A doctor will never prescribe medicines without diagnosing a problem. In the same way, you can’t improve your website’s search engine ranking without an SEO audit. It’s the first step to an informed, effective SEO strategy—and improving your site performance to attract more leads, visitors and revenue. Find out more in our complete SEO Audit Singapore guide!

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit is like your website’s report card. It looks at the different factors that can affect your website ranking, and measures how well your site meets the criteria or follows the best practices.  It can help you:

  • Compare your strengths, weaknesses and opportunities vis a vis your competitors, and help you find your unique competitive advantage.
  • Identify the most important changes you need to make to your website.
  • Understand your sites’ overall SEO efficiency.
  • Identify the weaknesses and critical errors that are affecting your website performance, and allow you to correct them quickly and efficiently.
  • Set goals and expectations for your digital marketing campaigns.
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What happens during an SEO Singapore Audit?

A complete SEO Audit for Singapore websites will include the following steps or stages.

Technical analysis

 This involves technical factors that affects your website’s accessibility and indexability. Accessibility is whether or not search engines or users can find your content. Indexability is the search engine’s ability to analyze and add a page to its index.

A technical SEO audit will look at robot.txt files, metatags, XML sitemaps, looped redirects, unsupported scripts, server errors, broken links or 404 pages. Thus, it can help you find critical errors in your website, and guide your web development team’s effort to improve site performance and speed.

Another important factor is mobile-friendliness. Google and other search engines are prioritizing mobile-friendly websites, in light of how more people are using their phones or tablets. Your website may look great on your computer or laptop, but how will it perform when people access it through other gadgets? An SEO audit can help check if your website is mobile-friendly—and inform your website developers so they can create a site that people will want to read, wherever they are.

It’s important to address all technical errors, since these have a huge effect on site speed and your customer experience. A smooth, well-designed website is the foundation of all your digital efforts. It may take time—and investing in a good Singapore digital marketing and website development agency—but it is the cornerstone of any successful online presence. 

On-Page analysis

Another important aspect for any SEO Singapore audit is the content, or what you put on the pages. Some of the common issues are:

Duplicate content

Google can detect when blocks of content are identical to other pages within your own website, or with other websites. If they find out that content duplication was malicious—for example, you are plagiarizing other content, or deliberately using the same information across multiple domains to get more traffic—it can remove your website from search results.

In most cases, content duplication is accidental and non-malicious. For example, you have a printer-friendly version of an article, are using a boiler plate on several pages, or your content management system is displaying items on multiple sections with the same label. An SEO Singapore audit can help spot these issues and alert the web development team.

Stubs/lack of content

Other issues are lack of content, which can happen when your pages only have very short text (or stubs) that fall within the SEO ideal minimum of 300 words. The adage “keep it short and sweet” doesn’t apply to SEO – without content, search engines will have nothing to crawl, and no way to measure your site’s credibility as a good source of information.

Keyword cannibalization

Your SEO Audit Singapore expert will also identify  keyword cannibalization: when your website is trying to rank for the same keyword on different pages. Google will not “add your authority” and reward you for having several pages that focus on the same idea. Rather, it will rank you based on your strongest page. Your SEO audit can alert you on what pages you need to change or merge, but it falls on content developers to turn those keywords into something that is relevant and readable.

General content issues

That’s why a good SEO Singapore audit will not just look at individual pages, but your general content issues—whether or not the content meets search intent, is properly structured for easy reading and indexing, and simultaneously addresses the needs of your target market.

Off-Page analysis

This shows how people interact with your website, and if it is read or cited/linked by other websites. This is where your social media marketing, influencer marketing, or other efforts pay off. If you work hard to drive people to your website—either through ad campaigns, tie ups with communities, link building campaigns, etc—it will improve your website ranking. While this requires more long-term marketing campaigns which are harder to quantify, they do make a difference in how people trust your website, and their engagement will trickle down to affect your SEO score.

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Competitive analysis and keyword research

A complete SEO Singapore audit will also include a solid keyword strategy. What keywords are you most likely to rank in? How will you use them on your pages? How will you reach your users in different stages of the buyer journey, or with different search intents?

But do avoid keyword spamming—mindless reiterations of keywords that are meant to increase website ranking, but drive away any person who lands on your page. Every post you put on your website has to make sense. It should also address your customer interests and needs, and provide relevant information that informs, engages, entertains and persuades. While SEO increases your website ranking, do remember that at the end of the day you are still serving people. In this way, SEO strategy and content strategy work hand in hand to produce content that improves both your website ranking and your brand credibility. 

How can SEO Audits help my marketing efforts?

Ideally, your SEO audits can inform your overall marketing strategy, and your marketing strategy should guide your SEO strategy.

For example, do you want to compete directly with your competitor’s keywords? Or do you want to take a different approach and attract an untapped market? You may also want to align your website content with on-going campaigns, social media hash tags, or trending topics among your target audience and region.

How often should you do SEO audits?

While it’s recommended to get an SEO audit before making any major changes on a website, it is just as critical to do periodic audits. If you have a very large website, do it at least once every quarter of the year. If not, at least do it once or twice a year.

SEO is an on-going process.  Search engines like Google and Yahoo often update their algorithms, which set new criteria for website ranking. You also need to catch broken links or error messages, and revisit your content and adjust your strategy. For example, you may see that certain pages get a lot of traffic, which will give you an idea of what your readers want. Other pages may need to be re-optimized. An SEO audit can help you create fresh content that improves your website ranking, encourages old readers to return, and attracts new visitors.

Find an SEO Audit Singapore expert

Mapletree Media offers a full suite of services to build your digital presence. This includes website development, SEO audit and strategy, content management, social media management and more.

We can build or redesign your website, improve its ranking it an SEO Singapore audit. Then, we can promote your website and your brand with social media posts, lead generation campaigns, Google ad campaigns, and more. Contact us for a customized proposal.