This chart shows real data from a website that's been getting active SEO for 9 months. Note the overall upward trend in traffic from non-paid search.

Google traffic is a big part of many companies’ success. Some drive great revenue from Google and Facebook and Twitter, without paying them a dime.

But other companies run into problems and need to step back and reassess their search engine situation and figure out how to do better. A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) audit is the solution.

Below are seven of the most common reasons companies come looking for an SEO Audit.

1. Google Changes, Not Sure You’re Still On Track?

Panda? Freshness? These are some of the updates Google made to their ranking algorithm in 2011. Many updates like this have happened over the years. Each time, SEO’s update their strategies and tactics to keep getting results. Do you know what Panda and Freshness mean to your site’s SEO? If not, get an SEO audit to make sure you’re positioned to survive and thrive.

2. Need A Second Opinion?

This diagram highlights the six main topics within an SEO audit. Next to each topic are a few of the elements that need to be examined.

Journals have peer review, authors have tech reviewers, and sometime people take serious health diagnoses for a second opinion. If Google organic traffic is serious business for you, you might want a second opinion on the state of your SEO. Is everything being done that could be done?

There are many aspects to SEO:

• Technical aspects like canonicalization, 301 redirects, mod_rewrite
• Keyword research and selection, analysis through web analytics
• Proper use of SEO plugins if using WordPress
• Onsite keyword optimization, especially Title tags, headers, but also body copy and images
• Meta tags
• Internal links, navigation links, and the keywords in those links
• Site architecture
• External links, bridging into PR, social media, content creation, and blogging

If any of these are missing, you aren’t getting all you can from SEO.

3. Your SEO Expert Doesn’t Do It All?

Few SEO’s can do it all- many do their favorite three or four SEO activities and let the rest slide. Or you may have a number of subcontractors involved without a comprehensive strategy plan that covers all of them. You can still get good results that way, but not the best results. You may not be getting the full benefit of SEO. It’s a best practice to check whether your site is up-to-date and get another pair of eyes on it.

4. Your Competition is Catching Up?

If you monitor your rankings for keyphrases, and that of your competitors, you can tell when some of your bread and butter keywords are dipping and diving. You know that means fewer inbound leads, and more of them are going to your competition.

SEO is a game where you can’t relax for long. Climb a hill, rest a day, climb another. Not all your competitors are consciously trying to drive you nuts- some just do such a good job with content that they keep creating more and more links and their search rankings keep improving.

An SEO Audit will highlight the areas you need the most work in to achieve your goals and stage a comeback. See the following diagram for the kind of data that’s needed to evaluate your SEO competition and design an effective strategy:

This is the amount of information that needs to be considered when comparing your website to your competition.

5. Your rankings are stagnant and you want more business?

Life is like walking up a downwards-escalator… if you stop, you go down. If you’re an athlete, every day you don’t train, your competitor gets a leg up on you.

While there are periods of rest in all SEO, if your rest goes on to long and there’s no strong initative or budget, your rankings will eventually fall as your competitors continue to rise. An SEO Audit will help identify the source of your struggles and create strategies and tactics to overcome them so that you can maintain and increase your rankings.

6.Your Website traffic is lower than last year?

Or sales from organic traffic are less than last year? If your competition has really heated up, or your website has suffered from lack of content, mismanagement, or a redesign that didn’t taken into account technical SEO, or maybe you shifted to the wrong keywords; if your traffic and rankings are lower than last year, you need help more desperately. First, an SEO Audit will identify where you stand compared to others, and then try to diagnose what’s missing from your SEO Strategy mix, and given what the competition is doing, what your best next moves are to push back up aggressively in rankings and traffic.

7. You’d Love To Stop Paying Google?

Want to get more free Google traffic so you can pay less for Google AdWords clicks? That’s a noble goal, everyone except Google would say. Investment in SEO is like paying a mortgage on a house over time so you can own it. Paying for AdWords ads is like paying rent, because when you stop, your ads stop showing. Nothing is built over time. Investing in SEO puts you in a better position for years. And as you begin to rank naturally on the first page for your main keywords, you can cut back on your AdWords spend. An SEO Audit can map out this process for you. You also may want to increase the efficiency of your AdWords campaigns to get more bang for your buck. An AdWords Audit can help with that.

If you’d like to speak with us about an SEO Audit, whether it’s right for you, how it works, and the fees, contact us here.