Every business needs an SEO audit. Right?
Not necessarily. There. I said it.
But first, let’s establish something:
What Is the Role of Audits in SEO?
An audit focuses on where your site is now. It analyses the performance of your website and identifies areas for improvement.
These are some of the questions you want to answer with an audit:
Which pages are ranking?
Which keywords are bringing traffic?
Do you have SEO titles and meta descriptions?
Do you have internal links?
Do your images have alt text?
How many backlinks do you have?
Other aspects of your site may be explored to maximize the performance of your website, such as:
How fast is your site speed?
Is the design mobile-friendly?
Sounds important, right?
Well, audits aren’t vital.
What you really need is a strategy.
Unlocking Success With an SEO Strategy
- Which pages are ranking?
- Which keywords are bringing traffic?
- Are they branded keywords or non-branded?
If it feels similar to an audit, here are the kind of actionable implementations I’ll outline for a client in a full strategy:
Here are the changes we should make to your home page.
These are the new services pages we'll build out.
This is the content strategy we'll use, with all the sub-pages listed.
These are the keywords to target on that sales page.
This is how we'll approach this whole section of what you offer.
Based on competitor analysis, we won't create individual pages for this section as it didn't work for them.
Here is the initial list of blog posts we'll publish.
This is why you must have an author bio, and here's what it should contain.
Here is what's missing from your FAQ page.
Add a physical address to your Contact page.
This is what the internal linking strategy will look like.
And just in case you were worrying about the technical issues we may have found, we fix those too, without bothering the client first.
Do you see the difference?
Audits Aren’t the Fix-All
I recently saw an SEO report that someone had received for their site. It listed in great detail all the technical issues on the site, and plugged in some nice graphs about competitors.
Look, there's nothing wrong with an audit. But fixing up some technical issues isn't enough to rank well for the type of keywords that will bring your clients.
If you want real success with SEO, you need a full strategy.
SEO Strategy: The Imperial Rank Way
We used to only offer the strategy as part of a full SEO campaign, with a minimum commitment of six months.
However, you can now get the full SEO strategy as a standalone offer.
It's pretty simple:
We have a kickoff call where we join your company and get to know it inside out.
We perform keyword research, competitor analysis, and a website audit.
We create a wonderful, detailed SEO strategy for your website (average is 20 pages).
We meet, and our team presents and explains the strategy. We discuss it and adjust it as necessary to fit your business.
Once that's done, you can either decide to work with us to implement it, do it yourself, or get someone on your team to follow the instructions in the strategy.
This SEO strategy is also immensely useful if you're creating a new website. Having the website built with a powerful SEO foundation is one of the best things you can do for your business.
