Your SEO Audit Isn’t a 1-Time Fix (But it’s a Necessary Start)
Is your business website working?
Unless you offer SEO audit services, SEO isn’t the first thing you think of when starting your small business. There is a stage in marketing your small business where you no longer serve people you know (or people in your family – thanks Mom!) and you have to reach customers from a broader circle. That’s when people start thinking about a website and then SEO shortly after that. Search Engine Optimization is the work you have to do to get your website found and convert curious folks into paying customers.
SEO isn’t as easy as some people make it out to be. It’s just like any other industry, there are people that can DIY it and it’s good enough for a little bit, but if you’re going to be a professional, you need professional SEO services.
The SEO Audit one and done is ruining your web traffic
A lot of small businesses get ripped off by SEO agencies because they think of SEO as a deliverable. It’s the box that gets delivered and now we’re going to get more leads. It doesn’t really work. Like that. My neighbors pay for a lawn service. The guys come in uniform about twice a month and spread fertilizer, mow, pull weeds, and fluff up or replace the mulch. My neighbors sit on their porch, drink wine, and watch the men work. It’s kind of fun to watch, but impossible for me to keep up with.
SEO is a lot like that. If my awesome neighbor lady said “I want fertilizer!” she could pay one of my kids to go over there and dump fertilizer all around. For a little more, they could get one of those plastic things that spits it out evenly.
That’s not going to be the same experience.
In a few weeks, the spot where the dog pees is going to look different. The beautiful black mulch is going to be grey and half of it will be washed across the sidewalk after the rain.
But she doesn’t want fertilizer, she wants a nice yard.
SEO Audit Services Are a Long-Term Commitment that Nobody Mentions
I’ve worked on websites for companies before that understood the difference between fertilizer and a nice lawn that your grandkids can play on. It’s a great time. I’ve also worked with clients before that wanted my SEO audit, and according to my Office 365 notifications, they haven’t opened it in 6 months.
One day I sat down with a non-profit leader that had a sample website that he liked. He wanted me to make him a site that looked, performed, and felt like that site. I had to give him the truth:
That site has at least 4 hours a week of content generation going in the background. I can build it, but are you ready, or is your staff ready, for 4-6 hours a week of content creation?
An SEO audit is a good treatment of your overall marketing, but it isn’t a one and done.
When you buy SEO audit services from somebody like me, you want to be really honest with yourself and with them about what you want. If you want a flashy report to show the CEO about how awesome your website is doing, that is something, but it’s not SEO. That’s Google Analytics.
A good SEO audit is a bunch of things
- a technical SEO audit (does your site work?)
- an SEO content audit (what do you say on that site?)
- a social media audit (are you using the same SEO-informed language in your social media as you do on your website?)
- a business intake audit (what are you doing with those leads that come in?)
From there, you develop a content marketing plan to move forward and put that SEO audit to good use.
Even a 270+ Point SEO Audit Like Mine Is Only a Starting Point
When I do the preliminary SEO audit, you want to get everything right and fixed from the beginning. These are some of the things I check in my 270+ point SEO Audit.
- Technical audit: Can Google crawl the site? Is it indexed? Is it slow? How does it look on mobile? Are you using Schema markup and other must-haves?
- On-page audit: Are you using title tags correctly? Are there good internal links? Are you keyword stuffing like it’s 2019?
- Content audit: Do you say the words on your website that your customers use? Is it repetitive? Are you overly technical or only targeting the CEO?
- Off-page audit: What do other sites think about your content? Where does your traffic come from? Is your content sharable?
Some of this audit is just establishing how to measure the performance of your site. It’s not so much whether your site is doing good or bad, but are you even measuring it?
From there, you can build up a good marketing strategy cadence of checking ranking, web vitals, your content, and overall performance on a monthly basis. Just by learning how and what to measure month to month, you’ll already begin improving your SEO.
Whether you have an e-commerce SEO audit, local SEO audit, or an SEO content audit, knowing a baseline and then the monthly measurements can help you take the next steps to improve those metrics.
Get Some SEO, but Then Keep the Momentum Going
There are a lot of companies that have no idea about how or if their website is bringing them any business. No shade thrown to web designers, but if they aren’t an SEO-trained web designer, they just don’t take things like search engine performance into consideration. If you have a new or even an old website, let’s talk about my SEO audit services. I can work with your in-house marketing team or be your in-house marketing team.
Hire somebody like me or another reputable company for the SEO audit services, and then keep what they gave you and use that as a template to build on. It’s not the audit that you are looking for, but all of the measurements and direction that come from it.
Time to Quit Thinking of SEO as a Deliverable
Technical debt has compounding interest against your website. Technical benefit has a compounding factor too. As your site grows in SEO authority, your rankings and visits to your site increase. The longer you have little to no SEO benefits, the lower your site will rank in search with every Google update.
If you’ve been doing SEO the same way you did in 2019, your ranking drops with every Google Update, every search engine change, every Bing software update (see what I did there? That is 2019 SEO in action! If you came to this page from a search engine, it wasn’t because of that sentence.)
After an SEO Audit, Good Leads and More Business is the Deliverable
SEO audit services are a relationship. I have a therapist that calls me every few months for help. “How are these keywords doing? I’ve been targeting them.” That’s right. Therapists call me! We review his keywords and I send him a past and future report. Here’s how some words did in the past, here are some words to focus on in the future. He changes his blog posts and social posts accordingly.
It’s an ongoing collaboration that we continue as long as he wants to improve his SEO. The results he gets from the forms and phone calls show that it’s working.
Just like the best lawns aren’t the ones that got the best water in April, The business owners who win at SEO long-term aren’t the ones who did the biggest audit. They’re the ones who never stopped auditing. With a good SEO audit as a starting point to your marketing, you’ll be in a great spot to build your website as an asset instead of a business expense.
Fill out the SEO Audit interest form and let’s get your SEO in order for ongoing business success. I’ll call you as soon as I’m done pulling up every. single. dandelion. in my lawn.
