How often should you audit your website?

Many business owners have heard of SEO as a tactic to use as part of their digital marketing efforts. They invest in a well-designed website and create new content on a regular basis. And yet, website traffic numbers never take off, or they suddenly dip.

In order to avoid such pitfalls, they should have someone conduct an SEO audit on a regular basis. This will ensure that search engines can not only crawl and index the site, but also do so for the right pages. This will directly affect rankings and overall search engine visibility.

But how often should you do audit your website for technical SEO issues? That really depends on the type of your site. For small business websites without any e-commerce components, and audit twice a year might be sufficient. However, if you sell products on your site, a technical ecommerce SEO audit should be conducted every quarter, if you didn't make any big changes or don't notice anything out of the ordinary in your site performance. However, if organic site traffic suddenly decreases, an ad-hoc audit might necessary. The same applies for bigger changes and site migrations, including moving the site from HTTP to HTTPS.

An experienced SEO professional should be able to do such an audit in 2-3 hours for a small site, and 5-10 hours for larger e-commerce sites. Make sure to hire someone experienced, who specializes in technical SEO.