Looking for quick wins online? If you’ve executed a digital marketing strategy, chances are you’re tracking multiple platforms, search engines, and social media networks to check the effectiveness of your online efforts. From website SEO to a killer Google Ads campaign, we appreciate how easy it can be to get overwhelmed by the sheer number of online marketing platforms and tools available online can mean setting up, and forgetting to stay on top of, any one given tool.
That’s why the Edge Marketing team always recommends undertaking regular audits of each component that contributes to your overall marketing strategy. From regular website updates to in-depth SEO reviews, staying on top of your various marketing platforms is best done in small increments repeated regularly over time.
New to SEO auditing? If you’ve only just started optimising for search engines, you may not know where to begin when it comes to completing a monthly audit. Instead of trying to go it alone–read on. From experienced marketers to small business owners just learning to navigate the world of online marketing alone, we’ve summarised why you should be prioritising a regular SEO audit and which analytics you should be looking at first.
Why You Should Be Completing Regular SEO Audits
If you’ve gone through the hard yards of strategising and setting up an SEO strategy for your online business or brand, you’ll want to make sure you continue reviewing and updating it as you go. Why?
1. Real-time User Data from Live Search Engines:
If you’ve ever wanted to get to know your customers inside and out, the real-time user that’s collected through search engine optimising tools is one of the best ways to do it. From tracking and ranking the most-used keywords that drive potential customers to your following which messaging and copy shows the best ROI with real website visitors, all of the best market research and strategising in the world can’t make up for real user feedback. By setting up the right tools at the beginning of your SEO journey, you can collect meaningful data that will help inform you and your business about real customers, potential leads, and when and where your marketing platforms and sales efforts are hitting the mark.
2. Refine Your Marketing Collateral:
Found data collected by Google Analytics or Yoast SEO about your website? Fantastic–now you can put it to work. While knowing when, where, and how new users are finding your website online is fantastic, it doesn’t mean as much if those new leads aren’t converting to meaningful engagement and sales. By tracking and reviewing your SEO audit results, you can better refine and define your marketing message overtime–meaning, hitting the nail on the head with your customers the first time they visit your website.
3. Better ROI:
Following on from the above, analysing real user feedback and data and better defining your marketing messaging and customer facing collateral overtime can only mean one thing–a better overall SEO ROI. While there are ways to strategise your first ever SEO attempts to ensure you’re aligning it with your existing brand, most SEO data will need to be better refined in time based on real-time user feedback. Fear not! The time between point A and point B won’t be wasted. Instead, you’ll be collecting real customer feedback (like above) and be able to update and edit your marketing and messaging based on this data as you go. How so? Through a regular SEO audit of course–one that will continue to expand, grow, and get better in time.
If these all seem like good outcomes to you–that’s because there are. Working with real user feedback to better understand your target market and ensure your brand, products, and marketing are meeting their needs is one of the best ways to find a strong market-fit in a busy online environment. Read on to learn more about some of the top SEO data you should schedule into your regular audit to ensure you’re in the best position to refine a marketing strategy for your brand.
What To Include In Your Own SEO Audit and Review
Now that you know the powerful data that can be collected from optimising for SEO, you’ll want to take good care of the work you’ve already put in and make sure you’re getting the most out of your efforts over time. (We didn’t even touch on how a well optimised website can help Google drive more organic website traffic without you having to lift a finger. More on that another day!)
By putting monthly SEO audits on your To Do list, you can look for possible broken links and internal linking errors, review any technical SEO errors, and begin to identify trends that will help even further define your marketing campaigns. Among the top features we recommended reviewing during your SEO analysis, these five factors will help you conduct a good SEO audit.
1. Search Engine Result Page (Ranking)
Interested in listing high in search rankings on search engines such as Google? Of course you are. With more competition vying for the number one spot on Google result pages each day, achieving and maintaining a page one listing is no small feat. (Even then–SEO strategy work has to be updated and maintained to keep this position!) Indicating your overall website performance and how well your marketing collateral is meeting Google’s algorithm needs, reviewing your search engine page rank is a good way to see if your existing SEO is still working or needs to be updated to better reflect Google user trends.
2. Click-through-Rate
If you’re wanting to test how effective your messaging is, CTRs (Click-through-Rates) are one great marker. How so? From Google search results (called Meta Descriptions) through to Google Display Ads, effective marketing messaging will encourage viewers to ‘click through’ the ad or Google result to learn more about the brand or follow through on the designated CTA. (Call to action.) Find that you’re able to rank relatively high on the Google search console but not gaining any new website visitors? Check your messaging. More on this below but there could be specific keywords that are definitely attracting and converting potential leads but your CTA, meta description, or on page SEO copy may not include these.
3. Pages per Visit
Find that more organic traffic is clicking through to your website? Excellent–another great SEO data field to look at is how many website pages are being clicked on per session. Why? Not only can a higher ‘page per visit’ rate indicate that new visitors are highly interested in your brand, but that your overall website user experience and design is prompting new leads to click through. Why is this good? Interested parties want to know more about your brand–fantastic. You may have excellent internal links leading visitors from one relevant page to the next–also fantastic. The longer viewers stay on your website, the more opportunities you have to walk them through a sales funnel (or equivalent) and get them to follow through on your final CTA. If you can start by simply increasing the number of pages looked at per visit, you’re already on your way there.
4. Crawl Errors
One thing that you’ll want to be aware of ASAP? Crawl errors. “Crawling” refers to Google’s practice of ‘crawling’ pages to determine and understand the website’s content, examine how well each page is optimised for website visitors, and helps maintain online standards by scouring for possible duplicate pages. (Your overall website SEO score can be affected by any and all of the above.) One of the biggest indicators to Google that your website offers a less than ideal user experience is a ‘crawl error’–meaning, a page that should be accessible on your website is showing an error, broken links, leads to a duplicate page, or page misdirect.
While this can be (at best) a nuisance to potentially new users wanting to engage with your website, having multiple crawl errors can hugely affect your overall SEO score. In better news–these can be easily tracked and fixed with an initial SEO audit which is great, because it’s easy to miss one internal link when redesigning your website or product pages. Instead of letting one oversight ruin your hard-earned-SEO ranking, make sure to look for broken or dead end links each month.
5. Most Searched Keywords
Ever wonder how new visitors find your website? To figure out exactly what it is Google users are entering into the search bar before stumbling upon your business, SEO can gather data and collate the most commonly searched terms that direct new users your way. Why is this important? Not only can you then revise existing marketing messaging and SEO copy (meta descriptions, meta data, etc.) to include the actual terms searched by real users, you can also begin to add and expand on additional website copy, marketing campaigns, and products that aligns with these same interests and needs.
Learning SEO Audit Best Practices with the Edge Marketing Team
Edge Marketing is one of Australia’s leading digital marketing agencies and we help businesses and brands of every size grow and solidify their presence online. Dedicating to educating and upskilling our online community, we know that every entrepreneur, marketer, and small business owner can learn how to better refine and define their marketing strategy with a bit of guidance and a lot of perseverance.
To help marketers at every skill level level up their marketing, our team of experts regularly publish blogs examining search engine optimisation, Google Ads, social media strategising, and how to know when it’s time to outsource your marketing work. Focused on publishing content that will help all businesses find and anchor their place in the market, follow along to learn more about the latest marketing trends and how you can kickstart your brands’ growth online.
