One of the huge lessons that a lot of businesses had to learn the hard way in 2020 was that it’s not enough to just have a website – you also need to actively promote and optimise it in order to get in front of the people that really matter.
In order to get the most out of your SEO, you really need a cohesive SEO strategy and, here at PracticeWeb, we like to start our strategising with an SEO audit.
An SEO audit helps you identify the strengths, weaknesses and potential of your site in regards to its performance in search engines so you can build a long term strategy for SEO success.
It looks at your current performance, what visibility and rankings you currently have, your site structure and any technical issues present on your site.
What goes into an SEO audit?
A comprehensive SEO audit should look at:
- current site performance
- site search performance
- website technical health
To get the most out of your SEO activities, all three need to be taken into account.
Current performance
It all starts here, really, with your current website performance.
By looking at things like your traffic over time, alongside key engagement metrics such as time on page, site content performance as a whole and, most importantly, conversions, you can build a really strong picture of how your site performs and how users engage with it.
While, strictly speaking, these things are not directly related to SEO, it’s important to have a understanding of what happens when users land on your site and how good your site is at converting them.
We also dig deeper, looking at demographic information like age, gender, location, their interests and things like the time of day when they visit, all of which can be used to develop detailed buyer personas which you can use to power your content game.
Search Performance
How visible is my site? What’s my average position? What pages rank? What do they rank for?
All pertinent questions, and all answered in an SEO audit.
We use a range of leading SEO analysis software to delve into just how your site performs in search engines, as well as measuring that performance against more than 100 leading keywords across the finance and accountancy sectors.
To get the most out of any SEO activity you need to understand where you’re starting from so you can plan where you’re going next.
Technical Issues
Although content is still king, as SEOs and copywriters like to repeat over and over, technical factors are also important, both in terms of your search rankings and in giving users a smooth on-site experience.
We look at your site architecture to identify any issues with crawlers;at the responsive aspects of your site (since Google now indexes mobile-first); and we crawl your site to identify any technical errors that need fixing, no matter how small.
Benchmarking
At PracticeWeb, we’ve made our name working with accountants and IFAs across the UK, which, along with our leading web platform, has given us unparalleled access to a wealth of data.
This lets us see how you stack up against your peers and competitors across a huge range of data points, essential for developing an effective marketing strategy.
How do you do an SEO audit?
Oh, that’s the easy part – just get in touch with us and we’ll do the rest.
For 20 years we’ve worked with accountants and IFAs on their digital marketing, making us ideally placed to kick start yours too.
