The value of website auditing in today’s SEO landscape

While most people can claim that they have the “keys” to profitable search engine optimization strategies, the reality is that many of them overlook the fundamental knowledge of website performance. This is essentially where website auditing comes into the picture.

Contrary to what most people believe, the “secret” to SEO success isn’t a cutting-edge tool or a well-guarded resource, it’s mindfulness of how a website performs and what needs to be improved. Thankfully, a well-rounded audit process will open up an assortment of opportunities for improvement so that you can improve your efforts and take them to the next level. 

Mistakes that you’ll want to avoid

As clear as it is that your business’s key to having a profitable and successful website lies in a proper auditing process, you must also not overlook the aspect of common mistakes made. If you want to ensure that you have all the right insight to refine your search engine optimization strategy, here are two pitfalls to avoid along the way: 

Mistake #1: Overlooking the critical aspect of accessibility

Although numbers do matter when it comes to carrying out a website audit for your quarterly SEO check-up, don’t let this take away the fact that accessibility also contributes to success.

What most people don’t realize about successful SEO strategies and insightful audits is that no effort bears more unless certain accessibility issues are inspected and resolved so that more traffic reaches your pages. To avoid this mistake, best practice dictates inspecting all pages during the audit for robots.txt file accessibility to have a clear idea of what pages search engine bots can crawl (and which ones they can’t).

Mistake #2: Failing to crawl the entire website

If you’re looking to make the most out of your website audit, then it’s worth noting that you can’t afford to ignore the opportunity to crawl the whole website. 

As much as it pays to run robots.txt checks, failing to crawl the entire website takes away the effectiveness of an audit because of how many common problems don’t end up being highlighted. Thanks to the wide range of available crawling tools (free and paid) that you can use, you won’t have to worry about missing out on the opportunity to keep everything airtight ever again!

Conclusion

For any small business owner, one of the most valuable tools that can be used to reinforce and fortify the integrity of a website’s SEO performance is a thorough, well-rounded audit, one that isn’t conducted with any mistakes. Through the help of this guide, you can watch out for usual pitfalls that you might run into and ensure that your findings check out on all ends for sustained improvements!

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About The Stack Group

We're a digital marketing agency in Massachusetts, specializing in web design and branding, SEO, and social media management.  Contact us if you have any questions