What is an SEO audit?
An SEO audit or search engine optimization analysis is an analysis designed specifically to understand why a website is not ranking well or has a low search engine ranking (via a low score) in major search engines like Google or Bing. An SEO audit is particularly useful to identify opportunities for improvement in SEO optimizations.
An SEO audit consists of analyzing your website from a technical standpoint with the programming (language, tags, domain name) but also the speed and loading response as well as from a content perspective (or on-page) with the links (internal links, external links), and the content visible by visitors.
A bit like a doctor who gives a diagnosis to a patient after a visit, an SEO analyst can give recommendations as well as assess the site health after an SEO audit.
Do you have questions about your SEO audit? Contact us now!
What is the SEO audit process?
1. Determine the target keywords or search term to rank for
The first step of an SEO audit is to identify the relevant keywords and search query for which you should rank. If you are in the field of construction then you should focus on keywords related to your field.
2. Identify your competitors and their positions in the search results (or SERP in SEO jargon)
The next step is to analyze your competitors and their positions in the search results. Why are they ahead of you or behind you? What explains their good or bad score? Is it only their website or also their social networks?
3. Analyze the site visibility on search engines
Next, we will analyze the presence of your website on search engines and try to improve it from a technical and content point of view. We will make sure that each page is visible to the search engines and that none of them are missing (due to dead links or broken links) at the risk of losing precious places.
4. Check the technical health
In this step, we check the core web vitals of your website. We look for potential issues such as technical errors, server errors, and other minor as well as major issues. Although they are very common, not all technical errors are critical. They should be reviewed to ensure that your site is functioning properly. Dead links or broken links are among the first things we look at. This is also called off-page SEO audit and can affect your SEO rankings as much as on-page SEO.
5. Semantic audit of the site
To rank well on the keywords you choose and have a good indexation you must imperatively use them in the content published on your site and in the meta-data of your site. The content must not be of poor quality or a simple copy and paste from another site. Content includes blog posts, service pages, category pages, images, etc. Therefore, a detailed semantic cocoon should be designed. If your goal is to convert visitors into customers, perhaps it is worth writing a blog post with obvious business intent. This could perform well.
6. Audit the established backlinks to your site
Analyzing the inbound links pointing to your site is essential since each of these links, if good, give strength and authority to your site which will help it to score well in the search engine results. Acquiring good quality links or backlinks is a lifelong process that is inseparable from good SEO performance.
7. Recommendations
As an SEO agency and SEO expert, the last step is to give you comprehensive recommendations that are both simple to understand, quick to implement and with good medium and long term potential. SEO is a marathon, not a sprint.
Do you have questions about your SEO audit? Contact us now!
We will provide you with a complete audit report of several pages that will cover all the SEO problems encountered on your website.
We will also develop a specific strategy to increase your positioning on search engines. Every customer who chooses to participate in one of our three SEO programs will receive their full audit for free.
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Do you prefer to do it yourself?
If you plan to do the SEO work on your site yourself or pair with your programmer, the full audit of your site will be available for a fee ranging from $ 500 to $ 2000.
An SEO audit can take place at any point in the lifecycle of a website. Many choose to make one during critical phases, such as before launching a new website or when considering redefining or migrating an existing website.
An audit of your technical performance
Having a technically optimized website is essential to the long-term success of your SEO campaign. If your site is not structured properly, search engines will have trouble analyzing and indexing its content.
An audit of the keyword strategy
We analyze the set of Google keywords for your site, those of your competitors and those you should focus on to increase your position in the SERP results.
An audit of your competitors
Keyword analysis is the first part of the process. We then analyze your competitors and their web strategy. We will discover the pages where they get better results and establish a strategy to overcome them.
An audit of the architecture of your site
A well-designed site architecture can improve analysis and exploration and contribute to the growth of your site’s authority. We will audit your existing architecture and recommend a more efficient one if needed.
An audit of the speed of your website
Recent data shows that 50% of users expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds. We will analyze the speed of your site as well as its loading times and give you a list of points to modify in order to improve it.
