The value of using site audit software to identify SEO issues is significant. For one, a website that doesn’t provide its users with the best possible experience isn’t going to rank well over time. If your website performs poorly, you won’t get much organic traffic. In fact, you may get hardly any organic traffic at all. This can easily kill your SEO efforts and even lead to the failure of your business.
However, if there is one thing search engines value over everything else, it’s a good user experience. Many people have this misconception that Google only cares about content and not user experience, but that’s not true at all. Our white label SEO agency is all about giving users the best possible website experience. If your website isn’t performing well, then you’re not giving users the experience they deserve. This can cause your website to fall out of favor with search engines, and you’ll see a major drop in traffic from those sources.
Site audit tools can help you avoid problems like this by providing you with the SEO insights needed to really understand what’s going on with your site. After all, who knows more about your site than you? Your competitors spend large amounts of money trying to beat you at SEO, but if they knew what they were doing, they wouldn’t need to spend so much money on SEO because the software would do it for them.
Identifying Issues Using a Site Audit
Site audits are great for finding broken links, images, and pages. You can also use the data to provide a better experience for your users. Broken links are one of the main reasons that people have a bad user experience. In fact, there’s no faster way to kill organic traffic than by having lots of broken links on your website. There are various site audit tools out there that will allow you to quickly find all of the broken links on your website, as well as pages that contain old content, images without alt text, or even pages that don’t exist!
Broken pages are bad for SEO, too. If you have a lot of broken links and pages, this can cause your search rankings to drop dramatically. Your site audit should give you insight into the overall quality of your website’s backlink profile and help you find any pages that you can either remove or update to improve your website’s user experience.
Identify Issues with Internal Linking
It’s so important to keep track of all of these issues because the data from a site audit can also be used as a tool for improving an existing website. Site audit tools can identify internal linking issues and even help you create new content for your site. The more content you have on your site, the better the user experience will be. If your users are leaving a website quickly, it’s likely because they didn’t find what they were looking for quickly enough.
[bctt tweet=”A word to the wise: Do not take it for granted that your technology will support you endlessly without failing.” username=”ThatCompanycom”]Creating valuable content is easier than you think as well since most blog articles that rank well are ones that solve problems and help users resolve issues that they’re experiencing. You don’t have to be an SEO expert to write these articles either. A lot of the data from a site audit can also be used as marketing insights, allowing you to create more valuable content to attract more organic traffic.
Identifying Broken Links in the Footer
Broken links in the footer are another common problem with websites today – especially with eCommerce sites. Search engines don’t like broken links in the footer. The best practice is to make sure that every link in the footer is working properly. This includes links to your homepage, contact page, and any other pages that you want search engines to rank well since they are all important to your visitor experience.
Site audits can identify these issues and help you fix them to improve user experience and organic traffic. However, if you follow the right processes when developing a website or adding new content, then you won’t have these problems, and site audits will be used solely as a tool for identifying user experience problems as well as getting marketing insights from data gathered on your website.
Identifying Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is another problem that can really hurt your SEO efforts. If you have two pages on your website containing the same content, search engines will choose not to rank both of those pages. Generally, they’ll choose the one with the most authority, and then they’ll use that as a way to link to both pages. SEOs like using duplicated content because it helps them create more valuable links, but it’s not a good idea if you rely on search engines for organic traffic. It’s better to do things the right way and avoid duplicate content whenever possible.
Identifying Missing Titles and Descriptions
Broken links aren’t the only thing site audits can identify. They can also tell you when your images don’t have alt text or missing title tags. These issues are all fairly common, and they cause a huge problem for user experience. Web crawlers can’t understand images by looking at them, so if an image doesn’t have any description, then it’s just not going to show up in search results. The same goes for missing title tags because web crawlers can’t understand the content that’s not on the page itself.
Identifying Broken Outbound Links
Site audits can also tell you when your outbound links are broken as well. This means that if you have a link to a third-party website and that link no longer works, search engines will not know where your user is going when they click on it. They’ll think that the content on your website is incomplete. In order to avoid this, you should make sure that all your outbound links work properly. This will keep users happy since they won’t have to click on a broken link, and it will keep search engines happy because they will know how to send users to where they want them to go.
Site audits can be really helpful if you know how to use them. They’re not used just to identify problems; they’re also used as a way to get marketing insights and figure out ways to make your website more valuable for search engines and users alike. Would you hire a surgeon who didn’t know how to use a stethoscope? Of course not, and you shouldn’t hire an SEO who doesn’t know how to run a site audit. Site audits are important because they help you identify user experience problems and tell you what needs to be done to fix them.