The search engine visibility of a website can directly impact the level of visitor traffic it can get. Therefore, SEO positioning is of vital importance to achieving the goals of a digital marketing plan. But how do you know if the organic positioning strategies have been executed correctly? An SEO audit allows you to know the status of the site’s indexing and the improvements to be applied.
Good web positioning is essential for a site to prosper. However, many times the SEO strategies are not applied correctly or are outdated and the traffic is zero and the positioning is low. To identify the problems to be solved, an SEO audit -which will yield a report on indexing and suggested improvements- is essential to know what to focus on and how to bring the web to success. If you want to know if your website needs an audit, then we explain some signs.
What is an SEO audit and why is it important?
If you wonder what an SEO audit is, this corresponds to a comprehensive analysis of the content and structure of your website. Someone with SEO knowledge evaluates different aspects of interest such as code or indexing errors, link functionality, redirects, content quality, loading time, visits, user experience, indexing, etc.
All this to identify errors that are expressed in an organized and detailed SEO audit report.
An audit with an SEO report is very important for any site, since, if you do not carry it out, you can overlook many important aspects that can generate real headaches.
8 signs that your website needs an SEO audit
If you have a website, but you are not an SEO expert, you may not be sure whether or not you need an audit. Therefore, to help you, here are 8 signs to keep in mind:
The decrease in organic user traffic
When it comes to organic traffic, it refers to those visits to the web that come from search engines and are directly related to the content of the web. Its decline is one of the main signs that your site has SEO On-Page problems. They can be broken links, irrelevant or outdated content, among others and to determine this an SEO audit is necessary.
Incorrect positioning in search engines
Another sign that you have organic SEO problems is the poor positioning of your website in searches. When creating web content, optimizing keywords is considered one of the most important points. It is essential for it to appear as the main result in the correct searches to select words related to the content and that users use to find the type of web that is being positioned.
Outdated SEO strategies
All search engines like Google work with algorithms that determine which results appear in each search and how they are ordered taking into account different factors. Proper SEO strategies are the best way to manipulate these factors so that the page is indexed and positioned correctly and advantageously. However, these algorithms are constantly updated and although the content of a website is good and current, it may be that at the level of SEO strategies it is outdated so that positioning and traffic will fall. Because they are very changeable, what may be good today may not be tomorrow, keeping pace is difficult and an SEO audit is the best alternative.
Your website is new and you need to create a strategy
In the SEO audit report, you will see the status of your new website in an evaluation of both technical SEO, such as On-Page and Off-Page. Each one is measured with its errors and possible solutions, so that you can choose from there the appropriate strategies, either focused on improving hosting technicalities (UI strategies), content improvement (keywords, phrases), or off-page strategies (backlinks, etc.), creating a workflow from the most critical and impactful tasks to the least relevant ones.
Decreased conversion rate
When it comes to conversion rate, it refers to the measure that expresses the percentage of users who have carried out the desired action on the web, in a given period of time. That is, if your conversion rate decreases, the actions of the page are not being forceful.
Google Search Console shows you errors
There are different errors that Google Search Console can display. These may refer to a page not found (404), problems with cookies or cache (500) any type of URL that cannot be tracked by Google, it may be restricted only to users or members with a password (403), which cannot it’s indexed for content quality, a bad team site, etc. Although Google Search Console notifies you of their existence of them, this is not enough and to solve them for the most part an SEO audit report is necessary
Presence of pages not found
It refers to a link that you send to a website that does not exist. With a crawl, Google, among other things, evaluates the links on the site, verifying that they are correct and identifying errors that harm the navigability and user experience. If there are errors, the Google algorithm will negatively rate the web and position it unfavorably.
Also Read: 5 Local SEO Secrets To Improve Your Positioning
Failure in redirects, broken links, and/or No-follow
One of the main evaluations of an SEO audit is the links. For each page there may be more than 100 links and one may be the problem and you may not notice it. A website requires a correct link building for a good positioning with a balance of Dofollow (30% -40%) and Nofollow (60-70%) links and the elimination of broken links or classified as infringers that can result in the penalty of Google.
If you have a website and you want to achieve a good positioning, an SEO audit can be the solution to identify any error that you may have and that goes unnoticed. Don’t you know if you need it? Pay attention to the aspects mentioned above and decide if your website needs a deep evaluation.
