How To Prepare for 2025 With An SEO Audit

As 2024 comes to a close, now is the perfect time to start looking ahead toward 2025. With only a couple of weeks left in the year, you need to start preparing now so you’re ready to kick off 2025 with a bang. Even if you’re in the throes of holiday shopping and fulfillment, you should carve out some time to conduct an SEO audit.

If you’ve never done an SEO audit before, the process may take longer than normal, depending on how long you’ve been in business and the age of your website. However, even though it might be a lot of work, it’s imperative to ensure you get the most out of your marketing strategy in 2025 and beyond.

So, let’s break down the value of SEO audits and how to get ready for the new year.

The Importance of SEO Audits

First and foremost, what is an SEO audit? This is when you evaluate the effectiveness of your search engine optimization, both on and off your web pages. Typically, SEO audits fall into two categories: technical and keyword.

With a technical SEO audit, you’re looking for elements that can affect your website’s functionality and its ability to be crawled by search engines like Google. Some common issues can include:

• Broken links
• Orphaned pages (meaning no other pages link to them)
• Improper anchor text (text that isn’t related to the linked page)
• Meta and Title Tags
• Heavy image file sizes
• Page load speed

Fortunately, you can find various free technical audit tools (like Google Search Console) that can identify these problems immediately. If you don’t fix them as quickly as possible, you’ll hurt your rankings as search engines will penalize your site accordingly.

With keyword audits, the goal is to determine if you’re ranking well for your target keywords and whether you’re choosing the right keywords for your business. For example, perhaps visitors are finding your pages through keywords you didn’t consider, meaning it may be time to change gears and go where the traffic is.

Overall, conducting an SEO audit at the beginning of the year helps set you up for success. The sooner you can address any glaring issues, the easier it is to boost traffic and strengthen your bottom line. When it comes to audits, you need to be proactive instead of waiting for your pages to dip in the rankings. It’s much harder to reclaim your top spot than it is to keep it.

SEO Trends to Prepare for in 2025

As you audit your website, you need to know what will help you rank higher in the new year. So, here’s a quick breakdown of 2025 SEO trends and how they should inform your audit process.

AI-Assisted Search

It’s official: Google has rolled out its AI-assistant tool for most search results. The goal of this tool is to keep people on Google for as long as possible, but it can also be a valuable way to “game the system” and get top-ranking links.

If your links are referenced in the AI Overview section, you can boost your traffic above other organic search results. As with everything Google does, relevance regarding user intent is the best way to get into this Overview section.

Human First SEO

It’s a bit ironic that the top two 2025 SEO trends seem opposed. While you want to create content that Google AI will use for its overview, you must also create content that appeals to human readers, not crawlers and site indexes.

But what does person-first SEO mean, exactly? Well, it means the text on the page should not only sound like it was written by a person, but it should appeal to the person reading. AI tends to go for a more polished, “professional” style, while human writers can add a bit of personal touches to their writing.

Overall, content should seem authentic and relevant to a person’s actual needs, not just what the “algorithm” thinks they’ll like or want.

Polished, Technically Sound Sitemaps

Because SEO competition is so fierce, you can’t afford to lose a couple of spots on a SERP because your site is poorly organized or laid out. Now, more than ever, you must rely on technical SEO audits to keep your web pages as clean and scannable as possible.

Sitemaps are also invaluable as they tell Google and other search engines how to crawl and index your whole site. While a sitemap won’t necessarily bump you up a spot or two, it can help you avoid falling in the rankings. Also, schema markup helps search engines scan and understand the content on your pages more efficiently, helping them determine if it’s relevant to specific keywords and search results.

How to Prepare Your Website for 2025

As you conduct your SEO audit, you should discover some areas that need work. Some common examples include:

• Low Content – If pages are light on valuable details, search engines won’t bring them up in relevant search results or AI Overviews.
• Too Much Content – This is a problem if many content pieces are similar or nearly identical (e.g., only the location is different). In this case, you can use the keep, kill, combine method to streamline your content library and make it easier to index.
• Slow Site Speed – This usually happens if your site is overloaded with large image files. Resize your images and graphics and, if necessary, upgrade your site host to be faster.

Ultimately, while you can do all of this yourself, it’s best to outsource the process to SEO professionals. They know what to look for and how to fix problems as they’re discovered.

Setting Up for SEO Success

Whether you need comprehensive E-commerce solutions or help boosting your site in keyword rankings, CSP can help. Our SEO experts are well-versed in conducting site audits and helping small businesses like yours thrive now and into the future. Contact us today and start seeing results immediately!