Using SEO audits to improve your search ranking

Things don’t turn up in this world until somebody turns them up.
James A. Garfield, 20th president of the United States

When someone says SEO, what goes through your mind? That it’s a bit technical? A bit complicated? That it’s something you know you ought to be thinking about but who has the time? Back in the day, when independent SEO experts were thick on the ground and their skills considered such a dark art that they could basically name their price, maintaining SEO best practice seemed like a hugely onerous and costly endeavour. And, frankly, if you have the time and resources, that could still be true, but there is much you can be doing to give yourself the best chance of SEO success.

Let’s start with your website. Now, this might not be hugely relevant unless you are in the market for a site rebuild, but it still needs to be mentioned. As with building a physical structure, if the foundations are well-constructed and sturdy, you are making life much easier for yourself in the longer run. If your website is built using clean, semantically correct code, for example, your Google ranking is already ahead of the competition. In fact, one of our clients recently won an SEO award for their website despite not having done any subsequent work on SEO - it was purely down to the fact that we’d built their site to the highest industry standards… So this is something to bear in mind when you next come to a website rebuild. Ask your developers as many awkward questions as you need, to get a head start.

So what else can you do?

Issues to consider before we start.

• Understanding that you have a finite amount of resources to allocate. 

• Knowing the keywords that are good for your business. 

• Understanding that if your industry is saturated, standing out will be a (nearly) impossible challenge.  

• Knowing the keywords your competitors are ranking for and bidding on.

• Understanding that crafting an SEO strategy isn't the be-all and end-all, but merely the first step.

• Knowing which tools are the right fit for your SEO strategy research and implementation. 

• Knowing and understanding that going forward the content you create will depend on your SEO strategy.

Ugh, that’s a lot to start considering isn’t it? But if you want your SEO strategy to succeed, can you really afford to skimp out on any details?

Let’s assume you have a pretty serviceable website and, in an ideal world you would love to be optimising your chances of SEO success - only you have limited time, limited budget and demands for both coming at you from all directions. 

You can look internally at your SEO and content strategy and undertake a preliminary audit to see where you could improve..? But do you have the time, internal resource and skill set while also staying on top of your regular workload?

You could take a peek at your competitors and see what they are doing? Of course, you will also need to study the industry if you start going down this rabbit hole and before you know it, you are inundated with data that costs you more resources than you planned for… and then you need to analyse and make use of it

If even reading about SEO gives you the beginnings of a panic attack, you are not alone. Marketers across the globe struggle to keep abreast of the constantly changing digital landscape while juggling all their numerous other tasks. 

Perhaps what you really need is an SEO guardian angel* to help guide you safely through the murky world of SEO. 

And where do we come in?

Well, wherever required really, if we are being honest. 

You’ve likely been approached at some stage by one of the vast number of so-called SEO experts out there who, as far as we can tell, offer ‘free’ audits that are very basic, very generic and entirely automated - designed as a lead generation tool to panic you into a website rebuild… 

Well, we’re nothing like that. We do use some automated testing tools, but they are personalised to your specific circumstances and applied by our team, which has decades of SEO experience. We create detailed reports that contain full details of any gaps and issues and a bespoke, actionable roadmap (ordered by priority) for your developers to implement.

We have no wish to use our SEO audit service as an underhanded way to get you to rebuild your website with us… Obviously, the next time you’re in the market for a new website we’d be delighted to chat, it’s just that we can also help you effectively stretch out the time until that becomes a necessity. 

*We suppose we did just rename ourselves SEO guardian angels, but you have to agree that it does have a nice ring…