To be successful, a business’s website needs to provide its target audience with valuable and relevant information, services, and/or products. It also needs to be visible and usable. Furthermore, the website needs to have sufficient ranking within a search engine for it to even show up in organic searches. So how does a business establish the ranking, visibility, and usability of its website? Then, how do they improve those aspects if necessary? With a technical search engine optimization strategy, also known as a site audit. First, let’s review some important terminology leading up to what a site audit is and why it can benefit a business.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a technique used by various businesses to enhance the ranking of a website on search engine result pages (SERPs). Better ranking of a site on platforms such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo means better visibility to the targeted audience. Better visibility on SERPS leads to more traffic, which leads to more conversions.
The general purpose of SEO is to understand the needs and behaviors of the searcher, and in turn, optimize the site’s content to improve its ranking and create a high-quality, relevant user experience. The SEO process includes thousands of minor but important details but differs from technical SEO in that it puts focus on promoting the content on the site.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the process of optimizing a website in regard to its infrastructure and the technical requirements of the search engine. “Technical” SEO specifically refers to the crawling, indexing, and rendering phases of site optimization. In other words, this kind of site optimization deals nothing with website promotion or the site’s content but rather its architecture.
Technical SEO covers a wide variety of elements ranging from server configuration to on-page design elements. It deals with determining the overall performance of the website, web mastering, and supplying annotations, signals, and directives for search engines so the site is being crawled and indexed efficiently. Simply, the goal of technical SEO is to improve ranking on SERPs, increase site traffic, and ultimately, increase revenue. Sounds familiar.
Site Audit: An Overview
In a continually changing digital world, it’s vital for a business’s survival to align its website with modern-day practices and standards. So how does one go about assessing the current technical standing of their website? The answer is a site audit.
A technical site audit evaluates the website’s current standing, analyzes its architecture, and provides recommendations to better orient it with the most current technical requirements and practices. A website audit is similar to a traditional SEO audit because it evaluates the site as a whole from various angles, such as functionality, link building, and content.
Benefits of a Site Audit
A site audit involves thousands of technical analyses and optimizations in order to improve how search engines find, crawl, render, and index the website’s pages. Technical SEO is always evolving and increasingly intricate and therefore, hard to perfect. However, it doesn’t necessarily need to be perfect. Any technical improvements to a site that makes it easier for the search engine to retrieve the website’s content, will give it better visibility due to a better ranking. By technically optimizing a business’s website with an audit, a business owner can expect the following benefits:
To improve a business site’s search engine ranking, a clear understanding of the message and product the business wants to rank for is important. What words and phrases does the company want to be associated with? How will the search engine know what services a business is offering via their website and then present it to the appropriate target users when they are performing a relevant search?
A well-planned keyword strategy is a great place to start. Coding a site by integrating keywords and phrases into the content can lead to a higher organic search ranking. There are more details on this below; however, an on-page SEO plan resulting from a firm understanding of the industry and target market will distinguish a site from its competition.
Remember, better rankings mean increased visibility, which means more site traffic, and thus, more return on investment (ROI).
A website that’s packed with information, has busy, complicated web pages, and slow-loading times, will not benefit a business nearly as much as having a clear, easy-to-use, fast, and fully functioning site will. People don’t think twice about leaving a website that is difficult to use because there are so many other options available to them. A site audit helps identify areas that need improvement in regard to function, content, and structure, in order to enhance the overall user experience.
Search engines analyze website keywords and rank the site against its competitors. Through research and analysis, businesses can come to know what SEO strategies are being used to attract customers by successful leaders in their market. They can then adopt similar keyword tactics and strategies to improve their own results.
A site audit analyzes the technicalities of a website, such as the bounce rate, time spent on the site, page views, etc. These areas require attention to guarantee efficient and accurate search engine indexing. The quality of the content directly impacts how many search engines or people will see and visit the website. When a business does a site audit, its content will be evaluated in consideration of what people like most, whether it’s video, text, or images. The resulting recommendations will then allow the owner to develop a strong content strategy for their website and blog moving forward. This will also lead to better organic search rankings.
Search engine optimization has seen a drastic change in recent years. This is a clear indication that what works best for a business today, may not be what works best in the following months to come. The main priorities of a good site SEO should be a high-quality user experience and achieving the highest search engine ranking possible. During a site audit, the SEO will be assessed to determine the impact it’s having on the user experience and ranking, and then recommendations will be provided to improve it in any way.
The best way to elevate the ranking of your website on organic SERPS is through the natural and strategic use of keywords. Technical site audit professionals will be able to identify keyword placements that improve site ranking. They can recommend keyword distribution strategies that can be utilized to improve how search engines crawl, index, and render their site.
Should Businesses Utilize a Site Audit?
The ultimate site goal for any business is to create a website that is technically sound and provides content that is easily found by consumers in organic searches. A site audit can be performed on a website without causing any harm to its search engine ranking. Typical SEO campaigns usually emphasize factors like keywords, headings, meta-tags, and titles. A site audit analyzes external factors such as third-party hyperlinks to the website, server configurations, and page loading speeds.
A site audit is a comprehensive analysis of a website, which helps a business get a clear view of where its website stands at the moment. It’s an in-depth process that focuses on anything and everything technical a company may have overlooked, ranging from page views to bounce rate. In every aspect, a website will benefit from these insights. After the technical site audit is complete, the business will be provided with recommendations to improve its SEO strategy with recognized and proven strategies.
Businesses will be able to determine the overall performance of their website as a result of a site audit. With the strategic recommendations provided by the audit, they will ideally yield more organic traffic, enhanced growth, increased sales, and increased organic search ratings. They will also be able to unveil blockages to conversions and identify problems that could hinder future SEO projects. Technical SEO is an efficient method to apply deep expertise and experience to site audits in order to identify issues and optimize the site content and structure for better performance.
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