SEO audit services provide tons of benefits to professional websites willing to get an edge. There are around 1.2 billion live websites across the internet, including over 200 million active ones.
An SEO audit agency makes the difference to boost your organic performance. Search engines like Google rely on hundreds of factors to evaluate websites. We will explain below how an SEO audit helps identify the technical issues of your domain so you can address them.
What is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is a process that analyzes a website’s technical healthiness. It identifies the organic issues of the domain to build up a list of recommended fixes. SEO audits ensure the following:
- smooth website crawlability
- web pages indexability & ranking
- technical performance & loading speed
- device responsiveness
- content quality & keyword implementation
- clean outreach profile
The 3 main purposes of running a technical SEO audit are:
- guarantee great online user experience
- bring qualified visitors to relevant web pages
- pump up the keyword rankings on search engines
In the next sections, we will detail the complete process of SEO auditing.
Why Invest in an SEO Audit?
A professional website SEO audit helps you understand why your web pages do not rank high on search engines. When it happens, your business lacks online visibility.
To avoid this, proceed with an SEO audit. It detects site health issues & critical indexability errors. As a reminder, if search engines cannot index a specific web page, then it will never rank. No one could find this online page, which leads to no visitors, no traffic, no conversions, and no sales.
Besides, a domain can face Google penalties if it violates the webmaster guidelines. The recovering costs are much higher than performing an SEO audit. Better preventing than fixing!
Overall, an SEO audit service provides a roadmap to improve organic rankings. It lists all the items to check during the process.
Another great reason to invest in an SEO audit company is that you get support from professionals without spending money on the various needed software. A solid SEO audit requires years of experience & several paid automated tools. The cost of doing it yourself is always higher than outsourcing to an SEO audit agency, except if it is your core business that you can grow at scale.
How Do SEO Audits Work?
Before sharing a detailed breakdown of an SEO audit, let’s review its overall principles. An SEO audit service includes the following items:
- competitors benchmark
- technical SEO audit
- on-page review
- content audit
- off-page review
In total, there are over 300+ factors to consider during a complete SEO audit. Of course, not all of them are relevant to your website. If you own a non-commercial blog, the e-commerce rules from the checklist do not apply.
The purpose of an SEO audit is to go through this checklist that we will uncover below.
SEO Audit Breakdown
A professional website SEO audit includes 5 main steps. Each of them gathers up to hundreds of different items that compose the checklist.
We will introduce them below following the most intuitive order of execution.
Competitors’ Benchmark
Before digging into the website audit, SEO marketers must understand the digital environment. This market analysis focuses on the competitors.
Such a crucial step allows us to measure the market size, check what has been done, what works, and what doesn’t. Except if the business opens a totally new market, there are already players in the field. Reviewing their performance helps prepare the SEO audit.
Thanks to auditing tools like ahrefs or semrush, the SEO audit agency can review the following competitor assets:
- sources of website traffic (organic, paid, social, etc.)
- keyword rankings
- domain backlink profile
- website performance evolution
This competitor benchmark puts the foundations of the coming SEO audit. It gives directions about the market demand, the expected difficulty to rank for specific keywords, the good practices, and the ones to avoid as well.
When this task is completed, it is time to move on to the next step.
Technical SEO Audit
A technical SEO audit starts with a website crawling. It simulates how search engines like Google spider the website. As explained previously, it is a critical step. If bots cannot properly crawl a domain, the indexation phase will not happen. Consequently, the website will remain invisible to online searchers.
ScreamingFrog is one of the best SEO web crawler tools. Use it to identify these errors:
- indexable URLs
- .htaccess
- sitemap.xml
- robots.txt
- search engines rendering
- duplicate versions of the website (www & http)
- duplicate content
- thin (short) content
- canonical tags
- image size & ALT text
- metadata
- and more.
The Google Search Console is another great (shall we say “mandatory?”) tool that you want to consider when performing a technical SEO audit. It monitors the most critical errors related to the desktop & mobile versions of your website.
We cannot ignore this checkup. All those items are extremely important. For example, the sitemap.xml tells search engines how they can access & index the content. If you do not set it up appropriately, it may negatively affect your website’s organic performance.
To complete the technical SEO audit, review the domain Core Web Vitals (CWV). The PageSpeed Insights from Google is one of the available options.
You need web pages that load fast & are mobile-friendly. If it is not the case, you may lose plenty of online visitors. Make sure to optimize your website performance with a developer familiar with your Content Management System (CMS).
The top technical web issues that you want to fix are:
- JavaScript (it delays & sometimes blocks web crawlers)
- heavy images & videos
- render-blocking resources
- web font load on text visibility
Once you clear this SEO audit phase, go to the on-page analysis.
On-Page Review
The on-page SEO audit focuses on specific web pages, not the whole domain. Keep in mind that search engines do not rank websites, but individual web pages.
