website after an update. When there’s been a massive change in search engine algorithms, it’s time to perform an SEO audit. This will enable you to maximize the compatibility of your site’s current SEO with that of any new algorithms. These algorithms occur pretty frequently, so make sure you’re checking in for any major updates that could hurt your site.
3. Visitors Are Down
Many website owners will notice that their traffic amount and conversion have decreased recently and immediately assume that it’s a marketing or advertising issue. However, it might be the way your website is optimized, so an SEO audit can make sure that you’re not spending money trying to fix the wrong problem. There are a few reasons that traffic could be decreased. You might need to reoptimize your pages. The way we search for things and what devices we use to search for them are constantly changing, so make sure that you’re optimizing your pages by using SEO best practices.
4. Duplicate Content
Duplicate content can strongly hurt your SEO rankings. While we hope you at least know that you shouldn’t be copying the same content onto multiple pages, there are still a few ways that you might be duplicating content without meaning to. If you have a product or service on your site that is on multiple pages, the descriptions of the content might be flagged as duplicate content. Although it can be a pain, make sure the content of your pages is at least slightly unique. One other aspect of duplicate content that many won’t realize is not using canonical tags for their site. Using the canonical tag prevents problems caused by identical or duplicate content appearing on multiple URLs. This is to prevent Google from viewing pages starting with “http,” “https,” and other URL starters as different pages with the same content.
5. Outdated Content
One final reason that you might need an SEO audit is to identify outdated content. Not only can you identify content that needs to be updated, but you can also even use an SEO audit to identify content that might be worth repurposing as a guest blog on another site, or a more extensive article on your own site. Either way, breathing new life into your content can go a long way.
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