What does an SEO audit include? Why should it be made?
23.07.2024
Anyone with even minimal experience in marketing probably knows how important it is for websites to be visible in search engines.
One way to assess whether a site is performing well and reaching its maximum potential in terms of impressions or conversions is to conduct an SEO audit. But what exactly is an SEO audit, what does it consist of, and what can you achieve with it? Let’s take a closer look.
What is an SEO audit? Definition of
An SEO (Search Engine Optimization) audit is a specialized evaluation of your website in terms of how well it is optimized for search engines. It consists of dozens of optimization suggestions that are recommended to be implemented on the site. Depending on the specialist’s methodology, an SEO audit can take the form of a longer text file, a presentation, or simply a set of recommendations in a shuffle program.
Such a document identifies technological and strategic areas through which organic traffic can be improved, provides insight into the overall optimization of the site, and suggests further guidelines. With an SEO audit, a portal owner can learn what else they can do to improve their Google position and stand out from the competition.
We’ve put together this short guide on what a technical SEO audit is, what it should include, and when it should be performed. In addition, we present the tools you will need to prepare it and how audits of different digital products differ.
When to do an SEO audit of our website?
The SEO audit is the first step of the optimization process that has begun. It is he who allows us to outline its further elements. Both technical and content SEO improvement and linkbuilnding. When should you order an SEO audit of your portal? If you start working with an SEO specialist or agency, this is the product that should be the first task of the hired specialists.
Most often, SEO audits are performed on existing portals. However, if we are planning major changes to our site or launching a brand new digital product, it is definitely worth performing an SEO audit already on the stage version of our portal. This allows us to make sure that with the launch of the new site, we will not immediately face technical and strategic limitations through which we cannot increase traffic from Google search.
There are also other, more businesslike reasons for preparing an SEO optimization audit. These include situations such as a change in the existing SEO agency or long-term declines in organic traffic to the site. There are also “SEO acquisition audits”. They aim to study the limitations and potentials in the visibility of the web portal, which is to be purchased by us in the near future. This allows you to better understand the potential for investment and the amount of work needed to optimize this site.
What does an SEO audit include? Key areas of research
Every full-fledged SEO specialist must know how to conduct an audit. Depending on the portal – its type, industry, size, information obtained from the client, the audit may be longer or shorter, and the priority of tasks may differ. Even so, there are several areas that absolutely must be examined for SEO optimization regardless of the above variables. Key elements of any SEO audit include assessments and analysis on the following issues:
Effectiveness of content on the site
(whether pages relevant to SEO traffic have relevant content that the search engine algorithm will appreciate, and whether they are even visible to robots analyzing the portal);
HTML tags used in the page code
(whether in the code of the page Google robots will receive all the information that can improve the visibility of the portal);
Relationships between subpages of the website
(whether there is duplication of subpages or cannibalization of key phrases due to their excessive similarity);
Internal linking system on the portal
(whether the portal links to all of its subpages, whether it does not link to pages that generate a 404 code, whether there are no unnecessary link redirects, whether the linking adequately accentuates all sections of the site);
Budget crawl status
(about which subpages of the portal Google robots see, which subpages they can’t get to, and which they visit unnecessarily);
Other technical elements of the portal
(whether robots.txt, sitemap.xml files are optimized, whether the site has SSL);
Service performance
(what is the loading speed of the audited page and how can the current score be improved);
Portal link profile
(how other portals link to the analyzed portal, how they do it and what pages they link to).
It is sometimes referred to as “onsite” and “offsite” audits. The latter apply only to the last item on the above list. On the other hand, “onsite audits” should address all issues that originate in the code or content of the audited portal, and leave out issues of its link profile.
In addition to the described substantive part, a decent SEO audit should also have an “executive summary” – a summary that will allow you to clearly assess the portal’s situation. It is also important to introduce a rational priority system into the audit. They allow to optimize the client’s workload and thus increase the efficiency of optimization work.
Why start with an SEO audit?
Conducting an SEO audit gives us a broad overview of the current state of our site’s SEO. It allows you to assess what tasks and strategic decisions need to be made, and what exactly developers should change in the site’s code. In this way, we immediately have a recovery plan for the next months of work.
