When you’re doing a website update or redesign, it’s vital that you think about SEO for your new website. If you don’t, it’s like getting your car detailed and polished but not bothering to have the engine serviced. It might look shiny and new, but before long you’ll be in the website breakdown lane.

Part of making sure your SEO is up to scratch is to run an audit of your website as it sits currently, and see what works and what doesn’t. In this blog we’ll tell you how to do an audit and what to look for.

How to run a website SEO audit

There are plenty of online tools that will run a complete website audit for you, and these are worth checking out. Sites like Moz and Woorank will crawl your website and give you a detailed report of your site, and have free trial periods.

You can also use Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools to get an overview of what’s happening on your website. You’ll be notified of any crawl issues and will be able to see which other domains link to your website.

What to look for in an audit

Some things are more important than others, so look at:

• The number of visitors you get as a monthly average
• Whether your traffic is increasing or decreasing
• The top performing keywords and which ones help you with traffic and lead generation
• The number of other domains that link to yours
• The total number of pages indexed
• The total number of pages that receive traffic

If you see something that’s working really well, don’t change it when you do your website updates! When you see something that isn’t working, needs improving or needs to be fixed, schedule time to get it done. Some fixes can be done straight away, but many SEO factors are ongoing and take time, such as building quality backlinks to your site.

If you think you need a hand exploring the SEO components of your website, please get in touch with us to find out how we can improve your SEO (so you don’t have to stress about it!).