Why are SEO health checks important?

Your website is like a garden. Or a gym body. Or any other metaphor you prefer that illustrates how its well-being is an ongoing process.

Want to stay up-to-date with the latest Google algorithm changes, security standards, user preferences, competitors and more? Continual maintenance is needed.

SEO health checks can help guide you. They reveal issues that are affecting your website’s performance. This keeps you compliant and stops you from losing traffic and conversions.

Our current agency client has seen huge success in organic / SEO performance over the last year. Throughout the financial year, we drove 3,641 leads from organic search traffic – the equivalent of £192k worth of Paid Social leads.

 

MI Enquiries for ‘web’ hit 7,445 for FY21 (173% above target enquiries). We identified that average search ranking for all tracked keywords had gone from #17 (Sep 2020) up to #10 (Sep 2021) whilst ranked in position #1 in google for 134 tracked keywords and #1 for many local search terms.

What is an SEO health check?

Alongside the big leap SEO tactics that boost your search performance, you need to perform ongoing actions. These are less about strategic creativity and more about the bread-and-butter that ensures optimal health for your site.

A typical technical SEO health check might include:

• A full audit to assess technical aspects that Google would class as ranking signals
• Establishing baseline data for your site’s current status in terms of traffic, backlink profile and keyword rankings
• Main competitor analysis for comparison
• An overview of your local search performance (like reviews, user responses, Google My Business listing)
• Site speed
• Ensuring your most up-to-date sitemap has been submitted
• Payment and shopping processes functionality
• Various other factors that could affect the search health of your site in the eyes of Google (and your potential customers

What can be fixed?

An SEO health check is unique to your business. There’s no set list of fixes to be addressed following an audit. However, typical areas of attention can include:

• URL optimisation
• Removing or fixing broken links (via redirects if required)
• Page titles, meta descriptions and headers
• Removal of duplicate content
• Image optimisation
• Updating of any CMS plugins if needed
• Site security

Put simply – you won’t know for certain what needs sorting until a full health check has been conducted.

But the good news is that a methodical, analytical approach will be able to confirm a clear way forward.

Your SEO consultant will even be able to prioritise the work that needs doing, which prevents it overwhelming your resources and budgets.

Optimising your traffic

An important outcome of an SEO health check is that it allows you to see what kind of traffic you’re currently attracting.

Big numbers on their own mean nothing and may even be giving you a false impression of how you’re doing.

If you’re seeing a lot of visitors to a certain page but that’s not reflected in the conversion rate, it may be down to user experience.

But it could be something much more elementary – you could be attracting the wrong traffic because your content isn’t optimised correctly.

Even if your on-page info is high-quality, without optimisation for the correct keywords, it won’t perform at its best.

Which could mean a high bounce rate, lower conversions and other negative data that doesn’t paint the most accurate picture of your pages.

Optimising your traffic means paying attention to every part of your conversion funnel, which starts with the SEO basics.

Get started with an SEO health check

Before embarking on a comprehensive SEO strategy longer term, an initial health check will highlight immediate actions to take.

To stop losing traffic to low page speed, or attracting the wrong type due to poor optimisation, take the first step.

Get in touch today, or if you know someone who might be interested, share this content and spread the love.

Photo by Rémi Müller on Unsplash