As an SEO company we perform SEO audits frequently, but there are a lot of cases where it is a best practice to perform your own SEO audit. Websites change, SEO best practices, evolve, and new content becomes available, making a full SEO audit an important priority. We perform the same types of audits with our PPC campaigns and our social media campaigns as well. Recently, we were interviewed by CIO as part of an article about DIY SEO audits. You can read the full article and all the tips at CIO.com.
Though some of the nuts and bolts of SEO have changed over the years, the overwhelming focus on creating great content remains the same. According to Matt Cutts, the unofficial SEO guru at Google, every site should strive to be an expert in its niche and demonstrate that on the site. Look at each page of your site and decide if it has unique, creative, interesting content and answers the basic questions of who, what, when, where, and why. Is the user easily able to understand what you do and what that page is about? Then check the code pieces of the page: title and description tags, image and video tags and alt attributes, headings, CSS formatting, URLs, redirects, and other relevant SEO factors. Then check your site for things like duplicate content (would it be better to combine a few pages into a single one or break out certain pages into their own page?), crawlability (make sure you don’t have robots.txt blocking the page), and a few other SEO pieces.
Never forget to do an analysis on the usability of your site because your customer is infinitely more important than search engines. Now, I know that if your customer can’t find you on the internet, then the search engines become pretty important; however, we always tell our customers that we can drive traffic to your site no matter what, but that doesn’t matter if they aren’t a viable customer. Quality over quantity. So look at your website quality – is the site aesthetically pleasing, easy to navigate, comprehensible? How is your page load time? These pieces of the puzzle all factor into your SEO audit.
For more information about conducting your own SEO audit, check out the article at CIO.com.
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