The Purpose Of An SEO Audit
The purpose of an SEO audit is to find anything wrong with your website, to find anything you are missing and to improve your website’s rankings in Google and other search engines. Your audit analyses multiple different aspects of your website and me understand which aspects of your website are working well and which need fixing or improving. Your audit will cover both structural and content based components that may affect your visibility on Google.
Your audit may be a more general audit or if you have come to me with a specific issue I may focus the audit just on that area of the site.
What does an SEO audit include?
With a more general SEO audit, I would perform the following:
Technical analysis
On-Page analysis
Off-Page analysis
Competitor analysis
Keyword research
There are to many individual items to list here that may affect your rankings on Google, your SEO audit is extremely comprehensive and is designed to pick up any errors or opportunities we need to act on.
Technical Analysis
The first part of your SEO audit consists of checking your site for any general indexing or accessibility issues.
Indexing – This part of the audit is to check that your website can be indexed and that there aren’t any issues that would prevent Google from listing your website in their search results.
Accessibility – This part of the audit checks that your website can be accessed by both humans and the Google bot! Some of the things I look at when checking accessibility include looking at your robots.txt file, your sitemap, meta tags and any redirects. I will also run tests to make sure your website passes mobile friendly tests and that it loads in a fast and timely manor.
On-Page analysis
The next part of your SEO audit includes look at on-page or on-site elements. With this part of your audit I am looking at general content and page specific issues. I am looking for anything I can do to improve your HTML, URL structure, Title Tags, Heading Tags, page and website load times. Google likes websites that are technically correct, structured properly and have great content.
If your website has pages with not much content, or content that isn’t relevant to the intent of the search then Google will know this and wont give your website the recognition it deserves. I will look for things such duplicate content and broken links.
Off-Page analysis
Off-page SEO analysis is about looking at your incoming links and checking for any links that could be causing you problems.
This stage of your audit is one of the most important. I complete an analysis of your SEO link profile and make sure that it’s not causing a problem with your website ranking. Things I look for include link relevancy, diversity and authority.
I’ll be using SEO tools to check if the links back to your website are from trustworthy, reputable websites.
If you’ve used cheap SEO services or bought backlinks from services on the internet then it may well be that they are on sites that you don’t want to be on. There may also be low quality, spammy links that are doing damage to your site, these could be links another SEO Consultant created or from a competitor using negative SEO to lower your positions. Any Freelance SEO Consultant with knowledge of backlinks will be able to tell you this is a bad thing.
Competitor Analysis
The last part of my audit involves looking at your competitors websites and not yours. I want to find out what they are currently doing in terms of SEO, what is working well for them, what keywords they are targetting and what opportunities you are missing out on. This stage helps me learn about your competition, what we need to do to beat them and what needs to be done to stay ahead of them.
I look at things such as their domain rating and what their backlink profile is like. I want to know how many referring domains are linking to them as this can indicate a strong website, unless they are all spammy links.
I also want to know about what keywords they are targetting, I can find this out from both their content and the anchor text that is used to link to their website. I can also see what they are currently ranking for and the estimated traffic they are receiving from this. This information is vital to your SEO strategy.
