If you own your own business or a website, then you will need to carry out a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) SEO audit now and then. In fact, if you’re serious concerning your net business, you make sure to do it frequently. It is solely performed for marketing related purposes. A properly completed audit will optimize the website thus loading the web pages much faster. It is also a great way to improve Search Engine Results Pages or SERP ranking resulting in more traffic.

For this article, when we talk about “what is SEO audit” we mean how high up the SERP your website appears for certain search terms in the ‘organic’ results. Organic results seek advice from those that appear naturally on the page, rather than in the paid-for sections.

Before getting into details on how to perform an SEO audit, let’s understand what is SEO audit and what to expect after an audit.

          An SEO audit is done for evaluating the search engine friendliness of a website in different areas. There are various tools to perform an audit but it is always best to hire an SEO Auditor to the work professionally. An auditor will manually review the website’s every nook and corner and will come up with a list of things to be fixed to increase the performance of the website.

Why SEO is important?

          In the year of 2014, Conductor indicated 64% of all internet traffic comes from organic search, compared to 2% from social, 6% from paid search, 12% direct and 15% from other referral sources. Of all organic traffic, in the year 2015, it was found that Google accounts for more than 90% of global organic search traffic. Therefore, apart from a good SEO website, a good and strong presence of SERP is very important.

The secrete behind the working of a search engine

          Google guards its search algorithm pretty well. It considers around 200 factors to rank a website in its search index. A few are known such as Website name and URLs, its contents, metadata, page design.

The following are the various stages of a search cycle

1. Crawlers: Search engines are not humans; they use software to ‘crawl’ through webpages which compares a lot of factors which goes into deciding which websites will appear first on its search index.
2. Indexing: These factors are now stored in a huge database where it can be retrieved when some searches for a related keyword.
3. Search: When a search request is entered, the search engines uses its algorithm to detect millions of webpages related to the entered keyword.

What are search engines looking for?

1. Relevancy: What if you search for “the best restaurant” in your area and the search results come up with an out of town restaurant. But that never happens because search engines try to provide the most relevant results to a query. There are factors that you can be certain will influence these results and they’re all based around relevancy.

• Quality: Latest research from Searchmetrics on ranking factors indicates that Google is moving towards original, authentic and user-friendly websites instead of popular keywords.

• User experience: An easily navigable, clearly searchable website is much easier to find in the front of the search page rather than an old, heavily cluttered one.

• Cross-device compatibility: With the rise of mobile devices, a website with equally optimised contents for any given screen size or device is preferred.

These are a few of the long list of things the search engines look for before ranking a website.  SEO is not dead. Rather, a website is dead if it does not keep auditing its SEO. With Artificial Intelligence search engines are becoming smarter every day and is more likely to top rank optimized rich contents.

What is SEO audit strategy

Creating a viable strategy will help establish the goals of the business.

Everybody wants to be number one. To be the number one is to focus on numerous complex factors.

1. Technical SEO
   1. Using SEO spiders for a quick Panda and Penguin algorithm on your website. Created by Google, these algorithms help find rich contents for SERP rankings.
   1. Improving page title by adding a brand/company name can be helpful
   1. Good metadata is the searcher’s ticket to visit your website.  Short, relevant, yet detailed metadata attracts a lot of traffic.
   1. Canonical URL helps you and the search engine to know the source of any given page. It is always good to have backlinks.

• Non- Technical SEO
• Improve user experience
• Colours matching your brand/company
• Use of image and videos
• Cross-platform compatibility

These are the few other things which can help your website get a few more clicks apart from the technical part.

Why an SEO auditor is important?

          If you’re not a technical guy than it is best to contact an SEO auditor or auditing agency with a ton of experience to inspect your website professionally. I can recommend WL Digital Marketing Pvt. Ltd. A trusted and reputable agency with certifications from Google Adwords, Bing Ads and serving top global clients like Coca-Cola and Dynasty Travel International. With more than a thousand happy clients and 900+ projects, it is far ahead of its competitors. Including SEO Audit, WL Digital Marketing also deals with complex strategies like Pay per click, Email marketing, Social media marketing and more. It is a one-stop-destination for all of your brand’s digital marketing needs and is the best Best SEO company in Kolkata.