If you are reading this, chances are that you are a website owner and are interested in the professional services of an SEO company. In this case, you may be curious about the first steps that can be taken to improve the situation of your website and how a specialized firm can improve your ranking in search engine algorithms.
The digital world has made online marketing and SEO research pivotal to any business’s success. But many people don’t know exactly what steps are taken once this process begins, nor what it entails. In this article, we will explain what a complete SEO website audit consists of and why an SEO analysis can be the first step you can take to make your business successful.
What Does an SEO Analysis Consist Of?
SEO analysis is the process by which a company specializing in the field will analyze all the technical or content aspects that can influence your position in search engine results. It is also called a website SEO audit, and it is a process through which your website will be analyzed for distinct parameters that influence the success and interaction of your website with visitors. Once completed, the specialized firm you have hired will present solutions to the problems encountered and detail a plan of action based on the budget and time you wish to allocate to the process.
A website SEO audit performed by GAMIT can start from something as simple as analyzing keywords relevant to your field, using software like Semrush or Ubbersugest, and move to more complicated manners like influencing backlink creation on pages over which you have no direct control. A complete SEO website audit will therefore deal with the technical evaluation of the factors that can be changed immediately on the website you own and with the inspection of trends in your field of activity. But how can we group the types of analysis done by a website SEO audit?
Step One: On-Page SEO
On-page SEO refers to the elements on your website that you can control directly and can be optimized quickly to improve your website’s ranking in search engines as effectively as possible. Once you start the SEO website audit process, the first step is usually related to researching the keywords used in the field and analyzing them compared to the ones used in the articles on your website. What are the words most used in analytics trends when researching your area of activity? Once we know this, we can compare and overlay them with your situation. If they are not identical, we can create content using them until we see a significant difference in the obtained analytical data.
Also, when we talk about On-page SEO, we need to mention the importance of internal links to pages on your website, which should lead to other posts and services you want to highlight. Internal links make it easier for both search engines and people visiting your site to find and index the content you produce. The SEO analysis may also recommend creating a sitemap in which you index links to all the services or sections on your website.
Step Two: Off-Page SEO
This type of analysis and SEO optimization refers to elements that cannot be changed directly by you but that can be influenced in the medium or long term by the content you produce. Off-page SEO can consist of obvious elements such as promoting your products through all available communication channels, but it can also refer to more niche aspects such as creating video content separate from your business. Still, when we talk about Off-page SEO, we most often talk about the presence of backlinks. But what are they? And how do they work?
Backlinks are just links on the pages of other sites that refer to content you produce. Why would another site want to link to your site? There are several reasons. First of all, if that site uses references from your domain, then you, as the owner, have the right to ask the webmaster of that site to include the source of the content it promotes. Secondly, it is a process that benefits both sides, as the search engine algorithm rewards with better search ranking the websites that organically attract an audience from different domains. It is, in a way, a vote of confidence.
And the number of backlinks to your business can also be increased by using social media to promote your content or services. Various studies have shown that the use of blogging can increase the number of visitors to a website by over 50%, which can be huge for your website’s profitability and steady increase in ranking.
Step Three: Technical SEO
The last and most complex step of a website SEO audit has to do with the technical side of your business. This can consist of several more or less complex improvements that will enhance the end-user experience. What is the speed at which your website pages load? If it takes more than a few seconds, then quite possibly, the underlying architecture of it is outdated, and some experts in the field should rewrite the code. And it’s not a step you should ignore because page load speed is one of the main reasons people leave a website before they find what they’re looking for.
Another aspect you should be concerned about is the security of your website. Besides the fact that your visitors must access a site where their data is safe, an approach that puts cybersecurity first is also rewarded by search engines. At a minimum, your pages should load in the HTTPS protocol, where S stands for secure, and which ensures that the information of the person accessing the site is encrypted.
The last but perhaps the most crucial aspect to consider when discussing website technical functionality is the interface and mobile usability. Do you have a website that loads quickly on a desktop and is full of resources that your customers appreciate? Great, but if the same functionality doesn’t apply to mobile, you will only lose out.
Most of today’s internet traffic comes from mobile devices, and depending on the field of activity, this can seriously affect you. To improve the mobile experience of users, an SEO expert can make use of various tools, such as Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP for short, which is a framework created specifically to improve page load speed even on devices that don’t benefit from the same raw power as a desktop computer.
Further Actions Required
After completing a website SEO audit, the firm you have hired will present you with a plan that sketches the short-term priorities of the SEO program, outlines the resources you want to invest in the process, presents you with a timeline of the future traffic and revenue you can expect in the coming months, and last but not least, devises a plan to maintain the upward trend in visitors once it begins. What’s important to remember is that SEO is not a process where results are seen overnight. It usually takes at least three months from the start of the action for the results to show up in an obvious way, but once they do, with careful planning, they are here to stay.
A firm specializing in SEO should have in its ranks plenty of experts to attack each problem of your website from a different perspective, and one of the most complex problems we can encounter on a website is the lack of specific content that takes advantage of the availability of discovered keywords. Maybe you have a website that deals with the marketing of certain products, and you never considered writing detailed descriptions for them, or perhaps this requires too much effort. A professional SEO company can take care of this and use specialized content writers to write texts that will push your search engine rankings to a much higher level.
Money Well Spent
An SEO analysis often takes between two and six weeks, but there’s a chance this timeframe could be shorter if your website is smaller. After completing the website SEO audit process, one of the recommendations might be to investigate the competition in your field and thoroughly research the keywords they use. Your search engine rankings will be analyzed against them, and with the help of SEO analysis software such as Google Search Console or SemRush, we will discover the sites from which they benefit from backlinks.
The process of analyzing the content of your website may seem complicated, and most of the time, it is, which is why it is recommended to call on the professional services of a company that has years of experience in this field, and that can back up their successes with some case studies from satisfied clients. Nevertheless, the results almost always appear, and in the medium or long term, the return of investment gained from using such a service makes the process worthwhile.
