Regular SEO Audits Help to Prevent Issues Before They Become Problems
Be honest with yourself, you don’t fix what you don’t measure.
SEO is not something that you can just do once and forget about it. It requires ongoing work, and while the results that you get does improve over time, you do need to keep tabs on your website to make sure that SEO issues don’t creep in over time.
Much like what I discussed in an article on SEO metrics to track, knowledge is power, and doing regular SEO audits of your website, especially if you are updating it regularly will help you from missing any issues that may have cropped up on your website.
Tools like SEMRush or Screaming Frog can crawl your website and help you to identify any issues that you have either not seen yet or have come up. You may have taken care of the issues that we have previously discussed, such as optimizing for mobile devices.
However, if you are not regularly auditing your website you are opening yourself up to having to do everything all over again as small issues pile up.
Trying to manage every aspect of your business, including SEO, can lead to burnout and subpar results. You don’t have to do it alone. You can call in experts like us to help you.
What Should I Be Looking for With an On-Page Audit?
When you are doing an SEO Audit, look for issues with things like missing alt tags on images, duplicate meta tags, or issues with page structure, such as out of order header tags, broken links, and more.
One of the nice things that Screaming Frog does is highlight issues for you, giving you things to prioritize. Incredibly helpful if you are just starting out and trying to make sense of every aspect of SEO.
To start identifying issues to address you can click on the “Issues” and sort them by type and severity.
Once larger issues are sorted, you start moving on to opportunities to take advantage of.
Just be aware that some issues, like “no indexing” issues can be deceptive, as there might be good reason for a page to not be crawled and indexed.
Tracking Your Audits
Once you have found and identified the issues that your website has. You’ll want to go down the list and fix each issue checking them off one by one.
For larger sites this may take more time and be something that can’t be fixed quickly, for smaller sites the fixes could be quick and easy.
Either way you should be tracking the issues addressed and reassessing your website to make sure that updates to your website’s software or plugins and changes you have made have not added to the list of problems.
As you do make these improvements and are tracking the changes made. Look at when you make a change to your website and note if you see a later improvement in your metrics in Google Analytics.
If not, you may want to start looking for more user facing issues such as design or useability.
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