In the age of technology, many companies depend on online sales to make a profit. This is a business that has grown exponentially over the years. According to researchers, retail e-commerce sales around the world came to 3.53 trillion US dollars in 2019 and it’s expected to grow to 6.54 trillion US dollars by 2022. Some critics even say that physical stores will shut progressively from now on. Currently, the most popular online activity worldwide is online shopping.
Search engines are widely used to find online products and services. Google processes 3.5 billion searches per day and searches increase 10% every year, not considering other search engines such as Bing or Yahoo.
Having a business with an online sales platform, it’s fundamental that a website is appealing and easy to find and browse. To dive deep into the digital marketing world, getting to know its terms helps you to understand the business better. The acronym SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, which aims to improve on and off-site elements for result pages, to increase ranking, and traffic through organic search, as opposed to paid ads. Before you ask yourself what is a site audit in SEO, let’s discuss the matter in a simplified way.
SEO audits assess websites and point their relevance in the search engines results page, also known as SERPs. Its intention is to identify bottom issues that affect users’ organic search. Audits help to improve and increase web pages performance, consequently leading to more traffic and sales.
There are many areas in which a website can be audited and changes implemented. Technical SEO, for instance, involves crawling, categorizing and indexing of a website. If a webpage cannot be indexed, it will not show up on search results. On-Page SEO focuses on the webpage title, body copy (style you write and description of products), and internal linking strategy. If webpages are not interlinked within your website, they are called orphan pages. When not connected, orphan pages are not crawled and therefore not found.
Keywords are essential and should be enticing on a website, however, too many keywords may cause Google to penalize the webpage.
There can be different versions of a website in multiple languages. In terms of International SEO, it’s imperative to make sure the specific version serves the right language to the right user in the search results. Sites with international content should use the hreflang attribute, to avoid duplicate content, because that can affect SEO as well.
Another important aspect of SEO is the mobile-friendly website features. Having a mobile-optimized website means that users can access through cell phones or tablets. If your website doesn’t have this feature, many contents can be blocked or not displayed properly, making a poor browsing experience. Besides, the voice search feature is on the rise. It’s a fact that last year, around 50% of searches online were voice-based.
Depending on the size of your business, an SEO audit price ranges between $600 to $14,000. This is a process that needs to be done meticulously, not rushed, and it may take up to six weeks to be completed.
If you have a small business and do not want to pay for the service, you can try to do it yourself. Many websites explain step by step on how to execute it. Of course, if you don’t feel comfortable, many companies offer professional audits according to your needs. If you need your website audited, you can check out https://hvseo.co/industry-leading-seo-audits/ for more information.
For many believers that SEO would die in 2020, they couldn’t be more wrong. On the contrary, SEO is here to stay. Is your online business performing at its best? Maybe it’s time to revamp it with an SEO audit.
"Just recently, I was able to take a pretty competitive keyword from #12 (page 2), up to #5 on page 1 in 14 or 15 days."
