Wondering how to do an SEO audit?
If you are looking for someone to do an audit for you, use this page…
In this article, we cover exactly what you need to know if you are looking to do an SEO audit on your own.
We also have numerous excellent videos on the topic.
From how to steal a competitors SEO strategy by doing an SEO audit to how to build a backlink profile that makes other brands whimper, we cover it all. If you are looking for an SEO audit because you have a drop in website traffic, this is a better article for you here.
Here is how you steal your competitors’ strategy.
There is no one better to deliver you a website SEO audit and a plan of action than Ignite Visibility.
Here is how you do a technical SEO audit.
Now let’s dive into the article.
SEO Audit, Expert SEO Site Audit Service (Diagnose Issues Fast)
You might have noticed a significant drop in traffic lately. Or, even worse, you might have been hit with a penalty from Google. Alternatively, you might not notice any problems at all. You just think that you’d like to take your website to the next level with an improved presence in the search results.
Maybe you think that your site is in need of a “checkup” because it’s been a while since a trained SEO professional has looked at it.
In any of those cases, you’ll find that you can enjoy the benefits of a website SEO audit.
SEO Audit? Choose Ignite Visibility
Why You Should Get a SEO Audit
- No long term contracts, we earn our keep each month
- We teach search engine optimization at UC San Diego (we will teach you)
- Our work has earned us the award of best SEO Agency in the USA 2 years in a row
- Featured on The Huffington Post, Forbes, Search Engine Land, Entrepreneur, Inc.
- Experience with biggest websites (our CEO is one of the top SEO consultants in the field)
- We are international SEO experts (full translation and international SEO capabilities)
- Honest, hardworking, dedicated to client success
Expert SEO Audit Consultant John Lincoln
All SEO website audits are overseen by John Lincoln. Watch some of his SEO YouTube videos below. You can also skip past this and read more about the SEO audit program beneath the videos. To see all videos, click the 3 bars in the upper left corner of the YouTube player below.
Of course, the important thing about getting an SEO site audit is making sure that it’s done by someone who’s up to speed on search engine technology and enjoys a wealth of experience with diagnosing and resolving optimization problems.
Otherwise, you’ll waste a lot of money.
What Is An SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is an overall analysis of your site to determine why it’s not performing as well as it should in the search results.
A sound audit will locate roadblocks that prevent the site from achieving the best possible rank. Often, the auditors will recommend a course of action to optimize it.
Audits are best left to professionals because they’re based on a variety of different disciplines. People who perform optimization audits understand the technology behind Google-compliant sites, best-practices for content marketing, how to get out of penalties, what it takes to ensure that site works well with mobile devices, and a variety of other SEO techniques that they’ve learned from experience.
Looking to get a SEO Audit on your new site?
What Does SEO Audit Mean?
A great audit is really a limited engagement that involves a site review.
Don’t expect auditors to solve all your problems. They can help identify exactly what’s wrong with your site from an SEO perspective, but usually most of the heavy lifting is up to you.
Why? Because a good part of SEO is an ongoing process. There’s no “eureka” moment with site optimization where you finally don’t have to worry about search strategies any longer.
You’ll always have to update your site and its content while keeping SEO in mind. In other words: don’t expect an audit to produce miracles.
How Much and How Long For A SEO Website Audit?
Now we get to the part where the rubber meets the road: how much does a site audit cost and how long does it take?
If you’re like most small-to-medium sized business owners, you probably don’t have a whole lot of time to fix your problems and you certainly don’t want to spend a lot of money.
Unfortunately, a good audit can take longer than you wish it would and cost a lot of money.
That’s the nature of the business. Any auditor who promises a quick audit at a cheap price isn’t doing the job properly.
Pricing for a great audit can range anywhere from $6,000 to $100,000, depending on the size of the site and the scope of the issues involved.
An audit project can last anywhere from two weeks to five months. Again, that’s depending on the number of pages on the website and what types of problems the site is experiencing.
What Are Common SEO Audits?
There are several different ways to perform an audit. At Ignite Visibility, we analyze everything from a white-hat SEO perspective.
