Home / Services / SEO Audit / What Is It?
What Is a Website Audit?
Conducting a thorough website audit is the first step in optimizing your online presence and increasing organic traffic to your site. An audit is an in-depth analysis of your website’s content, technical performance, design, accessibility, user experience, and several other factors that allows you to see where your website stands from a technical, marketing, and SEO perspective.
Performing this evaluation of your website’s strengths and weaknesses allows us to identify any issues that may be affecting your organic search performance. Once we gather this information, we can create and implement a plan to remove or refresh poor-performing content and uncover new SEO opportunities to help your website rank higher.
What Does a Website Audit Entail?
1. Website Evaluation
A website audit is a multi-step process that involves using analytics programs, specialized software, and other technical resources to get a big-picture view of how your site operates and how you can improve on its current performance. Whatever the size and scope of your website, a comprehensive audit should evaluate the following details:
SEO Content
Having high-quality, unique, up-to-date content on your website is essential when trying to boost your rankings and increase traffic. An SEO content audit involves scanning your web pages and identifying opportunities to improve the quality, accuracy, relevance, scope, and recency of your content.
On-Page SEO
As the name suggests, an on-page SEO audit examines the pages and specific page elements of your website to find areas where those pages could rank higher on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). On-page audits typically involve checking metadata like title tags, keyword usage/density, headings, images, breadcrumbs, internal linking, and other elements.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO audits analyze backlinks, guest posts, listings, and other pages and domains that direct traffic to your website. Evaluating these details can reveal opportunities to update and repair broken links, disavow harmful backlinks, and promote your website on additional platforms.
Technical SEO
A technical SEO audit evaluates script/image optimization and checks the code for adjustments that could be made to improve performance metrics like page loading times, Core Web Vitals, spam, website security, etc.
Local SEO
A local SEO audit evaluates current online business listings on Google, Facebook, Yelp, and other relevant platforms to help clients rank higher in local searches and identifies gaps where the brand could establish an online presence on additional platforms.
2. Identifying Issues and Creating an Optimization Strategy
Once we collect enough baseline data on how your website is currently performing, we can focus our attention on the areas that need improvement and outline the best methods for fixing those issues. Depending on the results of the initial analysis, this portion of the audit may involve brainstorming on ways to:
- Make your website mobile-friendly
- Fix indexing problems
- Improve website speed and security
- Improve the backlink profile
- Repair broken links that result in 404 errors or create unnecessary redirects
- Identify new link-building opportunities
- Eliminate thin or duplicate content
- Better organize your website navigation
- Optimize pages for universal search features like passage rankings, featured snippets, and People Also Ask sections.
3. Scheduled Check-Ins
Developing a step-by-step roadmap for optimizing your website can take anywhere from two to six weeks, depending on the size of your site. To keep clients in the loop and help them manage expectations, we check in regularly to ask questions, report major issues, and provide status updates on analysis completed and related recommendations.
4. Audit Delivery and Review
The last step of the website auditing process is delivering the audit to the client and going over the results of our analysis. At this point, we discuss our findings and outline specifically how we could optimize your website to fix issues and increase traffic.
Conducting Periodic Website Audits
While an SEO audit is essential during the beginning stages of launching a new website and for sites that have never considered SEO best practices in the past, regular performance reviews ensure that you can continue to maintain or boost your search engine rankings over time. Most professionals recommend conducting an SEO audit at least once a year to help your website keep up with online marketing trends and ensure your website’s long-term success.
Contact Us for an SEO Audit
steve @ clarkoptimization.com