Sometimes it’s difficult to see the wood for the trees. Months worth, on occasions years worth of iterative website changes, fiddles, updates and amends have led you from where you were then – all bright eyed and bushy tailed, to where you are now – slightly perplexed, a little jaded perhaps, wondering why your website isn’t delivering the mega business you were hoping for.

Maybe over time you’ve lost sight of the two primary reasons your site was built in the first place. Namely – to attract as much of your target audience as possible and then to convert that target audience.

Your task now is to identify any issues that are obstructing these two fundamental objectives. Give your site a SEO Audit. As well as identifying the problems a proper SEO Audit will spot the areas that you are succeeding in, areas you might want to focus on.

What will an SEO Audit examine?

In a word: everything – everything that might have an impact on the search engine performance of your site. From DNS and hosting issues that examine server response times, server reliability and down time to coding, site structure and internal linking. You ideally need your site to be as light, as lean and clean as possible. An audit will pick up on crawler blocks, redundant, dead end or wasted code, legacy frames or old abandoned 404 pages.

It’s also important that close attention is paid to accessibility. Visitors are notoriously unforgiving when it comes to their user experience and will be quick to bounce from your site at the first sign of complication or difficulty. Remember, web users are alternative rich and patience poor. If your navigation, links or internal signposting is anything other than simple and intuitive you’ll give yourself a whole heap of problems.  It’s not only human visitors who appreciate simple to follow menu systems, meaningful anchor text, clear headers and hierarchical web pages. The search bots too will reward clarity with regular visits.

SEO Audit Keyword analysis

Re-visit your keywords and consider some fresh research and content. Are your keywords still meaningful and relevant to your current business objectives?  What about some longer tail keywords to spread the net a little? The combined effects of less obvious terms and expressions can often attract profitable traffic at a cost far lower than more popular, expensive keywords.

Whether you feel your site is under performing, even shocked at its over-performance and want to capitalise on it or are contemplating a redesign, consider the many benefits of an SEO Audit.

Talk to an online marketing or organic SEO expert for more information.