There are guides all over the web for increasing your search rankings and tightening up your website's SEO. But with so many tools at your disposal, where do you begin? That's exactly where a free website SEO audit comes in.

Keep reading and you'll have your site running lean in no time.

Prioritizing your SEO efforts

You could know that generally speaking you need to start adding new content geared toward your target topics. Maybe you've been thinking about knocking the dust off that Youtube channel. But if you have some serious issues with your site as-is, should you be spending your time making videos?

No.

Dumping a bunch of fresh content on a badly optimized site is like building a house on a crap foundation. It's a well-used analogy, but for good reason.

The new stuff will help, but it will lose the impact it could've had being added to a stronger site. You'll be fighting an unnecessary uphill battle.

There might be errors or inefficiencies with your site's design or template. Start there.

An SEO audit measures your progress

Many SEO audit tools give an overall site score based on everything else in the report.

This can be a good reference as you make changes to the site. Was your site a 25% originally but a month later you've improved it to a 60%? You'll know you still have work to do, but you'll also know measurably that your efforts have had an effect.

Take the score number with a grain of salt. It's not to say that a website that scores a 100% will rank at the top of Google based on that fact alone, for example.

Think of the score more as an indicator of having removed potential obstacles to ranking. A low score means you have a lot working against you; a high score means your site can move more freely up the rankings as it does other things well.

Create an SEO checklist for manageable bites

As with any goal, you can know there's a lot you need to do, but that can be overwhelming. Taking on a big matter in pieces is always the way to go, and an SEO audit can break that down for you.

For example, you might decide that this week you're going to correct meta title issues and nothing else. It's a reasonable and very doable task that will definitely help when it's complete. And you won't be distracted with all the other things your site needs because... you'll get there.

Now that you know how a free SEO audit can help you refine your website, give ours a try! It's free.