What Is A SEO Audit?

There are many aspects of a website’s SEO performance that contribute to its search engine ranking so you should be aware that an SEO audit is going assess several factors.

For that reason, do not expect any SEO which is conducted on your website to be a five-minute job, at least not if it is being done by a reputable and professional SEO specialist.

An SEO expert’s audit will be comprehensive, it will be detailed, and it will be thorough. Most importantly for the business owner, they will be able to establish from that audit what needs to be done in order to improve the SEO of their website, and the actions required to implement them fully.

Depending on the arrangement you have with your SEO expert, your SEO audit can be presented in several ways. You may simply ask for an overall summary, which the expert will do in one or two pages with the major headlines relating to the SEO of your website.

At the other end of the scale, they could produce for you a fully comprehensive report running to as many 70 pages, with details on every single test and analysis they have completed, along with their suggested actions to remedy or improve the SEO of your website.

To carry out all the checks that are required an SEO expert will need full access to the control panel of your website, and if you have one, access to your Google Search Console. They may also ask to discuss some aspects of your current marketing and SEO, such as who your main competitors are and which keywords you are currently targeting. While this isn’t essential it will certainly help them to do a more thorough analysis of your SEO, if you can provide that information.

They are also likely to use a number of tools and software which provide them with much of the data and information required to complete a comprehensive SEO audit. In truth there is a vast array of SEO tools out there, some of them are excellent, others are waste of money…we’re naming no names.

However, this can make doing an SEO audit yourself a bit of a nightmare especially if you do not know which the recommended tools to use. There’s also the not insignificant problem of learning to use the tools properly, which is why any SEO audit is best left to the experts.

An SEO audit will normally focus on specific areas for analysis, and although some of the details may differ from audit to audit, depending on who is conducting it, you should generally expect analysis on your SEO audit to cover the following:

• Check for Google Penalties: This check ensures you have not fallen foul of Google’s guidelines.
• Technical Audit: Looks at the structure of your website, and checks if it is working properly with reference to accessibility and indexability
• On-page Audit: Looks at your website, and analyses important SEO factors like metadata and internal linking structure. Also identifies issues relating to either your content or your pages.
• Off-page Analysis: This will analyse all your external backlinks and look at other data such as traffic numbers from the search engines and traffic sources. This can also look at your NAP, citations and social media accounts and how they contribute to your SEO. Read more about off-page SEO
• Search Appearance: This is the analysis done within Google Search Console if you use it and provides invaluable information in relation to how Google evaluates your website.

In summary, it can be argued that an SEO audit is the most aspect of any SEO campaign as it provides all the necessary data and information that identify where SEO improvements and changes need to be made.