Do you need help with SEO Audit? Let our SEO company in Atlanta team help you.
It’s no longer a secret that ranking high on Google can send a lot of organic traffic to your website, and revenue for your business.
Studies show that 95% of search engine users click on the links on the first page of Google search results and only about 8.5% leave the first page to other pages.
So the only way to stay ahead is to go the extra mile. And conducting a thorough website audit is a great way to help you figure out what’s not working, what your top competitors are doing right, and how you can improve on them to help you rank your web pages and boost your bottom line.
In this page, you’ll learn some of the processes our SEO Atlanta professionals go through to analyze our clients’ websites and help them improve their rankings on the search engines.
We identify our client’s SEO and audit goals
The very first step to effective and successful SEO audit is setting a goal for your audit. We identify our client’s SEO and audit goals. In fact, we have a clear understanding of what they want to achieve with their SEO campaign and audit.
Basically, the overall goal of an SEO audit is to help us identify areas of improvements in our client’s website so that the proper actions can be taken in order to boost organic search traffic to their website and improve their rankings optimally.
Our Atlanta SEO agency that specializes in audit takes this as our number one priority. So we basically identify the areas that need improvements. Identifying the goals provides us with the insights and directions we need to ensure the audit is a success.
An SEO audit allows us to discover exactly why our client’s website isn’t ranking or generating traffic as it should. Some of the core goals that most of our clients have include:
- Increasing revenue
- Gaining more leads
- Engaging and educating users
- Increasing brand awareness
- Improving customer satisfaction
- Increasing organic and referral traffic
- Increasing organic rankings for multiple keywords
Whatever the goal is, we keep it in mind during the audit process. To be honest, having them in mind allows us to run the campaign effectively and even quickly, as we’ll focus more on the things that matter most to our clients.
Determine KPIs
Once we’ve got our clients SEO and audit goals noted, next, we try to align the goals with their specific key performance indicators (KPIs) to use throughout the SEO audit process. The KPIs will be our focus metrics as we inspect and analyze the website.
For example, if our client’s goal is to generate more leads from search engines, one of our focus will be on the KPI that deals with the analysis of the visit-to-lead conversion path.
We’ll look at that metric to see how it’s been performing in the past 3 – 6 months, what’s working and what’s not working, why it isn’t generating results at all, what we need to improve and we analyze everything about it.
So after the analysis, the website will not only rank well, it’ll also be more likely to convert visitors to lead.
We found that each KPI is affected by certain aspects of our client’s website. So determining the KPI is an important aspect of our SEO audit process, and sets us up for success eventually.
We create a place to store your data
Once the first two steps have been completed. We start the analysis process. First of all, we create a Google spreadsheet for our client. Let me work you through how we go through this process.
You can click here to open a Google spreadsheet template document. Make a copy of it. Here is how.
When you click on the link, click on the file menu and you’ll find an option called Make a copy.
Name it whatever you want, it’s a sample of what an SEO audit data looks like. This will give you a place to store your data. You also have the option of downloading it to your PC as a Microsoft Excel document.
When you give the file a name, it will be added to your Google drive and will be accessible to you alone until you share it with someone. We make our process a lot transparent. All our clients have access to this kind of document created for their website.
To use this document, you can clear the content and add yours, you might want to leave out the titles.
To get to the main content – select the Content Audit tab.
Then select A2.
Hold the shift key and move to Z24 and then click it to select the entire section.
Now, select Edit from the Menu and click on the Delete Values option, this will clear the space for you to enter your data.
With this file, the audit process will be smooth and seamless.
We help you track your analytics
We get important data from your Google Analytics that show the health of your website for each of your pages. For example, your website’s bounce rate, visitor’s time on site, traffic, etc.
Put this information in your audit spreadsheet document in the columns starting with GA*.
You can also track social media like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and Pinterest.
It is important that you enter an action, strategy, title, and meta-description for each item. These will be automatically copied over to other tabs.
There are also other Analytics software you could use for your audit, that’s if you have been integrated with them already.
You could use Chartbeat, Woopra, Piwik, SE Ranking or Cyfe. These are also great Analytics Tools you can use for your audit. For our clients who have already integrated with these tools for a long time, it provides us with even more data to do our job effectively.
Otherwise, we could still help them integrate and watch the data over time. However, if you aren’t connected with them yet, but you have Google Analytics, we could even go ahead with that.
We track your keywords
Keyword tracking means monitoring the position of your website and web pages for the specific keywords you are watching.
Keyword tracking is so important in your audit as it allows you to analyze and discover the keywords that are doing well. And gives you a heads up on which keywords to give more attention to.
Unfortunately, keywords are secured now in Google Analytics, you can’t find valuable keywords there anymore. There are usually ‘not provided’ or ‘not set’:
That’s the reason you shouldn’t rely on Google Analytics alone. Just like we used a bunch of Analytics Tools to get the data that we can use to improve our client’s rankings and conversion rate.
One of the tools you can quickly use to get even a better result is RankTrackr. It’s such an effective tool for SEO tasks.
You know it’s almost impossible to know how you rank for a specific keyword for different locations, but RankTrackr helps you bridge the gap. It shows ranking for local and international searches, YouTube videos, etc.
There are many tools like this. You just have to find the one that you are comfortable with and use them. Just know that unlike Google Analytics which is free, they are usually not free but you could utilize the trial period to know if it’s the best choice for you.
6). Test Your Web Page Load Speed
Not only are users unhappy that your website loads slowly, search engines aren’t happy, too. And that can hurt your search visibility (organic traffic and ranking).
A 1 second delay in your page load time can lead to 11% fewer page views and a 7% loss of conversions, according to the Aberdeen group.
We use various tools to analyze and fix our client’s website speed. Some of the tools include:
- KeyCDN Speed Test
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- Pingdom
- GTmetrix
- WebPageTest
- Varvy Pagespeed Optimization
- UpTrends
- dotcom-monitor
- PageScoring
- Yellow Lab Tools
- Google Chrome DevTools
- Sucuri Load Time Tester
- Pagelocity
- YSlow
- PerfTool
You don’t have to use all the tools, but we use most of them because we discovered that some of them don’t usually get give us all the information we need to improve our client’s website speed.
However, our favorite tool is the Google Page Speed and Site Tool, which will give you a speed rating as well as make suggestions on how you can improve your website performance.
7). We audit your backlinks
Backlinks are still a major signal for search engine rankings. And of course, not all backlinks are created equal. Some backlinks have more juice than others.
As an Atlanta SEO audit agency, we audit our client’s backlinks and ensure that we disavow backlinks that are likely to hurt their rankings in search engines — such as links from spammy websites, spammy blog comments, etc.
Some of the legacy tools we use among other awesome backlink auditing tools are the Google Webmaster Tools, Moz, and Ahrefs. They allow us to find and analyze your backlinks to help boost your rankings.
We also analyze your top competitors to determine what they are doing right that you’re missing and we trace where they are getting their quality backlinks from so you can take advantage of that.
Wrap Up
That’s just the beginning. There is a lot that goes into the audit process. SEO audit is extremely important for every business that wants to grow their business through organic search traffic.
And the process has been tagged to be a lot tedious, actually, it is. The good news is that our Atlanta SEO company and Audit team will lift the burden from off your shoulder so that you can focus on other areas of your business, such as creating useful products, seeking out investors, and among many others.