Businesses need to know exactly what is stopping their website from performing in search results before they invest in monthly SEO services. An SEO audit is a thorough evaluation of your website’s technical health, content, search visibility, backlinks, and overall SEO opportunities.
For businesses thinking about hiring an SEO agency, an audit can be a good first step. It helps you to get a handle on where you’re at now, and gives you a better basis for deciding which SEO services you actually need.
Google recommends doing some serious homework on an SEO professional yourself, looking at past work, asking how they measure success, and looking at their audit recommendations before making big changes to a website.
What Is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is a systematic review of the factors that affect how well your website can be discovered, crawled, indexed, and understood by search engines.
A professional audit can examine areas such as:
- Technical SEO
- Website structure
- On-page SEO
- Keyword targeting
- Content quality
- Internal linking
- Backlinks
- Competitor performance
- Local SEO
- Search visibility
- Website performance
- Conversion opportunities
Google’s SEO documentation emphasizes making websites easier for search engines to crawl, index, and understand.
Why you need an SEO audit before hiring an agency
Choosing an SEO agency is a big business decision. An audit can help you see what your website actually needs, without immediately locking yourself into a long-term SEO package.
- Identify Current SEO Problems
Your website may have problems like:
Invalid links
Poor page layout
Copy content
Wrong redirects
Issues with indexing
Weak or missing title tags
Bad internal linking
Slow pages
Bad keyword targeting
Low quality or obsolete content
Identifying these problems first helps to create a proper SEO strategy.
2. Understand Your Current Search Performance”
An audit provides you with a baseline for your website.
You may evaluate:
Present organic traffic
Current keyword ranking
Index pages
Search engine visibility
Top performing pages
Pages that underperform
Organic conversion
Competitor awareness
One of the critical resources available to website owners and SEO professionals to understand performance in Google Search is Google Search Console.
3. Don’t Pay for SEO Services You Don’t Need
Not every business requires the same SEO package.
One website may need local SEO and authority building, while another may need technical SEO and content optimization.
A proper audit helps you prioritize your investment and not buy a generic package.
4. More Effectively Compare SEO Agencies
An audit may also be useful for you if you’re looking at more than one SEO company to compare recommendations.
Ask each agency:
What problems did you find?
What are the most important problems?
What should we fix first?
What services would you suggest?
What are your reasons for needing those services?
What will success look like?
What Does an Expert SEO Audit Look Like?
An effective SEO audit should be more than an automatic website score.
1. Technical SEO Audit.
Technical SEO looks at whether search engines are able to crawl and understand your website properly.
A technical audit might look at:
Crawlability
Indexability:
Robots.txt
XML sitemaps
Standardized URLs
404 Errors Redirects
Internal links
Web architecture
JavaScript rendering
Mobile friendliness
Page speed
Organized data
Google suggests that you make sure that search engines can access important resources and understand pages correctly.
2. On-Page SEO Audit
On-page SEO pertains to the individual pages on your website.
An audit could look at:
Titles of pages
Meta description
Headings structure
Targeting keywords
Image Optimization
Internal links
URL architecture
Relevance of content
Search purpose
The aim is to make sure that your important pages are well-optimized for the searches they are intended to satisfy.
3. Content Audit
Content is an important part of SEO but simply creating more articles isn’t always the answer.
A content audit can reveal:
Thin content.
Redundant content
Older pages
Subjects missing
Poor service pages
Keyword canabalization
Content holes
Commercial keyword opportunities
The audit should be about content that can support traffic, leads, inquiries and sales rather than just page views for businesses.
4. Keyword Gap Analysis
4. Keyword Gap Analysis
Keyword analysis identifies where your website has opportunities to compete.
An agency can benchmark your website against competitors to find out:
rank competitors for
Current keywords you are ranking for
High Value Keywords You’re Missing Out On
Keywords local
Commercial keywords
Long tail opportunities
This could help in creating a more focused SEO campaign.
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