Why is an Audit so Important?

To improve your SEO efforts and strategy, you’ll need a starting point. The audit lets you know what is wrong and what is right with your website’s optimization.

When you know the weak areas of your website, you can work on them and increase the effectiveness of your SEO campaign.

This way, you’ll not only improve your local SERP rankings but also reduce your hassle in the long run.

Here’s how you can start performing the local SEO audit:

How to Perform a Local SEO Audit:

Checking your GMB Page and Citations

Your Google My Business is certainly the most influential local SEO factor. We’ve already thrown light on its set up and optimization.

Make sure that it is properly optimized without any errors. Along with the GMB page, you should check your citations too. You can use the citation finder tools mentioned in the preceding chapter to find your business citations. All in all, your NAP and Google My Business listing should be consistent and accurate.

Performing Keyword Analysis

Keywords are the fundamentals of SEO. Finding out if you’re targeting the right keywords or not, is vital for your campaign’s success and you shouldn’t neglect it. Your website might already be targeting a few keywords. You should find out which ones you’re targeting right now.

You can find out which keywords you’re targeting for right now, on SEMrush.com.

1. Add your website’s URL, select the country your business is in
2. You’ll then see the performance of your website in terms of organic keywords
3. It also shows the position of the keywords

The list of keywords will give you an idea of the keywords your business is targeting for. You can use the Google Keyword Planner Tool for finding relevant keywords and ideas for your business too.

Once you’ve found the keywords you’re ranking for, perform an organic search for them.Take a look at the top results and see who’s ranking ahead of you.

Next, do the same for the local version of the keywords. So, if you’re keyword was ‘best restaurant’, change it to ‘best restaurant + [location]’. See the results and you’ll see which websites rank ahead of you.

Try this out with different local keywords and you’ll find out which keywords get the maximum traffic. You can also use Google Trends to find out the popularity of keywords region-wise.

Checking the Meta Data

Your Meta information is critical for your site’s SEO health. You can use the Screaming Frog tool to check your Meta information (Meta tags, title tags, Meta Description, etc.).

If you don’t want to use the tool, you can do this process manually as well.

• Check the Meta descriptions present on your website. Compare them with your competitors’.
• If your page is missing Meta Descriptions, then add them there.
• Make sure that your Meta Descriptions contain keywords, are engaging and compelling.
• Check those descriptions which aren’t optimized and optimize them as well.

Your title tags should be less than 55 characters and the meta descriptions should be less than 155 characters in size.

Analyzing Organic Search Results

Organic search results refer to searches performed by real users. Go to the private browsing window (Incognito in Google Chrome and InPrivate in Microsoft Edge) and search for the keywords you want to target. Choose a competitor and enter its website in SEMRush to find out about the keywords they rank for. Visit their website and see what the thing they are doing differently is. Maybe they are writing long-form posts or maybe they have better media on the site.

Now, you should search for your business with the location in the search engine. When you search for your business, check if your GMB page is present in the SEPRs or not. Also, check if your website and the GMB page is present on the SEPR or not. Because if it isn’t then Google hasn’t linked them together. Maybe your social media page is showing up or maybe not. This simple search helps you find out where you’re lagging behind in terms of optimization.

Using Social Signals

How well is your local business presence on social media? Checking your social media presence is important because it directly impacts your website’s SEO. Which social signals impact your ranking?

The number of likes on your Facebook page, number of twitter followers, and other similar factors influence your SEO. Take a look at this Search Metrics’ chart for social signals:

To find out how well you perform in this regard, you should search for your business online. See which social profiles of your business appear in the search results. For example, if your business’s Twitter account appears but not the Facebook business page, it means your Facebook page is lagging behind.

In such a case, you can do two things- either start a new one or optimize the current one.

How to optimize your social media profile?

The best tactic is the simplest one, start posting content there. Engage with people on these platforms. It will make your profile more active and you’ll begin to appear in search results quickly. Your posts should be engaging and valuable. It’ll help you get better results faster.

Conclusion

Auditing your business website regularly helps you evaluate your progress. Conduct audits on your site periodically to make sure you don’t lag behind anywhere. It will help you measure your success. Now that we’ve discussed auditing your website, we’ll target the competition in the upcoming chapter.