What is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is the process of analyzing how well your web presence relates to best practices – it is the first step to creating an implementation plan that will have measurable results.
The purpose of the audit is to identify as many foundational issues affecting organic search performance as possible. The SEO audit will reveal:
- Technical SEO issues
- Website structure issues
- On-page SEO issues
- Potential off-site problems
- User experience issues
- Content gaps and opportunities
- Competitive marketplace insights
An audit is a standard procedure that should occur on a regular basis – It is essentially a “health check” for your website.
What Is Included in a Website Audit?
A proper site audit will tell you what’s working on your current website, what’s falling short and how you can improve your site for the opportunity to rank.
Achieving all of the above requires auditing the site for six different elements:
- Site health audit: This type of website audit assesses the architecture and usability of a website (oversees onsite and technical SEO, page speed, internal links, external links, and other factors, including meta descriptions, broken links, load time, page titles, and site structure). For SEO analytics, many use Google Analytics to evaluate the overall usability of their site – this is a great place to start for your comprehensive audit of your site.
- Site security audit: It identifies vulnerabilities to security breaches. A security audit prevents compromising sensitive information of a business or its visitors.
- Conversion rate optimization audit: This type of site audit helps businesses understand how visitors move through your website, what actions they take (filling out a form, purchase products or otherwise) and what is stopping the users from completing the end goals.
- Google penalty and recovery audit: Identify penalties, which are either manual or algorithmic issues and assessed with a process to present solutions for site recovery. This audit can unveil issues with site speed or performance of mobile pages.
- Competitor website audit: Knowing what your competitors are doing is one of the most important ways to stay ahead in your industry. By auditing your competitor’s website, you can find insights and opportunities to implement into your own digital marketing strategy.
- Content and SEO audit: This type of audit can help you understand how content is performing on your site. Traffic to your web pages is impacted by content and SEO issues such as broken links, incorrect anchor text and duplicate content – just to name a few. These are common issues for many large enterprise websites and therefore, it is imperative to conduct a content audit or a technical SEO audit and produce authentic, engaging, and unique content with the right target keywords to the best of your abilities.
What Is Analyzed in an SEO Audit:
While SEO audits may vary slightly, each one should analyze basic technical SEO “table stakes” such as sitemaps, server errors, and metadata. At a high level, an audit should cover off on accessibility, indexation, and optimization.
In an SEO audit at Bold Orange, our experts analyze over 193 different SEO elements across the following categories:
- Technical Audit
- Indexation analysis
- Status Codes
- Redirects
- Page Speed
- URL Structure
- Robots.txt
- XML Sitemap
- Canonical Tags
- Duplication
- Crawlability
- Legacy Domain Issues
- Off-page Analysis
- Mobile SEO analysis
- International SEO analysis
- On-Page Audit
- Site Content Structure
- Keyword Research
- Page Copy Theme Analysis
- Keyword Use
- Meta Data Analysis (Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, Heading Tags)
- Schema
- User Experience
- Images & Video
- Internal Linking & HTML Sitemap
- Server Log Audit
- Crawl Budget Analysis
- User Agent Analysis
Why Do You Need a Site Audit?
It doesn’t make sense, does it? You’ve optimized the site to your best abilities, you’ve ensured technical compliance and covered all the bases of on-page SEO.
Why audit the site, then? Well, there are several reasons why it’s beneficial for your SEO strategy.
1. To Keep Up With Changes in the Search Landscape
The changes to search engines over the years are vast on how search results are computed and how they perform. In the beginning, an individual would just include a keyword in the title and header tags, along with the content for the page. You would then gain and earn some backlinks and see your website’s SEO rankings and search visibility improve.
Today, everything has changed! Business owners and marketing leaders who have been marketing a product or service for a while have a hard time keeping up with the demands of SEO. Instead of a handful of factors a decade ago, there are now hundreds of search engine factors to consider.
Recent additions that factor into SEO include:
- Content (on-page content, blog posts, video, titles, meta data, tags, etc.)
- Responsiveness (for mobile devices as well as desktop)
- Page speed
- Authority (how well and completely you cover the topic)
- Technical code
2. To Optimize the Site Further
A typical website changes all the time too. New content gets added, older pages receive updates, the dev team updates server configurations and more. As a result, the website you’ve optimized originally, most likely, no longer exists – not in the same form, at least.
Regular website audits allow you to spot and eliminate many new issues and errors, keeping the site optimized to the highest potential.
3. To Identify New SEO Opportunities
Often, auditing the site reveals many untapped SEO opportunities. During the process, you might discover under-performing pages to update, assets that should not be in Google’s index or technical tweaks to improve the overall user experience.
4. To Boost Conversions
An audit will help you re-evaluate how well the site is optimized for conversions too. Perhaps there are some opportunities to generate more leads or sales that you’ve missed before? Or maybe the strategies you’ve been using so far aren’t as effective as you have thought? Analyzing the site will answer those, and many similar questions, leading to a potential for more conversions.
How Do I Do an SEO Site Audit?
The simplest way to do a site audit is with an SEO audit tool.
These tools crawl your site and identify broken and missing elements like broken links, meta tags, page load times, and more. Our platform, for example, examines 100+ areas that impact website performance.
If you search Google for “SEO site audit tool”, you’ll see plenty of results for free SEO audit tools. Many of these tools are “lite” versions of the full subscription tools offered by the provider. Larger enterprises may find these tools useful or they may need a more fully integrated SEO platform to reduce the time to make SEO a more scalable effort.
