Ready for SEO? How a Website Audit Can Help Your Decision

There are many marketing options to choose from to get new customers. The most common request we get is for SEO – to improve a website’s search engine rankings. 

In most cases, we can see there are some opportunities to improve SEO. But is it the best use of the marketing budget?

The goal of marketing is to get a qualified lead or a sale as profitably as possible. Yet, we often self-diagnose and prescribe the business as needing more leads without regard to optimizing the cost or profitability. 

It makes sense how we get here. It isn’t crazy. 

There are lots of justifications like:

• Paid advertising is getting more expensive, so we’ll move to SEO
• Organic traffic converts better than paid traffic
• My competitors are doing it successfully and taking your traffic

• Higher search rankings allow me to reduce your Google Ad spend
• More customers will find me and buy from me
• Sales fixes everything

But, let’s not assume SEO is a magic pill. Nothing in business is. It has to be profitable.

Quality SEO is expensive. It consistently takes your time and is a financial commitment.

Any decent SEO will ask you to commit to 90 days and will mention the real results come in the 6-12 month range. 

The time it takes to generate the topics, write the content, build the rankings, and find meaningful backlinks is one thing but, there are hidden costs like your time and effort to help with topics and review the results. 

You will not see results immediately, so you have to consider it an investment. If your goal is to drop your Ad spend or reduce other marketing dollars, you will be paying top dollar for both for a while. Until you rank in the top three results (at least) you can’t throttle the spend or your sales will drop.

Determining if you’re ready for SEO

Before you consider prescribing your marketing diagnosis with SEO, you need to consider:

• Are you clear about your goals?
• Do you know your conversion rate?
• How does it compare with the industry standard?
• What is the user experience on your website like?
• What is the key driver of your sales today?
• Is your customer journey clear and working on your website?
• Is your tracking set up properly to measure the results of SEO?
• Is your website optimized to handle more search traffic?
• Are there other areas that would help you better convert traffic?

Determining if you’re ready for SEO is a good idea before committing. Let’s go through the list together.

Being ready for SEO starts with having clear goals and ends with being reasonably confident that for every X visitors your website gets, Y will end in success and it will cost you Z per lead. 

Define your goals down to the successful action your visitor will take. For example, the visitor must click the ‘call now’ button in the top right corner, and the phone rings. Or, the visitor must submit this form and their information is saved in a specified location.

Once you have your goal, you need to ensure it is profitable. You have to know your conversion rate, specifically for organic search results to get this information.

Ughhhh… Math time. (I got transported back to school for a moment and the Sunday scaries are setting in.)

If you’re paying $2,000 per month for SEO and generating 200 leads per month and 2 leads convert (take the successful action we already mentioned) your cost per lead (CPL) is $1,000. 

It’s safe to say you’re not going to convert 100% of your leads into a sale but that’s a topic for another day. For now, we’re focusing on marketing – not sales. Let’s say you convert 50% so, your cost per customer (CPC) is $2,000. 

Can you make that work profitably? How does it compare to your industry? If it’s significantly higher than your competitors, then they can spend more money than you and win your customers.

Through our website audit and assessments, we often find the conversion rates could be improved to lower marketing costs. 

If you see or think the same, then ask yourself: how is the user experience on your website? Is your customer journey clear and working on your website? Could it be improved?

What is the key driver of your sales today? Maybe you need to do more of that first. 

To answer these questions and gather this sort of data, conversion tracking needs to be set up and reported correctly.

If you can’t confidently answer these questions or need help being certain, consider an audit. There are many different kinds of audits, but if you hire an SEO professional you will get an SEO audit so let’s start there.

What to expect from an SEO Audit

Running an SEO audit will give you some suggestions for site improvements. There are tons of auditing tools out there that offer good results. Some of them are even free. It is important to understand what you are getting from these audits.

Google doesn’t give us its secrets but, we have enough of a sample size to know best practices. Following any audit tool to a tee will largely be a waste of time though. You will need to dig through the results to sift the helpful information from everything else. 

Take the results of this audit for example. These results are scary. And fixing many of these items takes time, and effort, and is a waste of time.

