Whether you are working with a new client or an existing client, SEO audits are one of the various tools critical to a company’s growth. In fact, there are many different ways of conducting an SEO audit – some will use keyword tools and some will use page-by-page or other lists. And depending on your needs and requirements, they might choose to use an audit using keyword rankings – very useful and sometimes the standard entails only pressing a few buttons on screen. Another level of challenge lies in coming up with the most effective way of conducting an SEO audit for each individual client requiring it.
Since we have so many years’ experience of conducting these keyword audits, we can boldly say that we have long presence with our clients.
The spot checking of website’s overall health include referring to the issues prevalent on the website and ensuring there are no issues that could impact crawling, indexing and ranking of the pages.
When we sign up a new client, three SEO audits are often carried out.
- Technical audit
- Content audit
- Keyword research
In each of these audit letters, there is often a number of different areas that could justify their own audit, but it’s easier to consolidate this information into one document to the clients.
What are SEO Audits?
An SEO audit is an in-depth review of a website to determine how accessible it is for visitors and crawl bots. A comprehensive SEO audit should identify areas for improvement based on ranking factors. Although there are many ranking factors that contribute to a website’s overall ability to rank for the keywords it is targeting, there are some factors that are considered more relevant than others and these become the focus of an audit if a website does not perform well for the latter.
Elements included in a technical SEO audit include factors like content, technical flow, URL structure, meta description tags elements and others. All these form our framework to auditability of different website pages. Also,
- Page Speed
- Core Web Vitals
- On-page SEO (page titles, header tags etc.)
- Schema Markup
- Mobile-friendliness
- Linking (internal and external)
- Page errors
- Domain authority
- Sitemap and robots.txt set up
We do not focus on some more technical points in the technical audit, and instead are more focused on user-facing, keyword-based and commercial benefits of the site. We emphasize, of course, that our work will always involve commercial objectives and related content analysis. Communications activities will usually involve marketing professionals that are familiar with web content and EPUB/PDF technicalities.
After an SEO audit scan of a website, let there were clear action list to be taken to improve the overall quality of a web site, given the website best opportunity to rank the key phrase(s) the the business is aiming to rank.
However, when we make recommendations, we typically discuss each recommendation according to its importance, yet no matter how important a particular recommendation may be, all of them will not be carried out at the same time.
The Process Of An SEO Audit
For individuals/companies that have the budget and as a part of a long-term strategy, hiring an in-house SEO agency for your website is a great way to have a complete set of tailor made services for your needs and which will also be at a discount.
Most agencies will employ their approaches for performing search-engine optimization audits quite differently, however, their reports regarding this process will vary significantly due to the experience and expertise of these agencies.
Crawling Your Site
When auditing a website to verify its compliance with the laws in a particular country, the whole first process is setting up the active website crawling tools.
With these three pre-configured market-leading tools, issues can be identified on your website and the detailed causes are provided.
With the help of the Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool, you will certainly find issues on a website crawling. If you have more time and expertise though, this is more than likely better than using any off-the-shelf SEO software
SEMrush is an essential SEO tool and has a backlink checking suite. They do SEO as well as content creation and paid translation/localisation work. Their subscribers can see their strongest content pages, and can see all of the PR links generated by editors.
We also use other similar tools that help us to identify precisely why a website has not been able to rank on Google. We also use some other factors identified about one’s content such as its titles, publishing history, URLs, and URLs of their site’s pages.
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- Google Search Console
- WebPageTest
- GT Metrix
On-Page Optimisation
Another on-page SEO pass that we provide is the title tag and meta description role. Here we ensure they are optimised for the most relevant words to target.
Before the company’s brand auditing is complete, must know project team can start with keyword research and then be carried out our content audit by an extensive 2-step procedure.
In a world filled with countless keywords, the most important area to place top-rank keywords is in your target keyword’s match types in the page title and header tags, as well as focus on the typography of your title and subhead.
Next, we will also generally evaluate the performance of pages and search the behavior of users on web sites. Today, for instance, this also goes without saying that we take into account if a site is responsive and ensures that the mobile version is up to snuff.
Backlink Audit
Throughout our SEO audits and search engine optimisation projects, a key part has always been external links (links to your website). In more recent times, we have also seen the importance of internal links in SEO as clients of ours identified this and said that it?s one of the most important aspects which go into a successful SEO campaign.
While the value of backlinks has diminished over the past decade, they are still important to your SEO efforts. Therefore, you should not ignore them.
When it comes to business, a backlink audit can identify the links pointing to a website. This will then be assessed by our team to determine any potential issues, before recommendation is made. In some cases, we may recommend including the disavow file in your article content, or future queries to be deleted by algorithmic selection .
This second stage, to uncover opportunities from competitor backlink audits, would lie outside the scope of the client’s site audit and would need placing as a one-off project. With such efforts yielding tangible benefits, this scope can be included as part of a retention plan.
Keywords & Content
In contrast to a separate audit of the content, it can still be recognizable in a single document.
For an SEO audit, typically the only pages we pay close attention to are your top-performing pages. By doing a content audit as part of an SEO audit, each page can use different keywords. So every page on your website will be evaluated in regards to whether they’re consistent with the best performing pages in attracting organic traffic.
Basically, it is concerned with optimising existing pages to maximise quality and relevance to customers. It can also be employed to find opportunities to be created new pages to provide deeper content that would be of high quality, maximising it’s high relevancy with customers.
Based on our keyword research, new pages should be created as well as new content are produced. This is done in order to target some of the keywords we identified in our research.
SEO Maintenance
After we have conducted our initial SEO audit and all per client suggestions have been actioned, we then carry out regular health checks on a site to ensure no new issues develop.
Comprehensive website health checks are done at a regular restore monthly to highlight issues such as broken pages during 404 (page not found) errors, broken redirects of 301/302 during 404, missing alt tags and other errors. In this list are also things in which have been moving since the site initial setup and just provide a better health review.
So we have prepared a full health check for your website every six months or every 12 months.
Wrapping Up
Whether it’s first time or you have never conducted an SEO audit on your website, you should audit your website regularly as Google has updated their algorithms to rank websites where ever important new factors have been introduced, such as Google’s latest Core Web Vitals.
Contact us today to get started.We’d love to hear from you, get in touch with Able Media’s Digital Marketing Agency and our SEO Agency today!
