Although the Internet is a powerful tool, its sheer size prevents companies from easily connecting with customers. The Official Google Blog noted the prominent search engine had indexed a billion webpages by 2000, and Google reached a trillion unique pages by 2008.

The overwhelming numbers of webpages means companies and individuals must employ sophisticated SEO practices to gain any kind of visibility and an SEO audit should be performed at the start of any marketing campaign to ensure that potential customers can discover a company’s website without having to dig through hundreds of search engine results.

Competent SEO audits may check a website’s:

- backlinks
- cache dates
- crawl frequency
- pages
- top-level domain and sub-domains

An audit will also judge a website’s unique content, overall architecture, and performance metrics.

After a website has undergone an audit, businesses will know where to make specific improvements in their SEO practices. Companies on the first page of a search see the most traffic, but that traffic diminishes as the rankings decrease.  An SEO audit can help companies increase website traffic and possible sales by improving their SEO practices.

Because search engines are constantly tweaking their algorithms, businesses should regularly update their SEO practices and an annual SEO audit ensures that a website can remain competitive with other companies’ sites.

A SEO audit will not be the only deciding factor between a company’s success or failure on the Internet but it can help determine whether or not a company has a visible presence for customers to discover. Google has indexed more than a trillion possible competitors, so companies avoid performing a SEO audit at their own risk.