Northern Virginia Website Audit for Small Business

Northern Virginia SEO Website Audit

Table of Contents

Do you have a website?

How do you know it is search engine friendly?

For small businesses, it gets challenging to figure out where to start, right?

Start with a Website Audit to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your website.

What is a Website audit?

A Website Audit is a process to analyze your website for performance, speed, and other technical issues using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) best practices.

Why do a Website Audit?

When you conduct an SEO website audit, you understand the foundational issues affecting your website search performance. This is an opportunity to address those issues to get more organic traffic and customers for your business.

Now you know why conducting an SEO audit is essential for better performance.

What are the Benefits of a SEO Website audit?

Here are a few:

1. Search engines update their algorithms quite frequently. Your website needs to be updated to adjust to those changes, so you remain relevant to your audience.
2. Addressing technical errors such as broken links (404 errors), page speed, etc., are factors for higher rankings in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
3. Ensuring all your pages are indexed will make you more visible on the search engines.
4. Titles and Meta tags entice visitors to click to get to your website. Optimizing these tags for clicks will increase visitors to your site.
5. Update outdated content with fresh content to attract your target audience to revisit your site.
6. Optimize pages and blog posts that are not performing well to get more traffic to them.
7. Leverage competitor insights to improve your ranking in the SERPs.

SEO vs. Local SEO audit

Both audits are pretty similar. As the name suggests, a key difference is “Local SEO audits” help local brick-and-mortar stores where customers can visit.

You could be a regional, national or international company, but if you want to boost your brand awareness in the town, county, or city you are based in, you need to optimize for Local SEO.

A key component of Local SEO is to have a Google My Business listing.

We recommend ranking Locally before attempting to rank National or internationally.

How does Google My Business (GMB) listing help?

A GMB helps your local business with visibility on the Google Search Results (SERPs). As people search for services or products in the area they live in, the Google My Business page shows your business in the Google sidebar, local results, and google maps local listings.

(source)

If you want to make it to the Google Maps 3-pack, you will need to optimize your GMB listing. If you need help with that, contact us, and we will be glad to assist.

All these areas will increase your brand presence, website traffic, and credibility with potential local customers.

GMB can help share information about your business like address, working hours, location, and even business updates, announcements, offers, etc. This helps to build relationships with your local customers.

So, e.g., if you’re a local coffee shop, you can give free coffee to people who visit the store on National Coffee Day. If the experience is enjoyable for your visitors, you will get more referrals and brand recognition.

Your local customers will be more than happy to give you raving reviews.

Did you know …

Positive reviews will increase customer trust, higher rankings in the search engines, and direct access to customers who love your product or service.

But there are two sides to a coin; negative reviews could have the opposite effect. If not addressed quickly could have severe consequences on your sales, brand, and revenue.

Contact us for strategies to minimize negative reviews.

Types of SEO Website Audits 

What is a technical SEO audit?

Technical SEO is responsible for making your site easy for search engines to discover, crawl, and index web pages.

Conducting a technical SEO audit identifies errors holding your website from maximum visibility in the SERPs. Fixing those issues will help with an increase in business growth.

Essential items we check for when conducting Technical audits;
– Indexed Pages
– Page Speed
– Site Architecture
– Redirects
– Structured Markup
– Robots.txt
– XML Sitemap
– Canonical Tags
– Duplicate Content

What is an On-page SEO audit?

On-page SEO audit is about identifying and optimizing your copy and images for organic search. Resolving audit errors will improve your website’s visibility on the search results (SERPs).

Ultimately, making it easy for the search engines and visitors to find relevant content to their search query that is easy to understand and satisfies user intent.

We review the following areas to optimize based on On-Page audit findings, such as:

– Keyword Research
– User Intent match
– User experience issues
– Title and Meta Tags
– Schema
– Image & Video optimization
– Content quality
– Internal Linking

What is an Off-page SEO audit?

Off-page is all about outreach to improve your online presence and increase your brand awareness. Outreach involves contacting websites in your niche and building relationships to build backlinks.

We check for the following items,
– Inbound links (backlinks)
– Anchor text
– Relevance
– Domain Authority
– Reputation
– PR

How to Audit a Website?

Remember when you were in school and turned in your assignment, the teacher graded it. Similarly, your website gets graded by search engines and ranks you in the SERPs.

Our 6 step website audit process starts by installing Google and Bing Webmaster tools. Use webmaster tools to submit the sitemap, so it’s easy for the search engines to index and crawl the website.

Our SEO Audit checklist serves as a guide to identifying errors.

We analyze these errors and create a strategic roadmap with recommendations to resolve them.

SEO is all about test, rinse and repeat; audits are no exceptions. In the spirit of continuous improvement, we conduct these Website Audits every 6 months.

Some Website Audit Tools
– Screaming Frog
– Ahrefs
– Semrush
– Copyscape
– Google Analytics
– Google Search Console
– Bing Webmaster Tools
– PageSpeed Tool
– Asterikx SEO Audit Checklist

What is included in a Northern Virginia Website Audit?

The SEO audit identifies foundational issues affecting your organic search performance. It could take anywhere from 1 to 3 weeks to complete. It includes our findings from the Technical SEO Audit, On-Page Audit, and Off-Page Audit.

At completion, we present our findings to you and your team with a roadmap to address all issues.

Your website is a dynamic digital property with content updates made regularly. If you are concerned about your website’s health and want a site audit to fix any critical errors, please contact us today.