- General technical overview – auditors will go through your site from a development perspective to make sure that it performs as well as possible in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Large drop in traffic diagnosis – auditors will evaluate your analytics and your site to determine why your traffic dropped off.
- Penalty diagnosis – auditors will determine why Google penalized your site.
- Backlink review – auditors will use tools to determine the health of your backlink profile.
- Google News review – auditors will check to see if your site qualifies for Google News.
- E-Commerce category optimization review – auditors will determine what’s necessary for your category pages to perform well in the SERPs.
- Thin content review – auditors will check to see if your site is suffering in the search results because of too little valuable content.
- Duplicate content review – auditors will check to see if your site is suffering because it offers content that exists somewhere else.
- Schema.org review – auditors will go through your site to make sure that schema.org markup is properly structured.
What Is a Content Audit?
A SEO content audit evaluates your website from a content marketing perspective.
Basically, auditors will go through your site to determine if the content meets quality standards. If your site offers content that’s a little light on word counts or doesn’t contain much valuable information, you can expect that it won’t rank well.
Auditors will also look at the quality of content offered by your competitors. If other businesses in your industry have done a great job with content marketing and you haven’t done much, you can expect that they’ll outrank you in the SERPs.
Finally, a content audit will also offer a plan of action going forward.
What Is a Backlink Audit?
A backlink audit evaluates your site’s backlink profile. That’s the collection of links from other sites that point back to your site.
Auditors will use tools to check which sites are linking to your site. They’ll also determine the quality of those sites and whether or not the links are relevant to your niche.
Additionally, auditors will check to see which backlinks are good and which are bad. Yes, there are bad backlinks and they can hurt your rank.
Once again, auditors will also offer recommendations about how you can improve your backlink profile to remain competitive in the search results.
What Is a Website Crawler?
How does Google “find” pages on your website? With its crawler.
A website crawler is an automated agent (or an executable program) that traverses a website by following all the links that it sees on the site.
Auditors often use website crawlers so that they don’t have to evaluate each page manually. That would consume way too much time, especially for larger sites.
Crawlers are also often used to identify onsite SEO problems, such as when the title tag doesn’t match the H1 tag or when there’s a low text-to-HTML ratio.
In short, web crawlers make the SEO audit go much faster. That’s true even if the audit takes months to complete.
What SEO Services Are Included in the SEO Audit?
Contact us today to get started on your SEO audit!
What services are included in the typical SEO audit? It depends.
A general SEO audit will review the site from a technical standpoint. Also, a general search engine optimization website audit will evaluate the site from a content marketing perspective. One of the reasons your site might not rank as well as it should is because it doesn’t offer high quality content.
A typical audit also includes a look at the overall site structure. It might be the case that your site doesn’t perform well in the search results because it isn’t organized as well as it should be.
Finally, general audits also evaluate the site from an internal linking perspective. Many sites fail to “toot their own horn” by linking to other pages on the same site.
Those are the kinds of things that are included in a general audit. Some audits might be more specific, depending on the needs of the site.
Once an audit is completed, the auditors will offer a series of recommendations for site optimization.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much is an SEO audit?
When a business decides to hire an SEO audit service, one of the most important factors to consider is payment structure.
Depending on the size of your website, an SEO audit can cost anywhere between $500 and $30,000. And since SEO is done in so many different ways, there are some companies that charge by project and some that charge by the hour. According to Growth Ramp, 21.5% of SEO service agencies use project -based pricing, while the remaining 11.2% offer hourly rates.
One of the main reasons why prices vary so much is because SEO auditing is an extensive and time-consuming process. The more expensive audit tools typically offer recommendations for building site-specific internal and external links, identifying potential information architecture improvement, and scanning for keyword optimization. Free tools like Google’s Webmaster and Check My Links can also help you run a comprehensive site analysis both like a marketer and a Google bot.
Does an SEO audit include a competitor website audit?
In short—yes. The goal of conducting an expert SEO audit is to rank higher, spend less, and boost your ROI. The best way to do that is by knowing how you stack up against the competition.
That’s why SEO audits typically include competitor website audits, which allow you to compare your website to the websites of your competitors, find out if/why they’re outranking you, and what you can do to improve your strategy.
