According to highly regarded SEO consultant Peter Brittain, people throughout the world are entering the online business space every single day. This is making the online world increasingly competitive, with an estimated 650 million websites on the internet. If you want to succeed in your online ventures, you need to drive traffic away from your competitors’ websites to your own. One of the best ways to do this is to perform various search engine optimisation (SEO) actions on your site so that you appear highly in the search engine rankings for relevant keywords.
However, before you start undertaking SEO on your website, you need to have an idea of what things you need to do and how much work is going to be involved – especially if you have an older website which has a lot of existing content. The best way to do this is to get your website audited with respect to your SEO practices.
The main reasons why you should pay for a professional SEO audit include:
It will identify any major red flags immediately:
Major formatting or content problems can generate red flags and penalties from search engine crawler bots, which can significantly impact your search engine rankings. These problems are often relatively simple to fix once they are identified. Any professional SEO auditor should be able to point out and fix simple red flag penalties quickly and easily.
It will help you prioritise:
Some SEO actions will lead to huge results for a relatively small amount of work, while others will see you slowly climb up the search engine rankings over time. It makes sense to prioritise your SEO efforts so that you can get the best results possible as soon as possible – after all, more visitors to your site will mean more business, and in most cases, more income.
A paid, professional SEO audit will help you identify potential website improvements, as well as their likely benefits. This will help you prioritise, and will give you a clear direction and plan when it comes to SEO.
Find out how you compare to your competitors:
Certain SEO audits will compare your website to those of your competitors. This will help you identify the things that you are doing well, and the things that you are doing poorly. Once you have identified your weaknesses, you will be able to work on them and put yourself at the front of the pack.
Free SEO reports usually aren’t very effective:
Although there are plenty of free SEO reports and auditing tools out there, they aren’t meant to be a replacement for a professional audit be a SEO expert. Instead, they are designed to suck you in to different people’s websites and get you to sign up to their mailing lists. Their information is usually pretty basic, and probably won’t end up being very useful.
It really is worth spending the money on a professional SEO audit if you want to succeed and prosper in the online business space. This is one of the best ways to get ahead of your competitor websites, and you will find that a paid audit will return your money many times over in the long term.