Your brand has just received the news that your shiny, expensive and brand new website will have to undergo an SEO audit to determine its suitability for all the marketing and sales activities you have planned for it. The first question out of your mouth is, “what exactly is an SEO audit and why do need to have it performed when the website is brand new?”
Hopefully, the explanation we offer will answer both questions as you gain a better understanding of the purposes of the audit. But before we get into the audit itself, you have to understand the sometimes confusing dual functions of a digital marketing agency.
The marketing agency is also sometimes known as an SEO agency because marketing and optimisation are interdependent on one another. To prepare a website for sales and marketing platforms and tools is to ensure that it’s optimised, and stays optimised, to make those add-ons work as they’re designed.
Even if you’re not using your brand’s site to market your products and services directly online, keeping your site optimised ensures that you remain ranked highly among your competition and continue to increase your brand’s visibility.
The Reality of an SEO Audit
The reality of an audit is its sort of halfway like taking a car for a test drive and halfway like poking around the engine to determine how powerful it is. The agency performing the audit wants to determine how the website performs at present. They want to know the page size breakdowns and page speed rating, including response times. They want to go through the site’s content to find out the keyword density and the focus areas of the content.
They’ll also look for errors that could affect the performance of the site. Things like title tags that are over the pixel limits, missing description tags, and less than optimal or misleading H1 tags are some of the items sure to catch their attention.
Report on Recommended Improvements
Once they’ve gone through an exhausting list of tests like the ones listed above, they’ll issue a report naming recommended changes and updates that take into account the proposed use of the site as a marketing and sales channel.
There is no ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ to an SEO audit. The agency will simply tell you what they need to do to the existing site to make it perform up to the capabilities that you’ll expect from it with the additions you want to add. This also should not be seen as a knock on your website developer. Website developers are not SEO agencies, although they make use of some of its methods in building a website.
It’s also essential to ensure the agency that performed the audit is the same agency that installs the marketing and sales platforms and tools. No reputable digital marketing agency worth its salt will install anything on a website unless they’ve performed their own audit on the site.
Partnering with a trusted digital marketing agency over the long-term is the best bet if your brand is serious about entering the world of online sales and marketing.