The mandatory task of any business website is to bring in new customers for the business. But in order to become customers, users must first get to that site. There are two ways a user can do this. The fastest and most transparent way is contextual advertising. But this is the most expensive way. The other option is to get to the site from search engine results. Search traffic is much less dependent on monetary investment and its effectiveness is much more stable in the long run than contextual advertising. However, in order to get search traffic, the site must meet the needs of SEO as much as possible.
To identify and evaluate the SEO-potential of a website, you should perform a SEO-audit.
As a result of the SEO audit, you:
- know the SEO potential of your website;
- Understand how fully it is implemented;
- find out what you need to do to maximize the amount of search traffic.
Stages of SEO-audit:
- Search demand research.
This stage examines the volume, structure, and dynamics of search demand.
Different search queries have different frequencies, the dynamics of its change, different conversion ability and different competition. That is why it is necessary to segment the semantic core and track multiple characteristics of demand (seasonality, frequency, CTR, competitiveness) for each segment separately.
As a result, a matrix is built to determine the size of each segment and rank the segments by importance.
2. Research of the site and external factors, identification and study of competitors
Based on the data of statistical systems, examine the search traffic of the site: determine its share, quality and dynamics.
Conduct a technical audit of the project site: check the loading speed, the correctness of page display, lost links, etc. The number of characteristics relevant to search engine optimization resource, sometimes exceeds 50 parameters: the presence of CNC, filled in Title, Description meta tags and the quality of their filling, the presence of microarray, completeness sitemap.xml, etc.
Examine your competitors – the sites that rank for queries from the current semantic core – and compare your site with them on a dozen criteria, including visibility, indexing in Google, adaptability, age, etc. Analyze the structure of the site: levels of nesting, completeness of coverage of the semantic core. Thereby form the image of the “ideal competitor” – the site that has the best values for all the parameters under consideration. Then compare your site with the resulting ideal, and it will immediately become clear what to work on! Analysis of competitors and search engine results allows you to understand what your content should be, where it should be placed and what it gives.
Once all the steps of the SEO audit are completed, you’ll get specific and actionable recommendations that you can follow to increase search traffic. And remember that the most valuable thing in any audit is not the data collected, but its interpretation by specialists!