The first step towards increasing the organic search visibility of a business website is an SEO audit. When it comes to an audit, it tells you about your past optimization strategies and techniques. These reviews are done elaborately and focus on things like on-page and off-page SEO and technical optimization.
According to an article published on https://www.searchenginejournal.com, a website analysis denotes the use of a few keywords and in-depth study of keyword performance and competitor analysis. With all such efforts, you expect a greater return on your investment when you invest dollars for an SEO audit. You want your website to rank higher in the SERPs, drive quality traffic, and convert leads into loyal customers to improve the bottom line.
Then, an SEO audit is not the sole thing you must focus on to increase the visibility of your website. There are other things to factor in if you want to meet your business goals. Take some time out of your busy schedule and research on the web on how to improve your site’s SEO. There is no need to hurry. Remember that SEO takes time and does not give you results overnight. Therefore, for your better understanding, here are a couple of steps that you must take after an SEO audit to take your optimization efforts to the next level:
Focus on your priorities depending on the impact
Based on what was incorporated in an SEO audit, it is high time to plan. Try to communicate with the team or individual who performed the site audit. You can also request a post-audit meeting. Use this opportunity to understand and figure out the anticipated impact level of every item on the insights list. Remember all SEO efforts or corrective actions will have a similar effect. An SEO professional will not promise you top rankings due to the volatile nature of the industry. However, there is an objective method. There are ways to measure to create a priority list depending on the issues you face.
Set your expectations of the anticipated impact even if they depend on certain factors. Think where you want to see your website. It will help you in the future to measure the actual effect. If there is an issue like missing title and Meta description tags on each page of your website, you should include keyword-based tags to improve the visibility of your web pages on Google’s search pages. Use the search terms that are relevant and will have more effect. Use schema structured data for your Contact Us page.
Create a list of insights
When it comes to a comprehensive audit report, it has the list of optimization items examined. You will know about the status of such items compared against the audience, best practices as well as competitive filters. There are recommendations for the things that you need to rectify and improve. All these items are included in the SEO report and often summarized in the form of an executive summary or you will find them in the concluding segment. When it comes to automated or superficial audits, the findings sections may lack depth and transparency. Once the audit is over, you must take the onus to get the long list of particular insights and aspects that need implementation.
Decide on the essential resources
When you are ready with the priority list depending on the impact level, you must figure out the required budget, time, and resources necessary to cope with each of them. You can make some updates in no time with some training. When it comes to the others, they may need assistance from the other departments, external vendors, and individuals. If you want to implement a complicated canonical tag strategy, you must look for a person with sound technical SEO knowledge and the skill sets of a website developer. Such resources will cost you and require slotting as per schedules.
You will need to understand how much time it will take for their implementation, the cost of resources, and the impact level from the previous step. Once you figure out these things, you can filter your list and re-prioritize.
Decide on an action plan
Make sure that you put your plan into action for achieving success in SEO. You will need to look for the right system to assure there is the right collaboration, accountability is attached, and tasks are scheduled and allotted in a proper way. No matter whether is a workflow program, project management suite, SEO tool, you must regard this as a real project and campaign after the audit. It is one of the best practices to help you succeed in your optimization efforts.
Putting huge tasks and assignments on a person, a group of people or a team without any accountability and expectation will lead to greater risks and failures. Therefore, you must assign tasks carefully to efficient people who have the potential to deliver. You must begin with a plan and roles that will help in determining the possible effect of boosting your SEO efforts provided they have a little role in specific pieces. The IT manager will not give a hoot about why you would like to locate a canonical version of the root domain or change 302 redirects to 301s.
Without proper knowledge and education and a clear assignment with a proper due date that gets into the plan, it may get into an IT queue with little priority and never are done.
Attain success
You can measure the success of your SEO efforts by focusing on the goals as well as expectations that you have set in the initial post-audit step of assessment. Employing benchmark information or baseline, you can segregate the project schedule and determine where impressions, average position, web traffic, and conversions changed throughout the campaign or project. Use the annotation option in Google Analytics and maintain periodic reporting cycles weekly or monthly to decide on your timeline for the plan to take effect.
Conclusion
Using the scope of an SEO audit, you can leverage the same as a robust tool to improve the performance and visibility of your website in SERPs.
