If you’re planning on expanding your efforts online, it’s necessary to maximise SEO efficiency. If not, you can lose visibility and get left behind by the competition. For many businesses, SEO is one of the main focuses when developing their online marketing strategy. This isn’t a surprise, given how much your business could benefit from enhancing website SEO.

Ignoring SEO could mean losing sales, which could be detrimental to your business. A digital marketing agency uses specialised tools and can perform an audit to assess your SEO strategy and make suggestions, but until then let’s look at some of the things you can do to perform your own audit.

How Does SEO Work?

There’s no point in posting content if your audience isn’t interested in it or if it isn’t relevant to your brand or target market. Old strategies and tactics, like keyword stuffing, won’t achieve the results you’d like, and factors that count towards rankings have changed over the years.

Search engines, like Yahoo and Google, use algorithms to assess and compare your website against their ranking factors, determining how relevant and usable your site is. This process is known as crawling, and each page of your website will be crawled to make sure your content is relevant, legitimate, and useful.

Once each page has been assessed, it will be ranked; rank determined where your page will show up on the results of search engines. SEO criteria are constantly evolving, so it’s necessary to perform audits and update your SEO whenever algorithms are updated or changed.

When criteria changes, your content should be updated to ensure that it remains relevant and ranks higher on search engine results. Professionals at a digital marketing agency can go through your content and make sure it is all relevant, saving you from the hassle of constantly updating old content.

What’s an SEO Audit?

SEO audits are extremely useful, allowing you to check the health of websites and ensure that they are performing as well as they should be. Ideally, SEO audits should be done after making major changes to your website or each 4 to 6 months.

How to Perform an SEO Audit

If SEO is a large part of your online marketing strategy, it’s essential that you get an audit performed at least twice each year. It can take some time to perform your own audit, but some of the things you can do include:

  • Crawling your website
  • Manually searching your site
  • Look for duplicates
  • Make page titles & tags relevant
  • Check meta descriptions
  • Organise content
  • Manage external & internal links

It may not always be possible to perform an SEO audit for your business’ website, but these steps can help you get started. If you’re looking for a way to get a full SEO audit from professionals, speak with representatives at a digital marketing agency to find the right team to work with you and improve the SEO of your commercial business’ online presence using your website.

Author's Bio: 

Hazel Sansbury is a content writer and a copywriter specializes in Fitness, Health, and Legal writing.