Taking an audit of your website’s SEO performance is a good measure of determining where you stand and where you can expect to go. Many SEO companies offer website audits, and many perform continual website audits to benchmark and gauge ongoing SEO efforts. But what exactly should be included within a website audit?
A checkup of your website’s SEO can certainly help build an idea of how your SEO efforts are working. Just as routine maintenance and checkups are required on a car, doing an audit of your website can easily give insight into what needs to be done and perhaps what needs a little more attention. As an SEO strategy is usually a long-term commitment, an audit can help you see where you stand in search rankings, how you stack up against competitors, and what direction you should be taking with your keyword targeting and continuing goals.
There are valuable questions that you should be asking to help identify which direction your website performance is heading. Which keywords are you ranking well for, which keywords you aren’t ranking for, which competitors are ranking more aggressively than you, which competitors are dominating within your local region? These are just some of the questions that should be asked.
Taking a look at how your car dealership is ranking is valuable for a number of reasons. First, you may be completely new to the world of SEO and you may want to evaluate if it’s something that’s right for your marketing mix. Maybe you’ve already started an SEO campaign, but need a little more intelligence to guide your decision making. Another possibility is that you want to evaluate where your next steps should be. Lastly, an SEO audit can also give you peace of mind, and let you know what opportunities lay in front of you.
Deconstructing your current SEO efforts, or lack thereof, can be helpful in shedding a little light on your existing online presence. You certainly don’t need an audit to tell you what you already know. But if your dealership is new to search, or perhaps if it has been a while since you last addressed your SEO standings, you may find out that an audit can identify whether you’re rock solid in the SERPs or whether you’re on shaky ground.
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Going through the process of closely examining a website via a seo audit is a great way for in-house marketers to prioritize what steps should be taken with SEO execution. There are some templates online that serve as a checklist in auditing site structure, on-page strength, and off-page factors. The convergence of social media with search and the impact of the consumers voice (in the form of product reviews) can have a big impact on both unique content development and effective link building. At the end of the day, Information Architecture and URL structure can often prevent a site from ranking well, even in the presence of strong content & authority links. Site owners should keep a close eye on duplicate content, canonicalization, improper redirects, and odd URL strings.