SEO Audit Service
The success of your ecommerce brand depends on getting noticed, not just by shoppers, but by search engines, too.
Your search engine ranking matters. When users search for widgets and find you at or near the top of the SERPs, more eyes land on your brand, ideally, sales and recognition increase at the same time. All this is why you use many kinds of strategies and SEO techniques to ensure your site climbs towards that coveted first-page result. How can you be sure your SEO strategy focuses on what's important, though? What does it take to measure your success, and how can you improve your performance in organic search queries?
A comprehensive technical SEO audit is the answer. At Wild Sprout, we're excited about the opportunity to partner with brand new and established ecommerce brands alike to investigate the effectiveness of your existing SEO campaign.
Why Perform An SEO Audit At All?
There are so many moving parts to a strong SEO strategy, especially in the ecommerce sector, that it’s often hard to keep track of what works and what doesn’t. Are your efforts to build backlinks working as planned, or are they indeed dragging down your ranking? Is the content on your pages attractive to both search engines and users, or is it too tilted in one direction? Do you ever feel like the competition is always two steps ahead, or that you never quite know what Google wants to see from you?
When you aren't sure of any of the answers except to the last of these questions, it's a good sign your strategy needs more direction and better optimisation. Some of your efforts may work spectacularly, but others may work against you and create a muddled approach that leads to stagnation, slow growth, and frustrating struggles you may otherwise be able to avoid. The goals of a Wild Sprout content audit are simple: dispel confusion, provide clarity, and develop your digital marketing efforts in a direction that makes the most sense for your short and long-term goals.
A word of warning, beware the free SEO audit. Remember that old saying: “you get the service you pay for”? The same is true when it comes to the audit process. There are many services out there claiming to provide free insights into your marketing strategy, but the value they deliver often falls far short of what ecommerce businesses need to thrive.
A free audit may provide you with some sense of what isn’t working, but it won’t give you any concrete plans for developing solutions that do work. Data-driven results come from working alongside a proven SEO company such as Wild Sprout, with a clear commitment to performing a deep dive into everything on your sitemap.
When Do You Need SEO Audit Services?
There are some warning signs to watch for when considering the usefulness of your current SEO efforts. If you’ve noticed any of the following issues developing with your ecommerce website, it’s a good time to start a conversation with the SEO experts on the Wild Sprout team. What indicates that your campaign could do better?
- Your strategy feels piecemeal or incomplete. Do you think you’ve missed essential aspects of what to do to be successful? Whether it seems that the competition is always higher, or the latest articles on building a good backlink profile sound like Greek to you, it’s easy to feel “behind the curve.”
- Traffic numbers for your site have taken a noticeable dip and remained at lower levels, either overall, in organic results, or both. Clear declines in your metrics, especially sustained over time, indicate you should make changes as soon as possible.
- You’ve invested considerable time and funds into strategic elements of your website that you no longer maintain. Abandoned or dormant search strategies are some of the most common signs that a complete audit is necessary for a better user experience.
- You never see much or any improvement in your Google Search Console results when analysing your site following SEO changes. While Google’s tool only tells you so much about basic ranking and optimisation, it’s still an essential barometer for the health of your SEO efforts. Static results show that something isn’t working as it should.
What We Examine During a Website Audit
Improving your visibility to Google and the number of users who land on your page is no easy feat. Whether you’ve gone fully hands-on with your webmaster tools or you’ve previously relied on SEO services, you’ll know there’s much to consider — almost as much as what it takes to run the business itself. Juggling all these responsibilities means you’re more likely to drop the ball at some point. We’re here to help ensure that doesn’t happen.
So what do we do when you rely on our expertise to improve your search engine results? Some of our audit deliverables include the following:
Site health improvements.
Though some sites start fully formed and planned, others grow organically over time as your ecommerce business takes shape. The result of such irregular growth is often a website that retains some unnecessary parts. Dead links, thin pages, and other "leftovers" can impact your SEO efforts negatively. Wild Sprout sifts through your site in detail to identify areas that require fixes or outright elimination.
Keyword analysis
How well are you matching your target keywords? Are you hitting the right ones, or is your keyword profile out of sync with what people commonly search? Our rich reports will reveal where and how you rank, what for, and what your competitors may use, too. It may surprise you to learn that you aren't consistently ranking for the keywords you think you are.
UX insights
Are there technical issues holding your site back from being as good as it can be? In some cases, there may be issues with your user experience setup. These issues reduce the effectiveness of your SEO campaign. For example, you may have an excellent desktop website, but you may fail to rank effectively in mobile search due to a lack of user-friendliness. We'll chase down these obscure leads to deliver vital insights into usability improvements.
