You’ve built a beautiful website for your business, created a ton of content to attract and captivate your audience, but for some reason your pages aren’t appearing in the position your brand deserves — at the top of Google searches?
Despite all this effort, the key piece that may be missing from your strategy to sell more online is the SEO audit: an essential application to identify hidden errors in your website’s source code and ensure your place in the top position of search engines!
Knowing that finding invisible errors in the structure of your pages and content is an extremely difficult task, I created this article to guide you in implementing this strategy capable of:
- Evaluate the execution and results of your SEO services;
- Improve the visible content of pages through On Page SEO;
- Fix invisible errors before they become losses;
- Prevent questionable sites from affecting your brand authority;
- And take advantage of the most modern Technical SEO tools to pave your way to peak sales!
If you’ve never heard of SEO auditing, you can relax: my name is Guilherme de Bortoli and I’ll share all my practical wisdom below so you can profit once and for all!
Your success starts now!
What is SEO audit?
As the name suggests, an SEO audit tests and evaluates the effectiveness of all search engine optimization services used by your business website to ensure that it appears at the top of Internet search results!
SEO auditing is a crucial element for the success of any Digital Marketing strategy because it maps all possible optimization errors that may be harming your business’s rise in search rankings on platforms such as Google and Bing, directly affecting the number of new customers discovering your business — and buying from it!
Since the goal of SEO is to get your website found organically on the Internet — creating lifelong traffic and making sales predictable as a result — it is essential to ensure that your Digital Marketing strategy is not working against your own company!
This usually happens when:
- Your content takes a long time to load;
- Your website contains duplicate material;
- The code on your pages contains invisible errors;
- Poor quality or low authority sites link to your pages;
- Your publications do not comply with search engine quality guidelines;
- Among hundreds of other failure points that only an SEO audit can identify and fix!
The SEO audit is carried out in three well-defined stages, precisely to ensure that all errors will be analyzed and resolved within each optimization domain to meet the indexing requirements (cataloging and positioning of your website) in search engines.
Below, I’ll show you what these domains are and what impact they have on ensuring your business is reaching its ideal audience — the ones that buy!
On Page SEO
The On Page SEO audit analyzes the entire visible structure of the content on your website’s pages on two fronts: the content that the audience consumes, and the content used to prove to the algorithms that your content meets all the search engine quality guidelines!
The goal is to make sure that the right keywords are in the most relevant places (to please the algorithms, also called “robots”) and that the content is organized into titles, subtitles, lists and tables, to positively add to the browsing and consumption experience of the material by users!
As the “On Page” SEO audit literally means “inside the page” when translated into Portuguese, special attention is also given to the elements called “meta”.
“Meta” means that one thing is inside another (and it was no coincidence that Facebook’s parent company changed its name to incorporate this concept into virtual reality technologies over the Internet).
In the case of On Page SEO, a meta description is an alternative description, for example, optimized to be found in search engines (and which only appears on search results pages ) to convince a robot to index the page — with the bonus of enticing a curious person to click on the link to your website!
There is also the meta title, which serves the same purpose of giving your content an extra chance to be cataloged and clicked, and which helps to maximize the reach of your Digital Marketing strategy in a way that the common title cannot do alone.
Analyzing and fixing these meta elements, titles, subtitles, the structuring of the page content and its quality (from spelling to the relevance of the topic to the audience or the size of the content) not only prevents your business website from being forgotten at the bottom of the search results, but can also be the determining factor in beating your competitors if a “tie” occurs during the indexing process by the algorithms!
Off Page SEO
Unlike “on-page” SEO (which is On Page SEO), the domain of Off Page SEO extends to (and can be translated as) “off the page”.
As the name suggests, the Off Page SEO audit ensures that the links from other websites pointing to the pages on your business website (called “backlinks”) are of quality!
Since part of the authority of a popular website can be passed to another company’s website through backlinks , it is to be expected that links from dubious or poor content platforms (with low authority) can harm your business’s positioning in Internet searches!
The Off Page SEO audit cleans up these low-quality links and offers solutions for receiving more reliable backlinks — those truly capable of increasing your company’s reach and reputation in the eyes of robots and the public!
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the main domain of the audit because it fixes all the invisible problems on your brand’s website!
When a page takes a long time to load, or when it does not have the correct elements applied directly to the platform architecture, or when this structure is not secure for collecting and storing your visitors’ data, it harms your company’s performance in indexing and positioning in Internet searches as a whole!
Even the code that displays the page design (its “layout” and functionality) needs to be evaluated to avoid loopholes, and to show robots that your company cares about the quality of the content and the privacy of its users!
In addition, of course, to usability itself — which is how easy it is for your audience to navigate and consume content — since a website that is full of effects, confusing to navigate, or has the wrong audience tracking settings can cause visitors to abandon your page before reaching the minimum time spent on it to place it in the best positions!
The faster someone enters and leaves your site without consuming much, the more the algorithms think that your content is of low quality or not very relevant to the public, causing it to be displayed in lower positions in the next searches or making it disappear completely on the last pages of the results!
This is the biggest nightmare that any business with a strategy to sell more online can encounter — and the only way to avoid it is through a Technical SEO audit carried out periodically to keep the “bones” of your website stronger and healthier!
How SEO Audit Should Be Conducted
Now that you know the three main domains of SEO auditing, it’s important to understand the order in which the steps are taken to fix your website’s errors and get it to the top of the search engines!
Starting with the basics: finding out who your ideal audience is!
