If your business depends on online traffic, SEO would be really crucial. If you lose a bit of traffic, you would be advised about an SEO Audit. But is it really important and does it makes sense to get an SEO audit done?
I see that there are 3 broad reasons for conducting an SEO audit
- Complacency
- External Factors – Competitors
- External Factors – Algorithm changes
Complacency
You know why the official space watching employees do not catch the new comets or discover new things in the space.
You know why the revolutionaries are able to do that
The reason is simple
We are humans
We take things for granted
We overlook things
We sometimes miss things
We forget a few things
We do a lot of things all the time
In doing so, a few things are missed.
Now, people are complacent and confident at the same time. They think they have done everything and there is nothing that they could have missed.
The truth sometimes shows a different picture i.e. people do miss things; in fact a lot of times people do miss basic stuff.
An SEO audit according to me is required to beat this complacency or over confidence if some people would like to call it so
To add further, SEO is not 2+2=4 or should I say that the 4 is fixed but the 2s of every SEO professional are different.
A different eye (from time to time) can bring in a fresh perspective and help pleasantly.
That is the reason I would stress on the importance of an SEO audit.
Algorithm Changes
There are more than 200 factors that comprises the Google’s ranking algorithm.
These factors and the weight age of these factors keep changing
Google changes its algorithm from time to time and there are more than 200 factors that are part of the algorithm.
The job of the SEO managing any website is also to keep a track of the latest algorithm changes and to read, research and experiment about the latest algorithm updates.
An SEO audit will help you figure out how your website is placed with respect to the changes in the algorithm.
Competitors
When you are ranking well and suddenly lose your rankings to competitors, it is the time to investigate and check if everything is working fine.
There are times when things could go off that might lead to
Broken Links or 404 errors
Images not loading
Missing sitemaps
Missing tags
Content being missed
Duplicity
The importance of an SEO audit will be proven immediately if any of the above errors is caught.
Summary
Just to summarize, if you are facing any issue with your website’s organic traffic, above are a few underlying reasons to conduct an SEO audit.
I am an SEO professional and will also recommend getting an SEO audit done once in 6 months even if your website is performing well. There is no harm and there is nothing to lose 🙂
