Boost Digital Performance with an SEO Health Check
As 2024 draws to a close, many businesses are starting to think about their digital strategy for 2025. One of the most impactful actions you can take right now to prepare for the year ahead is conducting a comprehensive SEO health check. With SEO trends evolving rapidly and the rise of AI-powered technologies transforming the search landscape, auditing your website’s SEO performance now will position your business for greater success in the upcoming year.
We’ll explore the key benefits of running an updated SEO audit and outline the critical components to include, incorporating SEO best practices, consideration of AI’s role in search and optimising for large language models (LLMs) for the future.
- The benefits of running an SEO health check now
- Key components of an SEO health check
- Preparing for 2025: Make your SEO health check actionable
- Book your SEO Health Check
The benefits of running an SEO health check now
1. Identify and fix technical SEO issues
A technical SEO audit is one of the most vital components of a health check. By identifying and resolving technical issues, you ensure that your website’s infrastructure is fully optimised for search engines. These issues can range from broken links, slow loading times, crawl errors, duplicate pages and mobile responsiveness problems, all of which can impact your ability to secure strong search engine rankings.
By conducting an audit before 2025, you’ll be ahead of the curve, entering the new year with a technically-sound website that’s ready to attract increased organic traffic. Technical fixes can take time to deliver and fully reflect in search engines, so identifying and addressing these issues now can pay dividends in the months ahead.
2. Capitalise on untapped growth opportunities
An SEO audit doesn’t just identify problems; it also uncovers opportunities. Completing a health check, enables you to identify quick wins, such as optimising underperforming pages or targeting high-potential keywords that may have been overlooked. Additionally, the audit can help highlight and inform long-term growth strategies, such as new content opportunities or digital PR initiatives, that will help enhance your brand visibility and increase conversion potential.
3. Leverage AI and LLMs for better indexation
With the increasing integration of AI technology in search engines, including large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and Google Gemini (previously Bard), how search engines crawl, index, and display website content is rapidly evolving. Traditional search engines use crawlers (or bots) to systematically browse the web, indexing pages based on their relevance, structure, and keywords. While the underlying crawling process remains the same, LLMs like GPT-4 and Google Gemini can leverage AI-enhanced crawlers and contextual crawling to understand content more deeply.
Incorporating structured data, optimising for natural language, and enhancing your website’s authority through high-quality backlinks can all play a role in helping AI systems better understand and surface your content. With AI increasingly influencing search results, understanding how your brand and content is indexed and used by LLMs is an essential factor that any future facing SEO audit should consider.
4. Refine your content strategy for 2025
Content is still king, but it needs to be highly relevant, engaging, and optimised for search to help drive high quality organic traffic to your site. An SEO health check can help you identify gaps and opportunities in your existing content mix. Are your key pages aligned with the keywords your audience is searching for? Are there opportunities to update or consolidate thin content? Does your website deliver a cohesive user experience across the buyer journey?
By addressing these questions now, you can shape a content strategy for 2025 that is built on engaging content that resonates with your target audience.
5. Strengthen your backlink profile
Backlinks underpin the web and remain a strong ranking factor in SEO, but not all backlinks are created equal. A comprehensive backlink strategy focused on relevance and quality is key to boosting your domain authority and improving your search rankings. A backlink audit can help identify low-quality links that could be harming your site, while also uncovering opportunities to build valuable links in your niche.
Key components of an SEO health check
To ensure your website is fully optimised for the year ahead, a comprehensive SEO health check should include:
- Technical SEO audit: Identify and resolve crawl errors, page speed issues, mobile usability problems, broken links, and poor site architecture. Ensuring your website is fully crawlable and indexable is essential for success.
- Competitor analysis: A detailed review of competitor strategies, particularly around keyword targeting and backlink profiles, provides valuable insights that can help you better compete and/or outperform them in organic search.
- On-page SEO & schema markup: Review the fundamental SEO elements across your website, including title tags, meta descriptions, alt text, internal linking and header tags to ensure they are optimised. Check and expand your schema markup to help search engines better understand your content.
- Keyword research & content audit: Conduct in-depth keyword analysis to identify terms that will drive high-quality traffic. Audit your current content to ensure it aligns with search intent, focusing on relevance, engagement, and conversion potential.
- Indexation for AI & LLMs: As generative AI and LLMs become increasingly integral to search engines, the way websites are crawled, indexed, and displayed is evolving towards a more context-driven, conversational, and intelligent process. Ensure that your content is clear, natural, authoritative and utilise structured data and schema markup to be properly indexed by large language models.
- Backlink analysis: Assess the quality of your existing backlink profile and identify opportunities to acquire more authoritative links. This strengthens your domain’s overall authority and in-turn supports your rankings.
- User experience review: The user experience (UX) on your site directly impacts how visitors engage with your content and how search engines rank your pages. Evaluate site navigation, loading speeds, mobile responsiveness, and overall usability to maximise every visit and ultimately every conversion.
Preparing for 2025: Make your SEO health check actionable
Running a comprehensive SEO audit now sets the stage for a strong digital strategy in 2025. Once the audit is complete, you’ll have a detailed roadmap of the actions needed to optimise your site, from technical fixes to content improvements and backlink strategies. This proactive approach ensures your business stays competitive in the evolving SEO landscape and takes advantage of AI-driven changes that are reshaping search marketing.
