Auditing a website

3 Signs You Need a Website Technical SEO Audit

Ever get the sneaking suspicion your website isn’t built as well as it could be? Or wonder why you aren’t getting more visits from Google or Bing than you used to? Maybe you just want to double-check if that SEO specialist you’ve been paying is worth the money.

The answer to each of these challenges (and many more) is likely to be a thorough audit of your website. That means having an experienced SEO look at the underlying code, and deep dive for things like coding errors, link functionality, and page loading times, in addition to the usual things like user experience, content quality, and relevant inbound links.

Before we get into the finer points of what you can learn from an SEO audit, though, let’s look at three surefire signs you need one in the first place…

Sign #1: You Have no Idea Why Your Search Rankings Have Fallen Off

If Google visits are drying up and you can’t pinpoint a reason why it’s better to find out sooner rather than later. Some of the most basic technical problems with your website can be easy to miss with the naked eye, and they can cost you dearly in rankings.

Just moving from the first page to the second on Google’s listings can result in the loss of thousands of visits per week. That’s likely to translate into a big drop in inbound leads, and could eventually cause your sales funnel to dry up. In other words, seeing your site disappear from the search listings is not a situation you want to ignore while hoping things will improve.

Sign #2: You’ve Launched a New Website, and Want to be Sure it Was Built Correctly

Imagine for a moment that you’ve got a “great deal” on a website redesign… it looks great, but you aren’t sure how skilled the designer was around SEO or development for that matter. Maybe you are concerned it was generated from an old template, or that your coding team rushed through the process to get it online.

With time, updates to plugins, and new content being added to your website, any underlying coding issues are only going to get worse. Work with an experienced team to root out issues early on. They can help you find the kinds of problems that not only slow down your website and cause errors but also affect your search visibility.

Sign #3 Your SEO Isn’t 100% Sure They Caught Everything (or You Aren’t)

SEO is tough, detailed, and unforgiving. Many search consultants are good at finding keywords, tweaking content, and ordering citations, but lack the deeper technical experience needed to dig into the HTML side of things. In that case, they may recommend an in-depth website audit to look for well-hidden problems. Or, you might want to have someone do it even if your SEO advisor doesn’t bring it up if you get the sense they could use a bit of help.

In either case, an in-depth audit can help uncover issues that editing content or rewriting page titles can’t fix. Then, the additional time, effort, and money you put into search engine optimization become more likely to pay off.

What Can You Discover from an SEO Audit?

Having looked at a few instances when there is an obvious need for a detailed SEO audit, let’s turn our attention to what a website checkup like that actually entails. As I mentioned earlier, it’s essentially a close, intensive look at the underlying code on your website. It’s a way to see things through Google’s eyes and identify any issues that could be preventing you from ranking highly in search engines.

In a series of coming posts, I’m going to address about a dozen of these issues in more detail. However, here are some quick examples of the types of problems we might turn up during a search engine optimization audit:

  • Internal or outbound links that don’t have a valid destination
  • Links that can’t be crawled by search engine spiders
  • Page resources that redirect away from your website
  • Multiple variations of files in use on the same page
  • The many different forms of duplicate content
  • Special characters that can’t be properly read or indexed
  • Hidden files and missing access issues

This is by no means an exhaustive list. When you look at it, though, you can begin to understand why the details marketers might not see can do such extensive damage to search visibility, digital marketing, and inbound lead generation. Because these kinds of errors live “beneath the surface” on your website, you aren’t likely to detect them. In fact, your talented web designer or search engine optimization consultant might not know to look for them, either.

get a website auditReady to Elevate Your Website’s Potential?

Why guess whether your website is as visible to search engines as it could be? Because we know how important search engine optimization is to the success of your company, Kayak Marketing is launching a new technical SEO auditing service.

Here are four (4) options for conducting technical audits:

  • Screaming Frog: Run your own audit. Free (to 500 URLs) and paid versions. Desktop App. Popular among the more experienced SEOs
  • SEO Audits: Audit runs for you. Pay Per Service. Order Service. Detailed findings reporting w recommendations.
  • SEO Spyder: Run your own audit. Download App.Desktop App. Ultimate DIY option.
  • SEMRush: Run your own audit, Subscription Service. SaaS. Lots of help and support.

Whether you are a do-it-yourselfer or a marketing manager that just needs to know the findings, and how to address them, all the options will get you the data. What happens next is knowing what to do with it.

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