If you are starting a new website or have neglected an existing one and wish to be competitive against other Middlesbrough businesses online, then an SEO audit is normally a good place to start.
Performing a competitor audit will help you or a local agency to understand the work that needs to be done, before setting out a strategy and understanding the costs in both time and money.
Let’s Start with Technical Performance
Looking at how fast your competitor’s websites load and whether are they mobile-friendly will help with the basics. Are they based around a platform such as WordPress or have they been coded to be super-fast or basic html?
Essentially the technical auditor is looking to see if there are any weaknesses in the competitors’ sites from a technical point of view, to understand the cost of development and that the existing website is up to the mark.
How Big Are the Competing Websites?
In terms of content pages, how many are there and are they all quality content aimed at visitors, or are there many poor-quality web pages? If your old website has 10 pages of boiler plate content and your competitors have 200 well-written articles, here is a hint of how much work needs to be done to catch up.
How Good IS The Quality Of Content And Media?
Overall, how good is the media and content of the website you wish to compete with? Are the articles long in length with detailed data and useful information? Or is it all just spam, boiler plate and copy borrowed from elsewhere?
This audit will help ascertain the quality of the content that neds to be written, is a content writer needed, or can it be done in-house? What opportunities are there for keywords?
Link Audit for Middlesbrough Search Terms
Most learning Search engine optimsation, understand that good rankings can be influenced by strong trusted backlinks. In this case, the keywords would be based on regional search terms.
Having a core of local citations will also boost rankings, so how does the local competition fare against where your website stands now? What kind of backlink campaigns will need to be put together to better these existing websites?
Let’s not forget about social media. A local company that has an exciting engaging social media campaign can bring traffic to a website.
On Site Metrics Audit
Back to the website, as content is being added, are there clickable elements to encourage visitors to stay and increase dwell time? How do other regional websites look? Are they engaging or boring? What can be learned from the structure of these websites that are helping them with rankings, that can be applied better on this new project? Above is just the basics of how a competitor SEO audit could be applied to a Middlesbrough-based website being optimised for local or national search terms.