Continuing from yesterday’s post are the next four reasons for a search engine marketer to do an SEO audit before building a new online business marketing website or redesigning an old one.

5) Are you Social?- These days, if it’s not on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media platforms, it’s not legit. While that might be a little exaggerating, social media is free, but it requires some serious thought before you post that first Tweet. Details like the tone of the posts, what your website business will post about, how you promote your web content through social media, and the policy for how to handle controversy, are all things you need to consider, along with which social media platforms would best represent your company.

6) Where will you build link relationships?- For an online business, making “friends” with similar businesses online, or figuring out how to attract solid, relevant link relationships is something extremely important to consider. From a discussion about which forums you want your online business represented in, to your policy on accepting link relationships, your link building strategy needs to be detailed before you have a link to your online business that anybody is interested in seeing.

7) Money, money, money- Do you have the financial capability to overhaul or create an online business website exactly how you want it? Before you go “all-in” on a website overhaul, you should have a concrete idea of how much this process will cost you. If you do the financial audit and find the answer is “no,” or “maybe we can do this much of our plan but we have to cut out this, or that,” then you might want to consider saving your pennies, and optimizing your website to the best of its capability, until you can afford the entire plan you’ve sketched out.

8) Are there barriers?- Our final point to consider, before making over an online business’ website, is to make sure the website is being built without any serious barriers to construction. If there’s an agreed-upon cost that the website owner is quibbling about, that is a barrier, for example. So is someone screaming impatiently for “more web traffic,” or website to be finished and ranking #1 immediately, or “just put up a website, it doesn’t matter.”

A SEO audit, itself, requires time, and a detached view of how a website business would be best served by a well-thought out design with good, optimized content. Once this process is finished, you have a map to building a successful website business.