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How to Perform a Search Engine Optimization Audit

A sound and well-thought-out search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is key to a successful business in today’s fast-paced, digital world. Seeing as how much of the world's population is now online, and how a majority of those web users turn to search engines for virtually any need, SEO presents a way for businesses to improve their websites and attain traffic to ultimately gain leads and make sales. However, once you have laid out your strategy and have created content for your site, you will need to perform an SEO audit (and do so regularly) to determine how your strategy is actually performing. While this can be a time-consuming task, there are a number of SEO audit tools that can help make this process easier.

With StatCounter, you can access detailed statistics and information about your traffic, such as where users are coming from and how they interact on your site. This can be beneficial when developing an SEO strategy and when performing an SEO audit. Before you sign up with StatCounter or upgrade to our Growth Plan, let us fill you in on how to perform an SEO audit and some of the best tools to use to help you do so.

Suggested Reading

If you’d like to find additional information with regards to SEO, you can gain more insight as to the tactics and tools therein on the pages provided below:

The Importance of an SEO Audit

In short, an SEO audit is simply assessing how your SEO strategy is performing, and how it can be improved. This involves, but isn’t limited to, reviewing any content that has been written on your site, reviewing your keyword rankings, and analyzing the health of your website. This can help you evaluate areas of your strategy that are performing well, and areas that need more attention.

If you don’t perform an SEO audit regularly, every six months or so, you will have a more difficult time piecing together the effectiveness of your strategy. For example, you might believe that a certain keyword is driving the majority of your traffic, when in reality it accounts for only a small percentage of it. An SEO audit will help you notice details like this to help you strengthen your SEO strategy.

Additionally, an SEO audit can help you identify new techniques you aren't utilizing as part of your SEO strategy. For example, let’s say you have not been very active on social media, but a sizable portion of your traffic comes from these platforms. An SEO audit will help you realize the importance social media has on your website, allowing you to develop a strategy around such.

SEO Audit Tools

Performing an SEO audit sounds like a daunting task, and while it can be time-consuming, there are a number of SEO audit tools that can help make this an easier task. You will want to use several of these tools to get the most accurate picture of your SEO strategy, but only choose the tools that you believe to work best for your website and SEO strategy. Some of the best SEO audit tools are detailed below.

SEOptimer

One of the most popular SEO audit tools is SEOptimer. With this, you simply enter your URL and it will give you a health grade with recommendations to help further improve your SEO strategy. Additionally, this will give you scores on how well your website is laid out for SEO, user experience and mobile friendliness, social media, and security.

Better yet, SEOptimer will give you in-depth information on what to improve. Title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags are just a few of the aspects of SEO that this will assess for you. In addition to the on-page optimization recommendations, SEOptimer will also assess your website backlink portfolio and sitemaps to ensure these aspects of SEO are optimized correctly.

ZadroWeb

Like SEOptimer, ZadroWeb gives you a score out of 100 based on how well your website is optimized. They will notify you of any successes you have, as well as warnings and errors for you to correct. ZadroWeb will give you an in-depth look at your top organic keywords, image optimization needs, and much more.

ZadroWeb will also take a look at your code to determine if there are any issues that could be causing your website to load slowly. Page load speed is important because the longer your site take to load, the more likely visitors are to leave immediately, which can hurt you search engine result rankings. Technical SEO aspects like this are immensely important and should be included in your SEO audit.

StatCounter

Of course, one of the best tools for performing an SEO audit is StatCounter. With this, you are able to access detailed information on your traffic, like where users are coming from and which pages of your site they visit most often. StatCounter will also give you information on popular keywords that drove traffic to your site to help you further improve your content strategy.

Additionally, our Growth Plan will give you a grade on how well your website is performing compared to competitors in four main areas— traffic, social media, mobile friendliness, and visitor experience. Our Growth Plan will also give you access to actionable objectives to help you improve each of these areas.

Summary

Needless to say, SEO audits will help you ensure your strategy is worthwhile. Furthermore, it’ll help you assess which specific tactics are performing well, so you can determine what works and what doesn’t. In performing an audit, you may even find areas you hadn’t considered optimizing. No matter how you choose to audit your site and assess your SEO practices, doing so will provide you with much-needed insight as to where to go next with your strategy to improve your site and acquire more traffic.

Start Tracking Your Progress with StatCounter Today!

In order to develop a sound SEO strategy, and track the progress of such, you will need to install the StatCounter tracking code in the code on your site. Once it is active, you will be able to access these metrics, and more, to help you refine your strategy and improve your online presence.

If you have any questions about StatCounter or our Growth Plan, please contact StatCounter member support by completing the form below and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

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