Why do an SEO Assessment?
Posted by Gretchen

Much like diagnosing a car, an SEO assessment plays an important role in determining how your website is performing. Without an audit, it is virtually impossible to uncover everything that could be affecting your site.

Needless to say, that SEO assessments are important and key be the key to site success.

 

 

What is an SEO Assessment?
There are literally hundreds of ranking signals that search engines evaluate in order to determine where your site should rank for any given search inquiry. Some carry more weight than others, but all of them, if not optimized, can hinder your site’s performance. The aim of an SEO assessment is to review as many of these ranking signals to indicate what is working well, what elements need improving and what parts of your site need attention.

There are two ways to perform an SEO assessment:

• Do it manually! Use a comprehensive checklist.
• Use an advanced website review tool that will make auditing simple.

Benefits of Performing an SEO Assessment 

Finding SEO weaknesses –  SEO has evolved into something much more complex since the days of putting keywords into the correct places on your pages. Now, Google considers how your site is performing on many different levels, including technical performance and quality of content. It’s important to remember that Google updates to its algorithms – a lot.

SEO Metrics & Progress – An initial SEO assessment will set the scene upon which all metrics and progress can then be measured. If you don’t know what the situation was like before, then it will be hard to later determine how your site has improved.

Prioritize Changes – While it can be tempting to plow through all of these suggestions as quickly as possible, it’s worth segmenting individual tasks into mini projects and prioritizing these. Things that impact on usability like, customized 404 pages, favicons and implementing structured data markup are tasks that will certainly improve the user experience. However, focusing on technical SEO that could be hindering your site, like crawling and indexing issues because If you don’t optimize your technical SEO first you may find that other improvements you make will have less of an impact on overall performance.