Search Audits - The First Step to Gaining the Right Web Traffic

The Value of a Search Audit

Why can't I find my website on Google or Bing? How can people find my website? What is my website missing? These are questions that someone managing a website may ask at one time or another. As is common in life, there is not a simple answer. There is, however, a process by which you may determine the cause of low rankings or a Google invisibility issue. I would like to introduce you to the search audit.

A search audit is a valuable investment that will provide you with the insights you need to make important decisions about your online marketing strategy. It can provide a fresh prospective and identify new or different things you could be doing to increase your website's visibility in search engines and organic search traffic. Search engine optimization (SEO) is an ongoing process and a search audit can be the first step in identifying solutions to bring the right traffic to your website from the search engines.

The audit can also be a good benchmarking tool to see how well your website is performing over time. It can be used to review the current website for problems and/or limitations that maybe hindering your search marketing efforts. Having no or very few internal links or non-descriptive page titles, for example, could be impeding your website's ability to be found in the search engines. Once the audit is completed, it can be used as a guideline during the maintenance, redesign/rebuild,or new marketing phases.

Perhaps you have been trying to implement search engine optimization techniques but have received push back from others in your organization; an audit can provide a third-party confirmation that SEO is an essential component of your marketing strategy. It could arm you with the supporting data you need and back up your claims. It could also help you identify the next steps in your website optimization process. Alternatively, if you have already begun to use some SEO techniques, the search audit could confirm that you are on the right track and/or identify some tactics you could employ.

What is a Search Audit?

The search audit sounds like a great idea, right? So what is a search audit exactly? It is an analysis process designed to determine a website's relationship with search engines. Its purpose is to look for any problems a website might have with visibility in the different search engines, like Google or Bing. It can also be used to validate your existing SEO tactics, confirming that you are on the right track. The audit should examine a website's strengths and weaknesses, identify opportunities, and evaluate the website's search performance over time. It may also examine the ability of your website to achieve its intended goals and outcomes.

This analysis should review the different parts of your website. This would include an assessment of the technical aspects, such as sitemaps, the appropriate use of elements and tags (headings, titles,meta descriptions, etc), and error handling. The review should also examine the website's internal linking and navigation structure to determine how well a search engine crawler can move around the website to find (and index) content. If analytics or site usage data is available an analysis of this would provide important insight. Information such as traffic sources, referring websites, and top keywords would be reviewed.

Is a Search Audit For You?

A search audit is a valuable business investment for you if...

• You would like to have a better understanding of what the current search marketing techniques are
• You would like to know more about what search engines are looking for when 'crawling' a website
• You manage a website and would like to learn how to increase your visibility on the search engines 

It is important to note that search engines are continually evolving and changing their algorithms. This means that some of the techniques you may have already implemented are no longer as relevant as they once were. A search audit can help to determine your website's level of optimization and can inform you on how to bring it up to date.

Basically, if you are looking to improve your website's ranking in the search engines result pages (SERPs), a search audit is a great place to start. It is a valuable investment and there is no time like the present to get started.