The problem of why your website is not growing in the search ranks regardless of you implementing the latest and most effective strategies can be solved by performing an SEO audit. This article includes What is an SEO Audit: A Beginner’s Guide. The key to an audit is to ensure it is performed by an experienced SEO professional in order to receive the best and most actionable results.

What is an SEO Audit? Website Audit Defined:

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit is an effective process to find the weak/error signal points of a website. An SEO audit divides the whole website on the basis of technical, content, structure, off-page, on-page analysis providing an in-depth and clear understanding of the website performance metrics.

It is important to note that an SEO audit needs to be conducted at every stage at which the website’s performance goes down or stays stagnant for a period of time.

What are Website Audits?

Over the past decade, a huge number of businesses have chosen to bring their business online and invest in digital growth. This has grown the competition level on a digital/online scale by large, and webmasters who adopt SEO at an early stage see better results.

Website owners highly rely on website audits in order to grow their website rankings for the desired search terms.

A website audit is conducted on all the website data points, providing in-depth and productive recommendations in order to grow the website’s performance.

Types of SEO Audit

An SEO audit is divided into segments for clarity of reporting as well as an understanding of the website’s performance. These website segments include areas like website content, its silo structure, analysis of the number of links pointing to the website and its pages, technical aspects of the website such as its load time. A combination of such audit segments delivers the best SEO audit results, which can further be used by webmasters and SEO professionals to create a strategical roadmap to improve the SEO workflow.

Technical SEO Audit

What is a technical SEO Audit? Website technical aspects such as indexing, page load speed, 404 error pages, hosting downtime-related issues all are covered under the technical SEO audit process.

Tracking your website’s health and maintaining it should be the #1 choice of every webmaster as failure to do so may lead to a huge loss in the website performance metrics.

The best way to maintain your technical website health is to perform a technical SEO audit on a monthly basis.

Note: An experienced SEO company performs tech audits on a regular basis for its clients.

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What is Technical SEO?

SEO Content Audit

A website may have good amount of content and some of them may be bringing in a good amount of traffic and others may just be dead wight on the website. Then the issues of duplicate content and lack on internal linking between content pages are also a big factor that can affect the website performance.

The whole process of an SEO content audit ensure the content is well optimized on your website and only the most producive content is available for the audience and search engines to crawl.

Content audit can only be performed on the basis of analytical data of the website which can be accumalated from services like Google analytics, Google search console, Ahrefs or Semrush.

Content audit is an integral part of the overall SEO audit as it ensures the long term performance of the website is always at its best.

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Content Optimization Explained

Off-Page SEO Audit

Any and every activity connected to your website needs to be tracked and monitored on a regular basis to ensure only the best/relevant off-page factors connect to your website.

Google considers the quality of links to your website and its webpages as a ranking factor and as per SEO professionals around the world, this is the most important ranking factor.

If you have irrelevant or low quality links pointing to your website, it would be wise to use Google Disavow Tool to disassociate with these kind of links.

Competitors off-page SEO audit is also an important factor to consider in order to plan your off-page SEO strategy.

Ensuring you only link to high quality links and keep the level of links above your competitors will bring you dominance in search ranks.

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Off-Page Ranking Factors

Frequently Asked Questions

SEO audit is the first step of an SEO services campaign and is definitely a complicated process. This means a lot of businesses have trouble performing a detailed SEO audit mainly because of multiple doubts and questions that pop up during the process.

We have answered the top asked questions related to SEO audits for you in hopes to make your journey to understand SEO audits easy.

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit is an effective process to find the weak/error signal points of a website. An SEO audit divides the whole website on the basis of technical, content, structure, off-page, on-page analysis providing an in-depth and clear understanding of the website performance metrics.

What are the basics of an SEO audit?

An SEO audit is divided into multiple segments and is always done differently for each website as the niche, keywords, competitors, site structure and many more parameters are always different from one another.

However, the basics of an SEO audit always remain the same.

1. Research competitors & keywords

It’s always important to start your audit with research. See what your competition is doing, what keywords and phrases they are targeting and which ones you think will be best for your site.

2. Monitor Updates

It’s also a good idea to keep up to date with the latest SEO news as well as Google updates. This will help you to stay one step ahead and also allow you to identify any issues that you may have that could be causing problems.

3. Check Website Security

When doing your audit, make sure to include website security in the mix as well. This is especially true if you have a shopping cart on your site or any other place where user information is collected. It’s not enough to have a secure site, but you must inform Google of this as well.

How much time does an SEO audit take?

For a small website with very little traffic, a basic SEO audit may only take 24 to 48 hours to complete. For a larger site with more at stake, a full audit could take 2 to 4 weeks to complete. It all depends on how in depth you want the SEO audit to be.

What is the cost of an SEO audit?

On average, an SEO audit cost ranges between $700 to $5000 USD. The exact price for your website SEO audit really depends on the size of your business website and what type of audit you want to do.

If you are a local dentist in Boise, Idaho then our audit would look much different than if you were a large ecommerce site selling products online. The price also depends on how quickly you need the audit done, how in depth you want it to be and how many pages does your website currently hold.

Why is an SEO audit important?

Here are the top reasons as to why an SEO audit is important:

It helps you to establish a benchmark for your site. This way if we make changes to the website and see an increase in website traffic, you will know that it was directly caused by those changes.

What is included in an SEO audit?

To give you an idea of what is included in an SEO audit, here are some of the things that SEO audits include:

The SEO audit will include everything listed above and more. We do not skimp on our audits and we make sure to provide you with as much information as possible so that you can make an educated decision on how to move forward with your site.

What tools are used for an SEO audit?

There are many ways to go about performing an SEO audit. Some people prefer using tools like Screaming Frog or Moz while others prefer doing it manually.

Here are the top 3 SEO audit tools:

Screaming Frog

A free tool that allows you to test all website URLs, images, keywords in various combinations and see which ones get the best results for your business. It’s great if you want to find out the on-page factors that are working well for your site and what aren’t.

Moz

Another free tool that helps you to analyze websites and determine their ranking position in Google. It also gives you an insight into their back links, history and more. It’s a great tool if you want to learn more about your competition in addition to helping with your own SEO.

Yoast

A free WordPress plugin that allows you to thoroughly analyze your content for any potential SEO issues. It also gives you tips on how to improve your content so that it can rank well in search results.

There are many other ways to do an audit as well. There are professional services and software that can help as well.

Conclusion,

It’s also important to keep in mind that you may run across something that you don’t understand. If this happens, do not attempt to fool Google into ranking better. Instead, seek help right away so that the problem can be fixed before it causes serious damage to your site or business.

A really good SEO professional will be able to identify potential problems and know how to fix them.

With the tips above as a starting point, you should be able to do your own SEO audit and maintenance moving forward. Remember to stay on top of it and keep monitoring your site’s performance over time. If anything changes with your site or the industry in general, you’ll want to re-evaluate and make the proper adjustments as soon as possible.

Good SEO is an ongoing process that never ends.