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 two excellent videos on the topic.
One, is how to steal a competitors SEO strategy by doing an SEO audit and the other is what to look for in technical SEO. If you are looking for an SEO audit because you have a drop in website traffic, this is a better article for you.
Here is how you steal their 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.
