One of the most important services an SEO company can offer is an audit of your website. An SEO site audit is a review of your website, measured against the current best practices of the industry. “Current” is important, because SEO guidelines change regularly as Google changes its algorithms and experts release new information about what works and what doesn’t. Among the elements of a website that should be audited, are keywords and content, site coding and functionality, and inbound links and social shares. With that in mind, here are a few keyword-related factors an SEO website audit should both start with and always include.
1. The Right Keywords
If you wrote your content before you understood which keywords your audience would search for, there’s a chance that some of your keywords may be rendering useless. During an SEO site audit, your SEO company can do a thorough evaluation of your current keywords to determine if they are effectively targeting the audience.
For example, they may discover that some geo-targeted keyword phrases (which combine a city or region with the name of your product or service) are performing better than others. This information can be used to capitalize on the geographical locations for which you receive the most traffic, and you can shift your SEO budget accordingly.
2. Appropriate Keyword Usage
Understandably, some business owners are unsure how to properly implement keywords into their content. This affects factors like clarity and readability – both of which now affect Google rankings, because Google algorithms can now detect when content was “written for robots” as opposed to being written for human readers. To that end, inserting keywords haphazardly for the sake of SEO is actually counterproductive. Any SEO company worth its salt will take note of poor keyword usage during a site audit.
3. Keyword Density
Keyword density is a term that refers to the percentage of text that is keywords in a piece of content. For example, when the phrase “Los Angeles SEO” is used as a keyword, the keyword density is the rate at which that keyword appears in the content. One SEO rule of thumb that has not changed much over time is this: Keyword density should range from 2-3%. Although Google has never officially endorsed that figure, the closest the company has come to speaking out on keyword density came from Google’s Head of Webspam, Matt Cutts, last year:
“The first time you mention a word, you know, ‘Hey, that’s pretty interesting. It’s about that word.’ The next time you mention that word, ‘oh, OK. It’s still about that word.’ And once you start to mention it a whole lot, it really doesn’t help that much more. There’s diminishing returns. It’s just an incremental benefit, but it’s really not that large.”
What webmasters can extract from this is that less is more when it comes to keywords. When preparing your first site evaluation report, your SEO company should audit your site for keyword density.
Is it time for your SEO site audit?
Remember, a full site audit will examine much more than your SEO keywords. It will also look at the design, navigability, speed, linking profile and more. If you are seeking a web design and SEO company that can perform a full audit of your website, you may wish to contact the experts at Crest Media.
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