With an SEO technical audit, we can also find out whether the rest of the SEO activities will actually bring the expected results. If, for example, a technical solution makes it impossible for Google’s robots to read the content on the site, then expanding the link profile will not yield the desired results. In other words, without a holistic and in-depth audit, our other optimization efforts are undertaken blindly.
With regular optimization, many companies can gain a competitive edge. By gaining visibility for a wider range of key phrases and gaining higher positions, we bring more organic users to the portal. If the keyword strategy is well enough thought out, these will be our potential customers.
SEO audit – tools used by specialists
The key tools that are used during the audit are:
Service crawl programs
Their operation is based on sending a robot, similar to those used by search engines, to a specified address. Such analysis makes it possible to collect a large amount of data on the technical solutions used, HTML tags, and, most importantly, the relationships between the various pages.
Web performance testing program.
Tools such as Lighthouse from Google, for example, allow you to examine what is slowing down your site’s loading and how you can improve its performance.
Google Search Console
this tool is actually a communication platform between the site owner and the most important search engine. It allows us to find out what Google knows about the analyzed site. This is necessary to optimize the Crawl Budget of the site.
Web analytics tool
is an invaluable insight into the site’s performance and user behavior gained through SEO.
Link profile analysis tool
On our own, we are able to investigate what other portals our service links to. However, if we want to know how other portals link to us, we need specialized tools. They rely on their own indexing robots to analyze the content of a sizable portion of the Web. They provide us with data on how our site appears in referrals from other sites. Such tools also allow us to estimate the performance of our competitors.
Specialized SEO plugins for your browser.
The work of an SEO specialist can be sped up using a wide variety of browser plug-ins. They will provide information on key technical issues in a faster way. For example, how the redirects look on the page, what is the layout of the headers
How to do an SEO audit without access to such tools? This is possible to some extent and only with smaller portals. Then the code of several pages that such a site consists of can be examined. However, we will still not be able to analyze the link profile of this site. A holistic and fully authoritative SEO audit, unfortunately, must also rely on solutions available only in paid tools.
What is the difference between a website SEO audit and an online store audit?
Whether analyzing a website or an online store, SEO recommendations are the same. The form of the audit also does not necessarily vary in any way depending on the type of digital product being analyzed. The only difference may be in the recommended priority level of individual optimization tasks.
However, it is common for some SEO agencies to offer additional analytical services as part of an online store audit. This is because the effectiveness of e-commerce portals is more measured and easier to track with analytical tools.
How much does an SEO audit cost and can it be done for free?
Of course, it is possible to conduct an SEO audit at low cost
However, it is very important to consider the experience and level of expertise of a given company – the quality and effect of the audit can significantly depend on this. For more complex projects and more strongly complex websites or online stores, it is crucial to work with a trusted partner with extensive knowledge and know-how in the context of the SEO area.
It is worth bearing in mind that the preparation of a decent SEO audit usually takes from 10 to 30 hours of work by a specialist.
The amount of work depends primarily on the size of the site. The very fact of such a large amount of work, the need to use paid tools and an experienced specialist makes you understand that the price of an SEO audit can range from a thousand to several thousand zlotys.
Of course, some companies offer to conduct a free SEO audit.
However, this is likely to be a very different service than the audit offered by Artegence. After all, it’s hard to expect any company to spend several days of work to serve a potential customer for free.
When we are offered an SEO audit for free, we can usually only expect to receive a simple list of general areas for improvement.
Typically, such documents are “online SEO audits,” which are generated automatically in minutes using a single SEO tool. The problem with such “online audits” is that the tool performing it works on a zero-sum basis. In contrast, it is impossible to start specific optimization work on the basis of such a free audit.
Let’s assume that our site, has a “canonical” tag, which indicates the wrong URL.
The tool that prepares such express audits will not be able to understand this relationship. It will only specify that this HTML tag is already in the code, so the site is optimized for it. This results in a completely unreliable evaluation of the HTML tags used. Analogous problems also apply to other aspects of SEO analysis.
SEO audit with Artegence agency
Our agency has already prepared dozens of SEO audits. We have had the opportunity to analyze the SEO status of both specialized service websites and portals with tens of thousands of pages. As part of our services, we have helped increase the visibility of the websites of banks, online stores, startups and corporations. Use the form if you are interested in cooperation.
