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So, you know what SEO is. You’re a communications pro, after all. Or if you just need a refresher, we wrote an article all about it.

SEO is this slightly mysterious thing that search engines like Google really care about and use as the driving factor behind where websites fall in the SERPs (search engine result pages). 

Great SEO means you’ll rank really highly, and more people will find your website organically. In fact, the top 3 search results get over 52% of the total clicks in search. 

Not so great SEO means you might be a bit farther down the list, and losing out on people learning more about who you are and what you have to offer. Only 0.63% of Google searchers click on results from the second page. So if you aren’t near the top, you may be missing out on a huge chunk of your potential audience. 

If you’re not sure where to start, or need some guidance on how to best address your website’s SEO, an audit of your site is likely the best place to start. 

Here are five goals of an SEO audit:

1. Diagnose the issues

A site audit is a great way to diagnose any issues your website may have. This could include things like broken links, duplicate content, missing header tags and more. Diagnosing these issues and addressing them manually would take a ton of time and technical knowledge. An audit can help bring all of those issues to light much quicker.

2. Evaluate your keywords

This process will provide you with a great picture of how you’re ranking for your target keywords now and as you continue to optimize your website. You’ll get more recommended keywords to aim for as well as see what’s working well for others. 

3. Make things tangible

While most people have at least some idea of what SEO is, it’s hard to make it feel tangible without concrete results or next steps. SEO audits will give you an extensive list of where your website is at now and what may be preventing you from achieving SEO glory. Thankfully, that and your SEO partner or expert can craft a set of next steps to correct any issues and help you grow in both knowledge and performance. 

4. Improve your ranking

Each part of an audit is aimed at improving your ranking in the SERPs. This happens through both correcting any issues and finding new ways to optimize your keyword strategy. In tandem, these efforts can have you rising through the search results and connecting more people to your site. 

Your church is probably making every effort to get people into your physical front doors, so why wouldn’t you do the same thing for your digital ones?

5. Present to Leadership

Unless your leadership team is on the cutting edge of technology and digital ministry, convincing them that SEO is important and needs addressed could present quite the challenge. That’s where the audit comes in. Being able to walk into that conversation with identifiable goals and solutions–backed by data–could go a long way toward getting them to buy in. 

Every church wants to be easy to find online, so let’s identify what we need to do to make that happen.

Looking to have your site audited?

We would love to chat more about SEO and what an audit might look like for your website. We’re happy to chat through the process and coach you through what SEO improvements can look like for your church.