What Is an SEO Audit and Why Does it Matter?
An SEO audit identifies any potential technical or content issues that could affect your website’s keyword rankings and organic search performance overall. An SEO audit analyzes your website to ensure you are adhering to SEO best practices. Why does that matter? According to Google, SEO best practices “make it easier for search engines to crawl, index, and understand your (website) content.” The higher your content shows up on a search engine results page, the more likely users will see your content and convert – hopefully!
Our SEO auditing process
What Does an SEO Audit Include?
The purpose of such an audit is to see how well your web presence relates to best practices. Essentially, it looks at what is helping and harming your presence on the web. An SEO audit will be thorough and includes the following:
· Content gaps and opportunities
· Keyword usage
· Meta and structured data
· Links and broken links (internal and external)
· Proper heading usage
· URL structure
· Page crawlability
· Schema
· Duplicated and/or plagiarized content
· Images (alt image descriptions)
· Site map
· Backlinks
· Security
· Site speed
· Mobile-friendliness
· Website structure issues
· User experience flow
How Often Should You Do an SEO Audit?
We recommend doing a basic SEO audit check once a month and a more thorough one at least once a year. Your website type will dictate how often you should conduct an SEO audit. If you have an E-commerce website with thousands of products that need constant updating, you will want to audit your website once a month, maybe even once a week, to look for potential issues. If you have a business website where you only offer one service, you might only need to audit your site once a year.
Tools, such as SEMrush and Moz, provide you with complimentary auditing documents you can reference and fill out yourself. However, we highly recommend hiring an SEO company to support you with this. SEO companies have much more experience and more comprehensive SEO tools to support you - unless you really want to learn an entirely new skill set.
What Should an SEO Audit Cover?
An SEO audit should be comprehensive and tailored to your website. It should go over these three areas: technical, structural, and content. The SEO consultant or digital marketing agency responsible for your audit should point out any key areas on your website that could harm your SEO performance and address those first. This might include site speed, missing meta data, broken links, and/or thin or plagiarized content.
It is also important to ensure that an SEO plan is mapped out to address your website issues with actionable steps and deadlines.
How Long Will an SEO Audit Take to Complete?
It is difficult to rush an SEO audit unless a website does not contain many areas that need improvement. An SEO audit can take anywhere from 2 weeks to several months to complete depending on the type and size of a website. It is also common for additional SEO efforts to continue after that time to fix other components that constitute a strong and relevant web presence, including adding additional content and/or fixing new broken links.
What Should You Expect During an SEO Audit?
If you decide to hire a business to conduct an SEO audit for your business, you should expect that company to take the time to learn about your business, business goals, and the ins and outs of your website. This company should then analyze your website, uncovering any SEO opportunities and areas for improvement. It is common to have bi-weekly or weekly check-ins to stay updated on the audit’s progress.
During an SEO audit with TM SEO Services, we conduct an initial strategy session to learn about your SEO goals. We then complete our SEO audit form, which details how we would like to improve your website to make it SEO-friendly and discuss it with you on a video call. We send out weekly emails to inform you of our progress. We also take the time to educate you along the way, so you learn how not to make some of these SEO errors in the future. The way we see it, that way you do not have to do multiple SEO audits a year and might only need to do some occasional maintenance. We think it feels good to empower our clients.
If you would like help conducting an SEO audit for your website, get in touch with us online today.