Why SEO Audits Matter, How To Do One and a Checklist To Help

Search engine optimization (SEO) audits are crucial for businesses in competitive markets like Nevada. As a Las Vegas SEO marketing company will tell you, such activity uncovers opportunities for improvement to rank high in search results. This article explores a search engine optimization audit further. It covers the following points:

• What it means, including its benefits for Las Vegas businesses.
• A brief guide on how to conduct an SEO audit.
• Key elements to examine.
• A checklist to guide your process.

Read below if you are a business planning to thrive and win in the Entertainment Capital of the World. Let’s go!

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What Is an SEO Audit?

An SEO audit is a comprehensive analysis of all the factors affecting a website’s optimization and search result performance. When done right, it provides the following benefits to thriving, diverse businesses in Las Vegas:

   1. Increase Website Traffic and Leads

With over 30 million people visiting Las Vegas annually, the tourism and hospitality industries are the city’s lifeblood. Attracting more high-intent visitors to their sites is critical for success.  However, standing out online is challenging with so many competing properties and venues. Analyzing on-page and off-page factors often identifies specific issues hurting a website’s search presence and ability to drive qualified traffic. Here are a few of such problems:

• Pages not optimized for key tourism keywords related to Las Vegas hotels and entertainment.
• Technical problems such as slow load times or insufficient mobile optimization.   
• Bad backlinks from questionable directories that hurt rankings.
• Lack of schema markup or structured data to capitalize on the local map pack or rich snippets.
• Poor voice search optimization.

Further, the more a Las Vegas site stands out in the crowded SERPs and provides a positive user experience, the more it builds authority and credibility. This compounds over time, helping drive more traffic. 

   2. Boost Brand Awareness and Reach

SEO audits are invaluable for targeted, cost-efficient demand generation for startups and small businesses. The data helps in the following ways: 

• Creating accurate, relevant customer profiles.
• Breaking down market segments.
• Aligning content with the audience.
• Identifying the best channels to publish the content.
• Planning content marketing funnel strategies.

Take a new sushi restaurant in the Arts District. An audit shows competitors rank for “sushi downtown Vegas.” However, an opportunity exists to target foodies searching for “omakase Vegas.” Optimized menu pages and content such as “Best Omakase in Downtown” attract qualified leads.  The audit also provides insights into location-based queries and travel-planning questions from families asked via voice assistants. Tailoring the dining page for natural language helps convert this segment. For instance, voice-specific content describes the restaurant’s child-friendly ambiance when users ask, “What is the best kid-friendly sushi restaurant in Las Vegas?” Regular audits sustain momentum. It shows you how to continually refine segmentation and adjust tailored content. In the process, your strategies become more adaptable to market shifts. 

   3. Maximize Online Revenue and Bookings

Uncovering technical issues, keyword gaps, and conversion barriers directly increases qualified traffic and reservations. Even minor changes compound into major financial gains:

• Increased qualified website traffic during peak seasons translates directly into more bookings and revenue.
• Higher lead conversion rates mean each visitor drives more revenue on average.
• Capturing more commercial search terms nets incremental reservations without added advertising costs.
• Faster site speed reduces abandoned bookings, saving thousands in missed revenue.
• Optimized booking flows and user experiences minimize drop-off, leading to more completed reservations.
• Fixing technical issues provides lift at scale.
• Outranking competitors for valuable keywords redirects potential customers to you, expanding your economic piece of the pie.
• More visibility increases ancillary purchases once visitors arrive onsite, improving customer lifetime value (CLV).
• The audit cost pales compared to the increased revenue from its insights.
• It helps strategically allocate the budget to the highest return search initiatives.

Let us go back to the sushi restaurant. The audit cites technical problems causing lost reservations during peak nights. The four-second delay in load time of the online booking page increases abandoned bookings by 15% during busy Fridays. The process also suggests that competitors rank higher for valuable keywords, such as “best happy hour sushi downtown.” To mitigate lost reservations, and potential revenue, the restaurant employed these strategies:

• Create a long-form guide titled “The Top 5 Spots for the Best Happy Hour Sushi in Downtown Las Vegas.” Pack it with updated photos, reviews, and menu details to provide more value.
• Link shorter but relevant copies to the guide for topic clustering.
• Update downtown restaurant pages to highlight unique happy hour sushi offerings, such as 50% off rolls and discounted sake.

10-Step SEO Audit Guide and Checklist

Below is an SEO audit checklist to evaluate your site’s overall health. These include measuring technical performance, content, optimization, and authority. Use it to uncover issues hurting your performance and growth opportunities. Then, execute an action plan for search success.

SEO Audit Step	Strategies
Crawl the website to reveal technical SEO issues.	– Use a crawler tool to identify indexation issues, broken links, duplicate content, improper redirects, and rendering errors. – Check page speed scores and optimize pages for faster load times. – Verify that the website is mobile-friendly and uses a responsive design. – Ensure proper URL structures and sitemaps for crawl efficiency.
Thoroughly review on-page optimization.	– Check that page titles and meta descriptions are optimized and use target keywords. – For keyword optimization opportunities, examine heading tags (H1, H2, H3). – Analyze page content for readability, topic focus, keyword volume, and saturation. – Review internal links, image alt text, and the schema markup. – Identify any thin or empty pages to improve, delete, or consolidate.
Conduct keyword research and gap analysis.	– Use SEO tools to see where you currently rank for target terms. – Identify additional relevant keywords with traffic potential. – Analyze search volume and competition for core keywords. – Determine the priority keywords competitors are ranking for that you are not.
Critically assess content quality.	– Evaluate existing content for uniqueness, value, and relevance to users and search engines. – Check for grammar issues, outdated information, and opportunities to expand thin content. – Identify content gaps related to priority keywords and user intent. – Determine content types, topics, and formats that can enhance optimization.
Perform comprehensive link analysis.	– Use link analysis tools to evaluate current backlinks’ quantity, quality, and relevance. – Identify potential toxic links to disavow. – Assess opportunities to earn links from high-authority domains. – Analyze competitor link-building strategies for new link sources.
Review overall site authority.	– Check domain authority, page authority, and other trust metrics. – Determine issues affecting authority, such as low-quality links. – Review the presence of brand mentions and social signals pointing to the site. – Identify authority gaps compared to competitors.
Analyze site conversions.	– Study analytics to see how much traffic is converting on key pages. – Identify where users are dropping off in the conversion funnel. – Review user flows to improve conversion paths. – Check if calls to action are effective and test alternatives.
Compare against competitors.	– Benchmark the current site against competitors across all optimization factors. – Identify specific strengths, weaknesses, and gaps in SEO performance. – Determine new optimization tactics leveraged by top competitors.
Pinpoint quick wins.	– Find easy fixes with a big impact such as tweaking the title tag or fixing broken links. – Identify unoptimized pages or keywords that can quickly improve with attention.
Create a comprehensive action plan.	– Develop a prioritized list of next steps based on the audit findings. – Set realistic timelines for addressing issues. – Set up tracking to measure the impact over time.

Summing Up

An SEO audit provides you with information to scale or grow your Las Vegas business cost-effectively and beat competitors in the search results. It ensures that you have a winning chance against some of the city’s most popular brands.  This article includes a checklist to help you get started. To maximize the process and the data it collects, work with Digital Authority Partners (DAP). As an award-winning Las Vegas SEO marketing company, we have delivered to our clients over a million qualified leads. We have also ranked at least 350,000 keywords in the top positions. Our tailored SEO strategies, driven by audit-generated data, have helped our Fortune 5000 clients close over 300 accounts. We can help you experience the same success. Contact us to schedule a free consultation.