It implies that you should consider optimizing the most important sections of your website. If you have thousands of URLs to review, it will be must more time-consuming than if you only focus on several landing pages.
Here are examples of web pages that deserve an SEO audit, based on your business goals:
- homepage
- category pages
- products or services pages
- blog articles
However, you do not want to waste time on these web pages:
- privacy policy
- terms of use
- “thank you” page
- any page with no branding or business purpose
Once you identify which web pages will benefit from your SEO audit, you will mostly consider 2 areas of insight: the design & the content.
To comply with SEO rules, a web page must provide useful, accurate, clear, and updated information. This is what search engines are looking for. This is what real people are looking for too. If you expect amazing organic performance, your web page must answer this demand.
It starts with the design: the User Interface (UI) & the User Experience (UX).
At a higher level, the website architecture must follow a logical structure. The homepage is at the top of the domain. Then come the main sections of the website that we usually find at the navigation bar. Under those main sections, the website gathers categories & subcategories. The lowest level pages are also the most detailed, like a product page or a blog article.
Online visitors must understand the website flow. Domain navigation is critical. There must be indicators, proper internal links, and clear guidance about what to do next.
At the page level, the interface requires intuitiveness. It should be a good balance between visual attractiveness & features usability. For example, inserting a Call-To-Action (CTA) at the bottom of a web page may not always be a great idea.
Content is the second essential part of a web page. The SEO audit reviews the metadata like:
- page title (H1 header)
- subheads (H2, H3, etc.)
- meta description
- body text & paragraphs
- keyword density
This content checkup reviews the page structure, the metadata length, the content duplication, and the use of keywords. It is one of the most important factors for web page ranking.
The next step of the SEO audit goes deeper into the content analysis.
Content Audit
We enter the content marketing phase.
Putting apart the meta tags from the previous section, the content SEO audit focuses on:
- its uniqueness
- its quality
- its relevance
Content remains king nowadays. The information you share is an essential element of search engines’ main goal. The SEO audit ensures the content is up to people’s expectations.
Unfortunately, most of the internet’s content is duplicated or plagiarized. It is wrong because it negatively affects the end-users. To ensure your content is unique, use Copyscape free automated tool.
Quality of text implies effort during the copywriting process. Most internet writers publish poor content. Make sure you get an edge by producing amazing & informative copies. No wishy-washy or fluffy content. The internet is already full of that.
Content relevance is the last factor. An SEO audit ensures that online users looking for specific information will find it. We must ban deceptive web pages promising certain content but delivering otherwise.
Off-Page Review
Eventually, the SEO audit pays attention to the outreach strategy of the website. According to Google, link building is still today one of the top #3 most important ranking factors. We must get it right to boost online visibility.
Again, with the help of link-building tools, you can analyze the backlink profile of your website. If you did well in the competitor benchmark phase, you also want to compare it with theirs.
Check not only the number of backlinks but, above all, their quality. All websites, even the great ones, receive spammy backlinks. We must monitor to get rid of them. On the other side, it is important to check where the link-building quality gaps are & how we could improve this.
At the end of this complete technical SEO audit, you should have a perfect vision of the domain’s organic health. It will be up to you to prioritize the fixes & improve your traffic potential.
Be aware that there are always some improvements to consider when it comes to web page SEO. It is a never-ending process. That’s why we must focus on the most important or the quickest edits.
SEO Audit Service with Prodima
Most technical SEO audit service companies also provide complete Search Engine Optimization packages. Besides identifying your website issues, they can fix them & boost your organic visibility.
Our team of experts is ready to help you with this first step. Once your web pages become operational, we will run your SEO campaign to increase your traffic & improve your keyword rankings.
To get more details about Prodima’s professional website SEO audit services, ask for a quote.
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SEO Audit FAQ
What are SEO Audit Services?
SEO audit services analyze a web domain to identify its technical flaws. It includes a review of its Core Web Vitals, the UI/UX design, and its SEO on-page, off-page, and content marketing.
How Much Does an SEO Audit Cost?
A professional website SEO audit costs around 1,500 USD. It can be higher or lower depending on the domain size & the total number of web pages to evaluate.
How Long Does an SEO Audit Take?
As for the cost, the time to complete an SEO audit strongly depends on the scope of work covered. An SEO audit service agency can complete this task in 1 day up to 30 days.
What Benefits can My Business Expect from an SEO Audit?
The ultimate purpose of an SEO audit is to ensure that online users notice your web pages. If you sell products or services, a website SEO audit directly impacts your revenue.
How do I know if My Website Needs an SEO Audit?
Check your Google Analytics or Google Search Console. If the metrics keep going flat or worse, then you need an SEO audit. If you cannot access those tools, having no online conversion proves that you must investigate.
How to Choose the Best SEO Audit Service Provider?
Be safe & choose Prodima! We run SEO audit for clients of all verticals in many different countries, in English, French, and Vietnamese language. Check our work to be convinced we deliver outstanding value!