By knowing who your audience is (what fears, desires and doubts they have) or what they expect from your brand, you expand a huge range of possible keywords that can be used to make your business appear in front of the public the moment they search for an answer on the Internet!
The SEO audit comes into play at this stage to analyze the potential of each of these keywords relevant to your business and then to apply them to the visible structure (both On Page SEO and Off Page SEO) and invisible structure (Technical SEO) to meet all the algorithms’ quality guidelines!
Next, the SEO audit focuses on improving the content, making sure that its organization, the links on the pages, and the loading speed of the media (such as images, videos and audios, in addition to the layout itself) are in line with what robots and the public expect from your brand!
There are many other factors to be analyzed and observed, depending on your company’s sales strategy or the niche in which it operates, but the basic step-by-step is this:
- Understand the psychology of your audience;
- Apply this understanding to the page code;
- And optimize content to dominate the best position in search results!
SEO Audit Tools
Fortunately, you can count on the help of a series of very intelligent Digital Marketing tools designed to facilitate SEO auditing — from code to content!
Among the most popular ones (some of which my team and I use frequently here at Enjoy Minder to resolve positioning and reach errors on our clients’ websites), I think it’s important to mention:
- Semrush, one of the most complete SEO audit and Digital Marketing automation tools on the market;
- Ahrefs, more focused on Technical SEO auditing, but capable of covering all other holes in your Internet sales strategy;
- The free Google Search Console, which despite being basic, works well to identify the most common indexing errors of your pages in search results;
- And the also free Google Analytics, capable of giving you a panoramic view of your website’s performance on the Internet from sources that go far beyond organic search results!
SEO Audit Regularity
I mentioned earlier that SEO audits (especially Technical SEO audits) need to be done periodically — but how often?
It depends!
Since the mission of SEO auditing and services is to make your company appear in organic search results on the Internet — and to avoid any errors that harm the performance of your pages, no matter how silly they may seem — I recommend that you perform an audit every time you:
- Present a new branding style , a new sales funnel, the addition of a new feature or an innovation to the pages;
- Check whether the entire indexing structure remains intact after publishing many pages, new media and content on your business website;
- Modify the browsing experience of your pages, whether in the layout or in updating the platform to present a new product or service;
- Start a new Digital Marketing strategy, to ensure that the structure and content of your website will help achieve the objective of your new planning ;
- And keep your website’s domain at the top of searches with the emergence of new competitors or the improvement in the positioning of your current competitors!
Depending on the factors I presented above and the dynamics of your company in the sector or market in which it operates (especially when competition is fierce or if your industry presents many new developments in a short period of time), the frequency of the SEO audit can start from quarterly, go through half-yearly, or happen annually!
There is no rule — but if you want to sell more online (and on an ongoing basis), it is essential that SEO auditing is a fixed part of your budget every year!
An audit can solve problems before they become losses — and losses, in this case, are becoming invisible on the Internet to the public that is looking for the solutions your company has to offer!
Don’t give in!
Advantages of hiring SEO services
Of course, you and your team can do an SEO audit on your own using the tools and instructions I’ve shared here in this text, but since the goal is to catch the often invisible errors, having some prior experience with this type of service is just as important as the analysis itself!
After all, how will your company fix the errors it discovers?
How will she ensure that she has discovered all the flaws? Or worse: how much time and resources will she invest in inexperienced attempts to solve the problems before they become real headaches?
Hiring an experienced Digital Marketing agency — one that can demonstrate its expertise and mastery of the most advanced SEO audit tools — ends up being the most effective and economical way in the short, medium and long term.
This choice not only saves time, but prevents your budget from going over budget and putting at risk the only thing your company should really be doing: making much more profit!
When outsourcing SEO auditing, look at the agency’s portfolio and ask for proof, analysis results, and evaluate the opinions of their previous clients.
The last thing you need in an audit that aims to solve your brand’s indexing problems is to create even more errors on top of the ones that are already hindering its visibility on the Internet!
Hiring the best of the best agencies is the safest way to guarantee positive results for your business without dealing with surprise expenses!
Your website at the top of the results!
I think you can see how SEO auditing seems like a simple task — identifying and correcting errors that harm your company’s website’s appearance in the top positions on Google and other Internet search engines — but it requires:
- Pay extra attention to avoid creating even more indexing errors for your pages in search engines;
- A multidisciplinary team that analyzes the psychology of your ideal customers to know exactly what changes will need to be made to the structure of your website and the content within it;
- In addition to practical experience in Technical SEO, On Page SEO and Off Page SEO, to correct all invisible errors — and please the algorithms that decide in which position (or on which page) to display your website during searches by your future customers !
Auditing is the ultimate definition of strategic SEO planned to achieve top results , as nothing within this dynamic is a cake recipe that works the same for every business!
That’s why, to find out whether or not your company needs an SEO audit, I offer you the Free SEO Diagnosis here at Enjoy Minder!
By completing this analysis, you’ll know what you’re doing right — and what you need to fix ASAP — to make your brand dominate Google searches!
Every millisecond you waste becomes an advantage in positioning your competitors over your business — and that’s why time, especially on the Internet, is worth much more than money!
Take advantage of the free diagnosis and start building a truly profitable sales strategy now, borrowing EnjoyMinder’s 16+ years of expertise
My team and I are waiting for you on the other side of the screen — and of the few guarantees in life, I guarantee 100% of your success!
Come with Enjoy Minder!