Tools like SEMrush, for example, are useful for conducting on-page audits, off-page audits, as well as competitor analyses. SEMrush can monitor visibility and keyword rankings for multiple domains, as well as identify the highest-performing pages that drive organic traffic to competitor sites.
In addition to discovering what your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses are, you can also get an idea of which SEO tasks to prioritize moving forward. You can even track your competitor’s ad spend to see if they’re beating you in search engine results because they’re simply outspending you.
How do you reverse engineer competitor SEO?
With the web becoming more saturated with more content, you have more competitors to worry about than ever. The best way to reverse engineer your competitor’s SEO is by enlisting the help of an SEO audit service.
To perform this SEO audit, you first need to identify your top terms and your competitors’ top terms. Research tools like the Google Keyword Planner or Google Search Console can help you find keywords that relate to your brand, while SpyFu can help you find your top competitors.
Then, you should export your competitors’ links and organize them into different categories like top links, links to top pages, linking trends, and highest anchor texts.
From there, you’ll want to check your competitors’ HTML and XML sitemaps to see how they structure their website navigation.
And lastly, don’t forget to look into which demographics your competitors are catering to. You can filter by age, occupation, location, and interests.
How long does an SEO audit take?
Generally speaking, an SEO audit should take about a week. For a smaller website that receives very little traffic, a basic audit may only take one or two days to complete. For a larger site with more at stake, a larger audit could take between two and four weeks to finish.
Much of this depends on how in-depth you want the SEO audit service to be. With multiple variables involved in optimizing your website, these estimates can vary significantly. The three main variables are competition, inbound links, and content.
The more competing web pages you’re up against, the longer it will take to climb to the top of the search engine results pages.
When it comes to inbound links, the more high-quality links you have from relevant websites, the more difficult it will be for your competitors to replicate.
As for content, your content just needs to be long enough to solve a user’s problem. Remember—always go for quality over quantity.
What is delivered in the SEO audit service?
An SEO audit is one of the fastest, most efficient ways you can determine why your website isn’t ranking as high as it should be.
With a professional SEO audit service, you’ll receive a detailed analysis of your website’s optimization that you can use to create an actionable strategy to maximize your visibility online.
Services often include:
- Technical SEO: Refers to the process of making a website easier to crawl, faster, and more understandable for search engines.
- Links: Checks for broken links on both internal pages and external links.
- Content: Ensures that content is keyword-rich and long enough to bring in more traffic.
- Overall website: Checks for errors in coding, social media integration into the site, and overall page structure.
- Mobile and desktop: Reviews the ease of use and page load times on both desktop and mobile.
- Penalties: Ensures that site doesn’t get hit by Google penalties.
- Negative SEO: Addresses the tactics aimed at ruining the rankings of competitors to decrease their organic traffic.
What is the meaning of an SEO audit?
If you currently run a website and are unsure of how it’s set up to perform for SEO, consider looking into SEO auditing.
These organic search audits essentially check the health of your website. In addition to giving you some insight into the specific challenges you’re facing, an SEO audit (search engine optimization audit) can also tell you what your competitors are doing right.
SEO experts look at how search engines and visitors interact with your business’s site and examine a variety of elements including keyword usage, page speeds, mobile load speeds, URL structure, sitemaps, redirects, and more. Tools like Browseo, and Majestic can also assess your site’s overall user-friendliness as well.
While doing a full audit is fairly complicated and technical, it’s imperative that you investigate the performance of your website as often as you can. It can boost your revenue in ways you never thought possible.
Are there SEO audit templates?
When it comes to SEO, you’ll need to create a report that will guide your processes, help you collect any relevant information, and foster trust between yourself and your clients.
As you go through the checklist, try to create a document that outlines exactly what needs to be done. And keep in mind that many people aren’t familiar with the concept of SEO, so it’s your job to educate them.
The SEO audit should explain what each SEO factor is, why they matter, and whether or not your client meets certain standards for that particular factor. Some of these factors include title tags, reachability, redirects, anchor text, broken links on-site links, dead end pages, duplicate content, and long URLs.
While there’s no one-size-fits-all solution regarding SEO audits, luckily there are plenty of SEO audit templates online to choose from so you don’t have to create them from scratch.
