If you’re serious about growing traffic, an SEO audit shouldn’t be a one-off task. How often you need one depends on your website, your industry, and how quickly you’re trying to grow.

For most small businesses, a full SEO audit once a year is a sensible baseline. Websites change, competitors move, and search engines update constantly. What worked 12 months ago might already be holding you back.

There are also specific moments when an audit becomes essential:

• If you’ve launched a new website or redesigned your existing one, you should run an audit straight away. Migrations and redesigns often create indexing issues, broken internal links, missing metadata, or performance problems that aren’t obvious on the surface.
• If your traffic has dropped, an audit should be one of the first steps. It can uncover crawl errors, technical blocks, cannibalisation issues, slow site speed, weak internal linking, or gaps in your content that competitors are exploiting.
• If you’re investing in content or digital PR but not seeing rankings move, that’s another sign. Technical foundations need to be solid before authority building can have full impact.

For businesses on an ongoing SEO retainer, audits are often built into the process. Instead of waiting a year, technical health is reviewed regularly and improvements are made continuously.

Ultimately, an SEO audit is about protecting and improving visibility. If your website is a key driver of leads or sales, reviewing its performance regularly is part of running it properly.

If you’re based in Manchester and unsure when your site was last properly audited, Pollinate Marketing can take a look. Get in touch and we’ll assess where you stand and what needs fixing.