How Often Should an SEO Audit be Completed?
Whenever starting an SEO program, it is true that one of the first steps is to do an SEO audit. This helps assess where the SEO stands and what needs to be improved. However, what tends to happen is that most people do this process only once, at the beginning of the program. The reality is that it should be done periodically. Yet, the answer to the question of “how often” should you do it isn’t as straightforward to answer.
Here are some insights that may help when to conduct an SEO audit for your website:
Before Starting SEO
Let’s say you’re a business that has never really paid much attention to your SEO and you decided to start. Whether you deal with your SEO in house or hire an agency it doesn’t matter – your first step should always be to perform an SEO audit. You want to assess things like site speed, whether it is responsive and mobile friendly, as well as current organic performance in the search engines. The information you gather will be essential in helping you create an SEO plan that will help your organization meet its marketing and business goals.
The same line of thinking is true if you are making changes to your existing SEO program. The SEO audit is always a great way to assess where your SEO stands and can also enlighten you as to any technical elements that need to be tweaked that could affect your
Assessing Progress of Your SEO
After you’ve been executing your SEO program for some time, you can perform the SEO audit again in order to assess progress, especially if the original audit caused you to realize that you need to fix some things, like the site speed. For example, if your original audit showed that your website was slow, you might want to test this aspect again after a few months to make sure that the website is performing faster. In this case, you may not need to do a whole, complete audit again. Rather, you should test the elements that you needed to fix to make sure they meet your requirements.
After Changing the Website
It doesn’t matter when your last SEO audit was, whether it was last month or several years ago. You should always be in the mindset of performing another SEO audit after going through any website changes, from minor tweaks to a major redesign. Any change you make to the website has the potential of impacting SEO performance. The goal would be to discover if any of your changes impacted your technical SEO right away, before they had a chance to harm your results over the long term. If you suddenly notice that the images are loading slowly after making a site change, if you notice right away and address it, you will be less likely to experience any long-term repercussions.
As you can see, it is important to do an SEO audit periodically. There are no hard and fast rules, but you should be in the mindset to do one at least every few years. If any of the above scenarios take place, you should also follow this advice. The goal of your audit is to assess progress, and you can only do that if you do these audits now and then.
Categorized in: SEO
LIKE AND SHARE THIS ARTICLE:
