Starting a new marketing campaign with an SEO audit is always a good idea. It helps you uncover the weaknesses of the site so that problems can be corrected and the site can be optimized to provide maximum searchability. This process will also provide you with an SEO roadmap. This will give you an overall picture of your efforts to increase the marketability of the site. The top 5 reasons an SEO Audit is a good place to start are listed below.
1. The first reason is that a search engine optimization audit will provide an overall critique of the site’s visual design. Navigate the site and try to look at it through the eyes of the visitor. Is the site visually appealing? Does the navigation make sense? Does the site’s different content areas make sense and does if flow between them logically?
2. An SEO audit should also provide an overall search engine health check. Search for the exact domain name of the site and see how many content pages are listed. The number should at least be close to the total number of content pages contained in the site. Also, search for the website’s company name. Keyword searches may not be paying many dividends yet, but the site should at least appear near the top of the search for the company name.
3. A URL review is another benefit of an audit. This will provide information about how strong the links of the site are and how easy they are to follow. If things like multiple query string values and session id’s are concatenated onto the end of the site’s URLs they might provide a barrier for a visiting crawler that is trying to navigate the site.
4. A content review is another piece of valuable information that can be gleaned from an SEO audit. This will determine if the site’s content is unique and useful to humans and not search engine robots. The content should be visually appealing and stimulating to the visitor.
5. An image review is also very helpful in maximizing the searchability of a site. The data inside the image tags can provide information that can be indexed by search engine crawlers and should definitely not be ignored when constructing the site. Specifically, information about the image can be provided in the alt tag of the image. This is a good place to include keywords and other important information that can be easily read by search robots.
An SEO audit is always a good place to start a new Internet marketing campaign. It will provide valuable information that can be used to paint an overall picture of the search engine optimization of the site being marketed. Analyzing the visual design, search engine health check, URL review, content review, and image review will provide an SEO roadmap to optimizing the site and maximizing its indexability. An SEO audit in the beginning will yield dividends much faster than going into the campaign without a clearly defined plan.
