Your brand has just invested time and money to develop a website that you hope will deliver a more significant amount of user traffic and an increased sales volume for your brand. You partner with a well-regarded SEO company to create an SEO campaign. But before they even begin the campaign, they tell you they have to perform an SEO audit on your website. Why? Your website is brand new and functioning perfectly as far as you’re concerned. Why the need to do extra work on it above and beyond creating the SEO campaign?
Before you enter a car in a race, you have to fine-tune it to ensure it’s in top form and able to handle the demands of the race. Even if your car is brand new, you’ll find your mechanics under the hood and adjusting elements that will help your car perform the tasks that will be demanded during the race. This is kind of what is happening when you partner with an SEO company, and they want to perform an SEO audit.
Adhering to Google’s Best Practices
The SEO audit will provide them with the information they need to optimise the website. In performing an SEO audit, they will follow some steps in a specific order to ensure your website is functioning within the best practices requirements of Google.
Following the best practices of Google is the standard of the SEO industry. Being the number one search engine in the world has led to Google developing a set of rules. These rules (called ‘best practices’) are Google’s ongoing effort to ensure as level a playing field for every website on the internet.
By ensuring that your brand’s website is operating within these best practices, an SEO agency can easily take the additional steps needed to optimise your website without running into problems that have to be fixed in order to proceed.
Mechanics of SEO
The SEO audit is basically an exploration of your website to find and fix any problems before they implement any optimisation procedures that would be affected by the problems. Think of it as preventative maintenance. But the audit only needs to be performed once, as long as you don’t take it upon yourself to additional elements without the SEO agency’s knowledge.
You may have noticed that the developers of your brand’s website have included a Site Map as a page on your site. This is the doorway that the SEO agency will enter to perform the exploratory SEO audit. Every website developed as a business tool should include a site map. By working with the site map, the SEO agency can see precisely how your website is laid out, which pages are connected with which, and the additional functions that are built into your website. Having a complete picture of your website is crucial before your site can begin to be optimised to perform at its very best and deliver the results your brand expects.
