Regardless of whether your website is the lifeblood of your business or it's just one of many ways you generate revenue, chances are you've likely invested a good deal of resources on the site. To that end, it can obviously be frustrating to spend a lot of time and money on the CMS, hosting, programming, and design for a website and not see enough results to make it worthwhile.

But if you don't know why you're not attracting as many online customers as you'd like, you're not going to get the ROI you're hoping for. That's why you need a thorough SEO Performance Review (also known as an SEO Audit) to diagnose the problem and recommend the proper solutions.

If you're looking to improve your traffic through search engines like Google and convert more visitors into sales, having a professional SEO Specialist review your site as part of the SEO Audit is essential. Without this review, you're essentially diagnosing your own website and guessing why you're falling short on your traffic and conversion goals, which is far from an ideal solution.

After all, if your car wasn't performing properly and you couldn't pinpoint the problem, would you guess or take it to a mechanic?

If you were suffering from an unclear health issue, would you attempt to diagnose it yourself or visit a doctor?

The same logic should apply for your website. Unless you're completely certain on how to fix the problem, it's best to have an experienced pro do an overview of the site and provide advice on how to improve your SEO.

Additionally, many of the recommendations that you'll be given will likely go beyond simply improving your site's SEO. The tips provided by a modern-day SEO Specialist should also help your overall marketing strategy and improve the user experience (UX) on the site, which should increase the likelihood of visitors converting to customers. That's why we prefer to think of this as an overall SEO Performance Review, as opposed to an SEO Audit.

Important Sections in an SEO Review

When you hire a professional to conduct an SEO Performance Review, you should receive a detailed overview of several different aspects of your website. Not only should your SEO Specialist do a deep dive into the analytics, but there should also be a review of the site's content, keyword usage, technical SEO, social media strategy, off-page SEO, and more. Let's breakdown the important aspects of a quality SEO Performance Review.

Analytics

In order to make the proper suggestions for your website and business, it's essential to know the most important metrics of the site. This can include how many users are visiting the site, what pages receive the most visits through search engines, how long visitors are staying on your site, and what percentage of your visitors are being converted to leads or sales.

A good SEO Specialist will outline these stats, give his or her interpretation of them, and provide recommendations based on anything that stands out.

Content

The content on a website is a foundational aspect of SEO and is considered one of the most important ranking factors in Google's algorithm. When reviewing a site, an SEO Specialist can identify pages that are lacking in quality content and provide tips on additional info that can be added, as well as which keywords to include.

Having quality content on a site will also make the experience more enjoyable for a visitor, so the SEO tips for content should also help the UX and turn more visitors into customers.

Title Tags & Headings

A lot of website managers don't realize how important a well-optimized page title (aka. title tag) and heading can be when it comes to SEO. These are vital places on a page to utilize your targeted keywords and attract users who are searching those terms in Google. SEO Specialists can provide tips on how to keyword-optimize some of the headings and titles on your most important pages.

Technical SEO

This portion of the review can be worth its weight in gold if, for example, some of your pages aren't indexed or there are broken links on the site that you weren't aware of. In addition, a Technical SEO Audit can cover the quality of your sitemap, 404 errors, the robots.txt file, website speed, and mobile responsiveness. Your SEO Specialist can also suggest certain types of structured data for the site and tell you whether the errors that show up in automated site review tools are truly important.

Backlinks/Off-Site SEO

Another foundational SEO aspect is the quantity and quality of links pointing to your website from external sites, otherwise known as backlinks. The SEO Specialist reviewing your site should be able to provide you with an overview of the top web domains linking to your site, the number of valuable backlinks you have, and if there are potentially harmful links from spammy sites that should be disavowed.

A professional SEO Specialist can also make recommendations on which directories and industry sites you could get a link from, as well as provide advice on how to improve your social media strategy.

Choosing The Best SEO Audit For Your Business

As with every service you buy, not all SEO Reviews/Audits are created equal, so you'll need to do your research before deciding what to purchase. Here are some important questions to ask the company or individual that's offering the audit:

What sections are covered in the review?

Any quality SEO Performance Review should cover, at minimum, the sections mentioned above. Reviews may also have separate sections specifically for keywords, site architecture/navigation, landing page structure, conversion optimization, and competitor analysis.

Is the review done manually or is it automated?

Unfortunately, there are a lot of free (or extremely cheap) SEO Audits that are nothing more than an automated scan of your website and provide little to no useful tips. While every company uses certain tools to learn about a website's backlinks and discover technical issues, you need a professional to interpret this data and manually review other aspects of your site in order to give the proper recommendations.

What's even worse is these audits will often display unnecessary warnings in red font that are designed to scare you into purchasing a service to "fix" an irrelevant or non-existent issue. You're better off paying the proper rate for a qualified professional to review your site instead of choosing the cheapest audit you can find. As the saying goes, you get what you pay for.

Does the review include a phone consultation?

Even the clearest SEO Review can be tough to fully understand for the average person, so it's important to find out if you'll be able to speak with the person who reviewed your site. Phone consultations give the customer an opportunity to ask questions and get clarification on certain stats and recommendations from the review.