SEO Audits as a Catalyst for Growth: What We’ve Learned in Conducting Them

Getting visitors through your front door is vital to your business. Just as important is providing a virtual front door: your website. No matter the time that your customers are looking for you or where they might be, your website is ready for them 24/7. However, it’s not enough to just have a website these days. “If you build it, they will come” is not a philosophy that works in attracting traffic to your site. Your website should provide the best user experience possible and meet the needs of your customers. The first step is enhancing your curb appeal, so that you appear near the top of search engine pages.  

To do this, you need to take a focused look at your website. Your site should be working well technically and providing the best user experience possible for your new and existing clients. This means ensuring that the backend of your site is running efficiently with few to no errors. On the front end, your site should provide a positive user experience written in a language your customers understand and use. All of this will help improve your rankings in search engines. An SEO audit will help shine a light on any issues and illuminate areas that you’re already doing well.

At Chartwell, we’ve conducted many audits for our clients as well as for ourselves. So, we intimately know the challenges that reviewing and fixing a website can bring. Here are a few questions that you may be asking yourself if you’re thinking about an SEO audit.

Is an SEO audit time consuming?

At Chartwell, an SEO audit includes a technical review of your site, analysis of your competitors, and a keyword analysis of how users find your site and your competitors. These three pieces do require extensive review and analysis (which can be outsourced to firms like Chartwell!) to identify issues and create a plan of action to address immediate needs, as well as create a long-term strategy for optimization.

What if we already know our site has issues?

It’s not hard to see when your site is having issues with its speed, broken images or even broken pages but knowing your site may be broken and knowing what actually needs to be fixed are two different things. At Chartwell, our SEO audit provided us with a way forward to fixing issues on our site, identifying where we could compete with our competitors and identifying strategic keywords that we should be using on our own pages.

The audit is done, now what?

Now that you have all this information, what do you do with it? The results of an audit can seem overwhelming with technical issues and the analysis of competitors and keywords. Where do you start? The great news is that not everything has to be done at once. After our audit, we focused on the fixes that could be started immediately like resizing images, while we crafted our long-term strategies.

Is it worth it?

After all the work has been done, what is the ROI? At Chartwell we have seen our organic traffic grow into our #1 source of website traffic. This includes an increased number of users, pageviews and sessions on our site.

We have had new clients from all over the country reach out to us simply because they found us on Google when they were looking for an agency that fit their needs. So, we definitely know our audit was worth it.

Creating a website that not only works for your customers but also ranks well with Google will help you reach audiences that may never have heard of you. An SEO audit is a great way to ensure that your website has all the curb appeal for search engine rankings while providing the best user experience for your current and potential customers. If you’re not sure where to start, Chartwell Agency can help.