Choose a Site Audit Tool to Crawl Your Site
Let’s take for example Clarity Audits.
- Clarity Audits will crawl your HTML and JavaScript, much like Google’s own crawler – Googlebot – does, and analyze them for over 100 technical health checks.
- Clarity Audits will also validate your schema, canonical URLs, hreflang tags, pagination and more.
- It provides insights to optimize your site’s architecture and improve the site’s performance further.
Run the Site Through the Audit Tool
This step involves setting up the crawler with the appropriate URL and letting it do its job. It’s that simple. To bring automation into the process, you can set up recurring crawls, if your tool of choice allows for it.
How Long Does a Website Audit Take?
Many factors play into the time it takes for a site audit to run. First, the speed at which you set your crawl has a huge impact. Crawl speed is calculated as pages crawled per second, and different site audit and crawler tools have different capabilities in terms of how fast they can crawl. In fact, different tools have different capabilities for other functions as well, like what kind of content they are capable of crawling (i.e. some crawlers can’t read JavaScript pages).
Another factor that affects the time it takes to complete a website audit is the amount of pages being crawled. When you run a crawl, you can inform a crawler to ignore certain pages which can affect completion time.
Analyze and Act on the Audit Data
This is the most critical step. The site audit tool will deliver a plethora of insights. But they’re only meaningful if you act on them. So, analyze all technical errors reported, and prioritize acting on them.
While site audit tools are extremely beneficial, you may also want to conduct a manual website audit. In that case, we created a simple, easy-to-follow SEO audit checklist that delivers high results. The checklist helps you evaluate how search engines view your site, and whether they can access, crawl, and index all of your web pages, and more.
Sending the Site Audit Report
Here’s a question we hear often – “How do I use the site audit report to show my company’s executives the value of my work?”
Or, to put it differently, “How do I include the website audit results in my SEO report?”
It’s a valid concern. Often, various stakeholders will demand a more detailed overview of your campaign’s impact. In such a case, a simple rank or traffic report won’t suffice.
On the other hand, a site audit is most likely too complex a report to present to non-SEO personnel.
So, what should you do? Our recommendation is to use the report in two ways:
- Demonstrate your progress in improving the site’s overall usability, while also explaining how the usability improvements affect the entire site’s overall performance.
- Correlate your actions with eliminating technical or on-page elements with successes, be it rank increases, boost of ranking keywords, traffic, or other metrics.
This way, you’ll present the audit report in context for the person viewing it. Sure, they won’t see the actual factors you’ve corrected, but at least they’ll know how much working on the site’s technical setup helps to achieve the company’s goals.
You can use various SEO tools to output the report. But also, your platform should allow you to do so with ease, and create reports covering everything you need to justify the SEO program.
What an SEO Audit Should Be:
First and foremost, an audit should be comprehensive. It should cover both structural and content components affecting your SEO visibility. It should provide a “big picture” view of what is happening in your current state. Any missing pieces could result in unnecessary or improper recommendations.
Your audit should be easy to understand. As a business owner, you should be able to connect the dots as to how SEO issues are affecting your online priorities, goals, or revenue. Any and all recommendations should clearly ladder up to your overarching business objectives.
Finally, your SEO audit recommendations should be actionable. There should be a clear path to completion; prioritized with projected impact and effort associated with each recommendation. The output of any SEO audit should accurately convey an easy-to-follow roadmap.
What an SEO Audit Should Not Be:
An SEO audit should not be rushed. It simply takes time to uncover root causes of the issues affecting your online health. Depending on the size of your site, a proper audit can take anywhere from 2-6 weeks to complete. Due diligence is required when making major changes to any website, and an SEO specialist must conduct a thorough investigation to make accurate, impactful recommendations.
An SEO audit should not be “one size fits all”. While some technical elements are required for all websites, a situational analysis should be performed at the outset of an SEO audit to hone in on areas of focus for that site.
What to Expect During and After an SEO Audit:
As previously mentioned, an SEO audit can take anywhere from 2 to 6 weeks. During this time an SEO specialist is analyzing and uncovering SEO opportunities on your website. However, bi-weekly or weekly check-ins keep you and your team in the loop as to the progress.
In any given website audit, there are a few low-hanging opportunities discovered. When these types of insights are unearthed, our team will pass them along right away. This provides an opportunity to recover visibility while the remainder of the audit is carried out.
After the audit has been completed, your team will be invited to a presentation in which your SEO specialist will talk through the findings and recommendations. The Bold Orange SEO team will walk you and your team through the roadmap to completion so you know what to expect and when. In addition, you will receive a comprehensive analysis of your site’s health. All of these are customized to you and your specific situation.
Why It’s Important to Audit Your Website on a Regular Basis:
Your website is the “hub” of your online brand – so, it’s important to have regular checkups to ensure everything is in order. It’s also important to note that your website is a living digital property, it’s typically not stagnant for long periods of time. In any given year, content is added and/or removed from your site. It is for this reason that audits should occur on a regular basis. We recommend that websites be audited a minimum of once per year. That allows your teams to fix critical issues as they arise.
There are other parts of SEO which you should pay attention to after your audit to make sure you stay competitive. After all, the technical foundation isn’t the end of the road for SEO success. It’s important to pay attention to your competition’s SEO activity, keep an eye on the newest search engine best practices, and maintain local SEO best practices if your business depends on customers visiting a physical address. All of these are elements of a successful SEO strategy and should be a corollary to your audit and ongoing SEO maintenance.