When you’re ready to start your SEO journey, the first thing you need to do is to conduct a comprehensive website audit. It involves analysing your site’s search engine performance and how it compares against your competitors. It ensures that your site is up-to-date with the latest trends and developments, which in turn, will elevate your search rankings. At the same time, it empowers your business with real, actionable insights to reach your goals.
To reap the advantages of your website audit, here are the five steps you should take:
1. Gather meaningful insights
Before anything else, you need to be clear with your goals. Why did you perform an SEO audit? Apart from improving your search rankings, maybe you’re redesigning your website or revamping your brand. This sets the direction of your campaign.
Based on your website audit report, you will see the overview of your search engine performance, specifying your strengths and weaknesses. Collect all the data and insights you can leverage for your campaign and determine the aspects you need to fix or optimise.
2. Choose your priorities
Using the insights you’ve collected, you need to get your priorities straight. Not all SEO tasks have the same level of impact. While search engine algorithms update now and then, there’s an objective way to prioritise the tasks depending on the extent of issues and your resources.
This might seem tricky, but the key here is to look at what’s holding back your website. There could be low-hanging fruit you can take advantage of. For instance, title tags and meta descriptions may not sound like a major priority compared to others, but if they are missing on your website, then addressing it first could lead to significant improvements. Or, maybe you need fresh, new content but don’t have anyone to edit or publish it as of the moment. In this case, you may want to update your older posts instead or repurpose user-generated content.
3. Identify the needed resources
Now that you have your list of priorities, you can determine the amount of time, budget, and resources required to execute them. If you have the skills and can squeeze SEO into your schedule, you can take advantage of free tools to make it easier to manage your campaigns. Our digital marketing platform, for instance, comes with Google integrations that provide you with all the metrics and insights to track your campaign’s progress.
Some tasks, however, may require technical knowledge, like canonical tags, website speed optimisation and HTTPS setup. In this case, don’t hesitate to seek the help of an SEO expert. Apart from taking care of these tasks, they can analyse your strategy and take steps to improve it. You may need to prepare enough funds to complete certain assignments. Once you’ve figured everything out, you can filter the tasks based on the resources available.
4. Plan your timeline
SEO is a long-term commitment filled with short-term tasks and strategic implementation. You’ll need to create an action plan for the first 30, 60, or 90 days, with the most valuable tasks on top of the list. Based on your budget and your ability to commit, you can have a rough estimate on the time you need to accomplish expected goals. Here’s an example of what a 6-month SEO campaign looks like.
5. Take action
Lastly, it’s time to carry out your action plan. You’ll need to make sure that tasks are properly scheduled and assigned to every member and that teamwork would go smoothly. Everyone should understand the impact of their roles in improving SEO so they can stay focused.
Keep in mind that no matter how simple or complex the tasks are, there’s always a risk of failure. That’s why there should be a clear plan that will keep every aspect of the campaign organised and finished on time and budget.
As you make changes on your website, monitor the necessary KPIs and see if anything has improved. If it’s not moving in the right direction, you may want to tweak your strategy. Don’t make abrupt transitions on your campaign – instead, test out a few tactics that may provide better results. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution in SEO, so you’ll need to adapt your strategy from time to time.
Take advantage of our digital marketing platform’s site audit tool to uncover ways to enhance your SEO performance. Sign up today for free!