For example, any image that doesn’t have an alt tag (text telling Google what this image is about) is flagged as an issue. The most important images would be on pages that have some SEO value such as the homepage, your services pages, and some of your top blogs. It would be great to fix all of these but insanely time-consuming for minor benefits.

Or take this example of a “critical error” where pages have duplicate title tags. The scan from the audit has no context of these pages and how important or relevant they are. In this exact example, these pages have no search value and are only for the customer. They should be removed from the sitemap or blocked in the robots.txt file but again, the value compared to the effort is minimal.

Here is one last issue showing a warning of 12 pages that have a 3xx redirect. A 301 or 302 redirect tells the search engine that this page has been moved from one page to another and when someone visits it they will be redirected to the new page. This warning is returned because too many redirects can hurt the search engine’s ability to crawl through the whole website. Google calls this a crawl budget. This particular website has 75 pages and by Google’s admission, a medium website has 10,000 pages. There is no risk of hitting the crawl budget here. 

Additionally, very few audits are comprehensive, which requires you to go through multiple audits and stitch the results together. 

The many types of website audits

There are technical audits that look at the code and structure of the website to determine issues, content optimization audits that sift through each page and see how well the content is structured for your targeted keywords, and content strategy audits to find missing keywords or topics. 

To get any meaningful value from these audits, an experienced professional needs to go through the results to determine what suggestions to make and help form a plan to act.

What’s more, this is only the SEO audit. There are security audits, technical audits, Adwords or SEM audits, email marketing audits, website assessments, and data analytics audits. Each audit serves its purpose but how do you know what audit you need? 

If you’re trying to determine the best next steps in your marketing you want to ensure you get into the right audit. We have created a free Marketing Readiness Audit to help you find your next step. It takes 10 minutes to complete and you will know which audit you need to feel confident you’re making the right decision with your marketing.

Getting your business into the right website audit

Any time you’re making big decisions on your marketing you want to make sure you’re making the right choice. There are unlimited options out there and many of them are costly but may not produce the results your business needs. 

If you’re worried that you’ve misdiagnosed yourself and need a marketing professional to help you determine your next steps, getting into the right audit would be a good next step. Consider the following and ask yourself if your business meets the criteria:

• Unsure if you should spend money on SEO, Ads, or email marketing
• Not sure what is working to bring leads and sales and what is not on your website
• Determine what the competition is doing and how you compare
• Traffic has decreased or sales are slowing
• Think you should be getting more out of your marketing
• Not sure how your marketing is performing
• You’re shopping to price compare for updates to your website
• Considering if you need a new website or if the existing one will work
• A developer is leaving and you need to hire a new one based on the complexity
• Partnered with SEO team and need help with improvements or optimizations
• Website is slow
• Website was hacked
• Looking to scale and recognize the need for new functionality on the site
• Experiencing a lot of issues on the existing site
• You built the website yourself but need to understand the limitations or issues

There are many benefits of going through an audit. To list a few, you can gain confidence in your marketing, identify the next steps to take, better understand your website code, get a grasp on your maintenance needs, and hire appropriately.

Keys to a successful audit

Some of the keys to a successful audit include looking at the data, how the data is generated, and the tools the website uses. This can range from several different tools like Google Analytics, Hubspot, Adwords, lead generation and email marketing, website code and hosting servers, the user experience on your website, your competitor’s websites, and benchmarking against your industry. 

A good audit starts with your goals and fills in the gaps from there.

The end result of most audits is going to be a score on how well you do against a pre set checklist. However, a great audit comes with professional supervision and should give you a list of recommendations based on your goals.

How to do a website audit

You may be wondering, can you do the audit yourself?

If you would like to perform various partial audits on your own check out online tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, Frase, Ryte, BrightEdge, MarketMuse, CognitiveSEO, Surfer, Outranking, Clearscope, the StoryBrand assessment, WordFence, Securi, Sesonic, and Google Search Console. Each tool audits various parts of your website, including SEO, content, security, usability, and so on. Mixing and matching audits can give you some ideas.

Do you think you need SEO for your website but aren’t sure? Schedule a free discovery call with us to learn more.