Why a pre-website project SEO audit is so important

An SEO audit, according to various SEO experts and industry leaders, is a “comprehensive analysis of a website to assess its search engine optimisation performance and identify areas for improvement”.

If you look at what an SEO audit fundamentally is, you might be led to believe it’s best placed as either something you do to an existing website to extract more value, or after you’ve launched a new website to ensure all of the boxes are ticked.

However, conducting a thorough SEO audit before you embark on a new website project can significantly improve your approach and ensure the new website not only matches but surpasses the performance of your current one.

Here are 5 reasons why a pre-website project SEO audit is so important.

Protecting & building on what you’ve already got

One of the most significant risks to your SEO when migrating to a new website is losing existing rankings. An audit will help you to identify valuable pages, content and keywords that drive traffic and conversions so they can be prioritised and protected. You can also pinpoint content that isn’t performing that well that can be repurposed or improved – for example if a page or piece of content is bringing a lot traffic but the traffic isn’t relevant or converting. Having all of this information before you’ve even started planning your new website project helps you prioritise, plan, and puts you in the best possible position to maintain and improve on your current performance.

Shaping your new website structure with SEO in mind

It used to be that there was a bit of trade-off between designing a website for user experience and designing a website for SEO. But as search engines place more and more emphasis on good user experience, the two become more interlinked. Fast forward to today and incorporating SEO into the design phase of your website should be more seamless. An SEO audit should influence the proposed sitemap and page hierarchy for your new website, informing how users move around your site as well as how search engines index and understand your content. If you can identify priority areas and compare this to how organic users currently discover your website and move around it, you can use this to improve your approach.

Planning for content production & migration

Content population is a crucial part of a website project – not least because as we’ve already mentioned, if you don’t properly migrate across key content before going live, you’ll lose rankings and traffic. Not having the right content ready to drop into the CMS once development is complete can delay a project. An initial SEO audit will enable you to prioritise content and identify what can be migrated across, what content can be repurposed and improved, and what new content needs to be written. From there you can plan how this will be executed – including timeframes and resources.

Creating a foundation for an ongoing strategy

An initial SEO audit at the beginning of a website project can act as a roadmap for a long-term strategy. Incorporating things like competitor and keyword analysis into the process can help you identify key opportunities that you can take advantage of from the outset rather than “retrofitting” later. For example, if you find your competitor has a landing page for a particular service which you don’t and represents a good traffic opportunity, you can add this to the list of pages you need to produce content for and incorporate into your website’s structure before go-live.

Setting benchmarks

The success of a website project isn’t measured by deliverables, but by the results it generates. Depending on what you’ve set out in terms of objectives, an audit can help you take a benchmark in terms of performance now – rankings, traffic, conversions, etc – and help you track progress against these benchmarks once you’ve launched.

Bonus: quick fixes

As well as helping you look to the near future, an added bonus of doing an SEO audit on your website before you launch a new one is that you might be able to identify some “quick fixes” in the meantime. This could be crawling or indexing issues, broken links or redirect problems that might be relatively easy to fix and will help you get some short-term gains while you work on your medium to long-term strategy.

Key takeaways

• An SEO audit before starting a new website project is valuable for shaping your approach and improving performance.
• The 5 key benefits include:
  • Maintaining and improving current performance
  • Shaping your new website structure with SEO in mind
  • Planning content production and migration
  • Creating a foundation for a long-term strategy
  • Setting benchmarks
• A bonus is that you can identify “quick fixes” for your current website that will help you see some improvement in the short-term.

Find out more about protecting your SEO when migrating to a new website in our guide.

Starting a new website project and want to ensure you’re maintaining and improving your SEO performance? Get in touch and we’ll discuss how we can help.