An SEO audit is generally the first step to planning a strategy that will have objective measurable results, and it will evaluate how effectively your website aligns with SEO best practices. Once the audit is complete, it will allow you to translate those insights into strategies.
When you’re running an SEO audit, you’re essentially going down the “Alice in Wonderland Rabbit Hole” and assessing anything and everything that impacts your site’s performance. These couple include on-page elements, content quality, page load speed, linking, and any technical elements that could be preventing your site, or pages of your site, from being crawled and indexed properly.
Breaking Down SEO Site Audits: Elements and Why They Matter
A solid SEO audit should be thorough, covering both technical and content-related factors that impact visibility. Missing key areas can lead to misguided fixes. It also needs to be clear, helping you see how SEO issues impact your business goals, revenue, and online presence. Every recommendation should align with your broader objectives. Most importantly, it should provide you with actionable insights which allows you to create a prioritized, step-by-step roadmap with expected impact and effort, making it easy to implement meaningful improvements.
In over-simplification, an SEO audit evaluates:
- On-page Optimizations: These are the basics that often get missed by small businesses when you’re trying to do-it-yourself. Items include: title tags; meta descriptions; headers; image alt-text; internal linking; and content quality and structure.
- Off-page Optimizations: This focuses on what’s happening off of your website, and on other websites – aka your backlink profile. Relevant backlinks are essentially endorsements for your site that helps boost your credibility and keyword rankings. While it’s not the end-all-be-all some SEOs make it out to be, it’s an important part of SEO.
- Technical Optimizations: This covers what’s happening “behind the curtain.” But unlike the Wizard of Oz, you do want to pay attention to what’s happening behind the scenes because it impacts how search engines crawl and index your site. This can include: site architecture; mobile friendliness; page load speeds; structured data (schema). Fixing these technical impediments ensures search engines can properly navigate your site, which means it’s crawl friendly.
- Local Optimizations: This doesn’t apply to all businesses, but it does to businesses that operate in certain regions. This could be a barber shop with locations in specific cities, or a landscaper who prefers to work in a specific region of their metropolitan area. Local SEO looks at items such as your Google Business Profile, local citations (NAP: Name; Address; Phone Number), and location based keyword queries to help you show up when people search for your business near them. If there’s one thing I try to teach small businesses immediately it’s this – you look like a fool when your website is optimized to read “The best coffee shop near me in Waikiki” because that’s not how that term works.
- Share of Voice: An SEO Share of Voice (SOV) Audit assess your “share of search” versus your competitors for relevant queries, and it’s often measured by keywords within your industry. Auditing share of voice can get pretty in depth, and be measured across other channels too (such as social media), so I’ll have a separate post about it. When it comes to an SEO SOV Audit, this could be for all relevant keywords and search queries. But, it could also be narrowed down to your SOV for a specific topic within your industry versus your competitors too. Knowing your share of voice allows you to measures how much of the market conversation revolves around your brand versus your competitors. And having that data allows you to assess your strengths; weaknesses; opportunities; and threats.
Being able to assess each of these areas, it’ll allow you to put down a solid foundation for better ranking, and more organic traffic.
Why You Shouldn’t Rush an SEO Audit
An SEO audit takes time, and rushing the process can lead to missed issues. Depending on your site’s size, a thorough audit can take 2, and I’ve had instances where it has taken almost 8 weeks to uncover the root causes of performance problems to ensure I provided accurate recommendations. *Note – if you’re a marketing professional reading this, you can create actionable recommendations as you progress through your audit. When working with clients, part of your job is to also manage client expectations. If you’re a potential client reading this – more details on SEO Audit expectations below.
Also, audits aren’t a one-size-fits-all universal application to every site. While certain technical checks apply to all sites, an audit should start with a situational analysis to identify the most critical areas for improvement. But what are some items I always check?
On most site audits, I assess HTTP status codes such as: 200 (indexable and non-indexable); 301 (permanent redirects), 302 (temporary redirects), 401 (unauthorized), 403 (forbidden), 404 (not found), and 5xx (server errors) to pinpoint potential issues affecting site health.
Actual Story: I once did an SEO audit for a new client who couldn’t figure out why none of their content was ranking in search. Everything seemed fine, links to the page could be shared, the pages loaded without issues, but still, nothing showed up in search results. Turns out, somewhere along the way, he (or someone on his team) had set the default settings in their SEO plugin to automatically tag all new pages as “noindex.” And if you’re new to SEO, that basically tells search engines, “Hey, you can crawl this page, but don’t add it to your search results.” So yeah, no wonder nothing was ranking. Morale of the story, audit your non-indexable pages too.
Expectations of an SEO Audit
As I mentioned above, when auditing a site it can take weeks or even months to complete. However, you’ll uncover “low-hanging fruit” along the way – these are low effort, high reward quick-wins that drive results, and can be immediately acted on so you can start seeing results before the full audit is even done. Using the above referenced actual story example, do you think I left my client hanging until the full audit was done? Heck no – I took immediate action on that!
Expectations When Working With DRVN
It doesn’t matter where you are in the SEO engagement cycle with DRVN, we’ll keep you informed as much as it’s required, and/or needed by you. You’ll never have to fear being left in the dark, and having no answers if your executive team is asking you for updates on the SEO services (or any marketing service) you have with us.
Once we’ve wrapped up the SEO audit, we’ll walk you and your team through the findings in a detailed presentation. You’ll get a custom roadmap of what needs to be done, phases we’ll work on those tasks, when to expect results, and a breakdown of your site’s health. All of this will be tailored specifically to your site.
How Often Should You Audit Your Website?
Your website is the nucleus of your online brand, and much like doctors visits, regular checkups are a must. Sites constantly evolve with new content, updates, and removals. Moreover, search engines are continually evolving too. This is why I recommend at least a semi-annual SEO audit because it helps you catch and fix critical issues early, while adjusting strategies to match changes of search engines. Also, anytime there’s a major change, or site overhaul is a good time to do an SEO audit as well.
Remember, SEO isn’t just about technical fixes. To stay competitive, you need to monitor your competition, adapt to those pesky Google Core Algorithm Updates, and if you run a location dependent business, then you also need to monitor your local SEO efforts. The SEO audit is just the start, and continuous ongoing SEO efforts are key to long-term success.
I hope this helps you better understand why SEO audits are important. If there’s anything I, or my agency, DRVN Media, can do to help you – please don’t hesitate to reach out to us – this includes just reaching out to us to ask questions about SEO.
Other helpful links:
- Guidance on how to create SEO strategies
- My Actual SEO Audit Checklist. Well not the actual one because I have my checklist on Google Sheets for each of my clients with historical notes… but I think you get the gist.
- How I Setup Screaming Frog to Crawl a Site for the First Time.
About the Author:
Vinh Huynh is Digital Marketing strategist, specializing in SEO & Paid Search, and also the owner of DRVN. He helps businesses improve their online visibility, through data-driven strategies. Outside of Digital Marketing, you can find him coaching the sport of Olympic Weightlifting, and networking with entrepreneurs, and local businesses.