Site speed analysis
Did you know that how quickly your pages load influences how you rank on Google? It's true. Speed is essential not only for desktop users but for mobile users, too. Search engines know this, and they track how long it takes to build and display the pages found throughout your site. With an even greater emphasis on mobile friendliness today, you must ensure your site has been built for speed. We carefully analyse this metric to determine how you're doing in this category.
Content quality considerations
What you put on your pages matters as much as how you build them. In other words, it's about more than the HTML and CSS. Thin or out of date content that doesn't serve a user's search intent receive penalties and rank lower consistently. We perform an in-depth analysis of all the content currently on your site and consider how it impacts the way search engines rate your website.
Backlink profile investigations.
Who links back to you? What is the trustworthiness or value of those pages? Backlinks remain crucial, but black hat SEO techniques aren't going to do you any favours no matter how clever they might seem. By using white hat best practices and backlink analysis tools, we develop a clear picture of your profile and how it helps or harms your site. We can also analyse backlink anchor text and explore other metrics to uncover and mitigate the effects of negative SEO campaigns run by any unethical competitors.
From our first look at your site to the production of our final report, Wild Sprout leverages tools on the cutting edge, such as Sitebulb and Screaming Frog, to make your website more attractive to the crawlers indexing the modern web. Following our innovative ANCHOR model, we employ a clear strategy to better develop your ecommerce site into an attractive page that ranks well, shares easily on social media, and more.
What We Do Next for Your Long-Term Success
Let’s take a deeper dive into that subject. What can we do for you once we’ve completed an audit? Just like when you order a home inspection before buying or selling a property, an audit is only the first step in a more considerable effort to make improvements. Working together with Wild Sprout opens the door to making clear improvements that you can see clearly in your results on Google Analytics and across other metrics.
Some of what we provide for our clients includes:
Site optimisation
After determining the major issues with your page, we can embark on a plan to restructure it into a more sensible layout. We can reduce the complexity of your sitemap, remove dead links, and provide insights for creating an easy-to-navigate site that crawlers and users both understand. Optimising your site is usually the first thing on a long to-do list, and it is here that you will begin to see positive changes in your ranking efforts.
Keyword research
Using the information generated during our audit, we’ll research what keywords you should rank for and explore how to begin incorporating more of them into your content. By organically creating content helpful to users, we can plot your path up the rankings and hope to land you a higher spot.
Conversion Rate Optimisation
Getting people to your site is only a part of the battle. How do you reduce your bounce rate and convert more visitors into customers? There are a wide variety of strategies we explore to deliver CRO that works in the contemporary online shopping environment
Content development
Did you know that you can strengthen your brand while improving your rankings? Good content is all about doing both. It is no longer merely a means to an end, with that “end” being page one of Google. It should answer user questions, provide insight into what you do, and establish the trustworthiness of your business. Based on our understanding of your content from our audit services, Wild Sprout and our partners may suggest content improvements.
Competitor analysis
What are your biggest competitors doing? Where do they rank, and where do you compare? Sometimes the best way to improve your efforts is to see what other similar ecommerce businesses do to attract more search traffic to their page. We do a deep dive into the competition identified during your audit and provide a detailed breakdown of what we can do to work towards outperforming their efforts without resorting to black hat strategies.
And More!
These steps are only the beginning of the complete overhaul we provide to clients through our ANCHOR model of service delivery. From audit to implementation, we stand by our clients 100 percent, providing clear, attentive service that delivers important answers.
Starting with our richly detailed audit report and continuing through our entire business relationship, Wild Sprout remains focused on what’s best for your brand. With an exclusive focus on ecommerce businesses, we have a clear understanding of what works in this industry. Even more importantly, our services continuously evolve to keep up with the changes Google makes in its algorithms regularly. Together, we improve your chances for ranking more highly, driving more traffic, and converting more visitors into paying customers.
Building Better Webpages With Wild Sprout
Think about the process you go through personally when you search for something on the web — does SEO ever cross your mind when you want to find a good local pizza joint or a specialty retailer? Typically, the answer is no. Isn’t that the way it should be for the end-user? Determining how to structure a site and create content that drives organic traffic may seem challenging, but with Wild Sprout, it’s just another day at the office.
Leave confusion about SEO behind and make the headaches surrounding understanding your analytics a distant memory. Develop the agility your brand needs to move swiftly towards bigger successes and new growth opportunities today.
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