It’s always best to start working on search engine optimisation (SEO) from the moment you start building your website, especially your blog. Still, when creating a pet business, there are so many things to focus on you can only do some at a time. If you’ve got an existing website and blog with content on it, don’t despair. You can still incorporate SEO to boost your pet brand, the website traffic and online visibility. Completing an SEO content audit will help you understand how your current content performs in search and how you can utilise this to chase more SEO success.
What is an SEO content audit?
There is never a wrong time to start implementing SEO in your pet business. Even if you’ve been in business for years and have a blog full of educational, engaging and exciting content, you can start implementing SEO strategies today. Still, before you do, you must see where you sit now. An SEO content audit involves taking stock of the content you currently have on your website and how it performs in search, even if you’ve never done SEO.
Benefits of an SEO content audit
There are three main benefits to completing an SEO content audit right now in your business before doing any keyword research, SEO or content strategy moving forward.
See how your website has performed in the past.
As long as you’ve set everything up correctly, your website will naturally appear in search results, and doing an SEO content audit will show you how it’s been performing in terms of traffic and ranking without any actionable SEO work being done.
Set a benchmark for moving forward.
Once you’ve completed the SEO content audit, you can then begin setting goals in terms of keywords you want to target, traffic you want to get and even conversions or other targets to help you build your pet brand’s online presence.
Find gaps in your content plan.
Part of an SEO content audit is checking where the traffic to your website is currently coming from in terms of keywords and search terms. This information can then be used to see if your current content needs to include more information or if there are opportunities for you to target similar keywords with new content moving forward.
Basics of an SEO content audit
Depending on how much content you currently have on your website, your SEO content audit will take you a few hours, weeks, or months. I worked with a business once where it took us over six months to do a content audit, and in the end, we had to put it on pause to focus on other parts of the business. Here are the basic steps to do an SEO content audit;
- Get a list of all the currently published pages and posts on your website that have content on them.
- Look at the traffic your website has been getting over the last six or twelve months through Google Analytics.
- Use Google Search Console to check how your website and each page or post perform in Google search results; this will include impressions, clicks, search terms and more.
This will give you the benchmark for all the relevant information you’ll need to help move forward with your SEO efforts. Once you’ve got this benchmark, you can dive deeper and see which pages get the most traffic and where it’s coming from, which ones keep users on your website longer, and which ones are already performing well for specific terms in search results. You can gain so much information from just taking stock of where things are at.
Once you’ve worked through the basics of an SEO content audit, you can use that information to develop a content strategy and help inform keyword research. But whatever you do, make sure you track, review and refresh along the way to ensure you’re content is fresh and you’re using the information you’re finding to help make your website better.
Want some help completing an SEO content audit for your pet brand? Get in touch I’d love to do it for you so you can focus on other parts of your business and brand building. Once we complete the content audit, you can then build an SEO and content strategy that will help your pet brand grow and succeed.