An audit of your backlink strategy
External and internal links (backlinks) are fundamental elements of the SEO equation. We first analyze your existing backlink profile and then establish a strategy for growing external links.
An audit of your SEO content strategy
All the content on your website will be reviewed, we will identify the pages that contribute the most to the site’s traffic and we will make the necessary recommendations to improve the weakest aspects of your content.
Precise action plan
Information is useless without clear directions. That’s why we provide you with a detailed list of actions to set up in order to increase your SEO efficiency. This list is prioritized based on the actions that will have the greatest impact on your performance.
Do you have questions about your SEO audit? Contact us now!
SEO Audit - Frequently Asked Questions
What is an SEO audit?
An SEO (Search Engine Optimization) analysis is an inventory of the overall performance of your website’s organic search engine optimization. The objective of an SEO analysis is to identify areas for improvement to increase your website’s visibility on search engines.
Why do an SEO audit?
Many factors can affect the performance of your website, some are very visible, like the quality of your content or the user experience; others, like the coding of your page or the indexing of its content, are not so obvious.
A technical SEO audit identifies all these elements and adjusts them if they do not meet the performance, quality or reliability requirements set by search engines.
In short, a search engine optimization audit helps you identify the current strengths of the website and its areas of improvement. It is also important to organize your SEO strategy around priorities and high potential. It is important to keep track of the keywords you want to target for each page so you know where to focus your efforts.
What is a good SEO practice and a bad SEO practice?
The majority of websites rely on three pillars or ranking factors that are essential to rank well:
- The technical aspect;
- The content;
- Netlinking or link building.
To have a good performance on search engines there are good practices to adopt and bad practices to avoid at all costs.
Good SEO practices
- Using the tags (title tag and meta description) correctly with the correct amount of characters
- Having a good SEO strategy
- Studying the direct competitors
- Having good quality backlinks
- Seizing new backlink opportunities
- Increasing the domain authority
- Doing image optimization to have a better navigation
Bad SEO practices
- Not caring about content duplicate content issues
- Having toxic links on your site
- Not caring about competitors on mobile or their own mobile version focusing only on the desktop version
- Not analyzing organic traffic loss
- Alternating between an old version and a new version of your site
- Having isolated pages without internal linking
- Disregarding a technical issue
- Delivering a poor user experience
What are the audit tools to perform a complete SEO audit?
To perform a complete SEO audit, you need some SEO audit tools. Each of them offers a free version (free trial limited in time or in features) and/or a paid version. Here are the best tools that are also the most famous, as well as a short description of how we use them in a complete SEO audit.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is an interesting and very powerful software for an SEO audit. It allows you to crawl or analyze and extract each page of your site (limited to 500 URLs in the free version).
AHRef, SEMRush Pro or MOZ
These programs are not only used as a keyword research tool but also to analyze the performance of your site, but also to study your competitors in depth and see what works for them but not for you and vice versa. Ideal for spotting opportunities and getting new ideas to grow, studying referring domains, and having a complete analysis of your site.
Google Search Console
The only completely free program on this list, this is the official Google tool that allows you to see the evolution of your ranking, measure organic traffic through impressions (the number of times a link to your site is seen by a user in the search results) as well as clicks (the number of times a user has clicked on a link to your site from the search results). You can also analyze the user experience, spot technical SEO issues, and much more!
With these SEO tools, you have a good idea of the amount of work involved in an SEO audit.
What are the most common technical issues?
During an SEO audit we happen to spot a variety of technical issues. Here is a list of the most common:
- HTTPS-related issues
- Indexing issues
- Sitemap issues
- Basic issues
- User experience issues
- SEO issues
- Structure issues
- Crawl issues
An effective audit will help you get rid of those as soon as possible.
How can I get a free SEO audit with ProStar SEO?
All future clients who go through one of our programs will be able to get a free SEO audit (technical audit, content audit, issues audit, backlink audit, etc.) from ProStar SEO. We are committed to providing you with results that are as reliable as they are applicable and as sustainable as they are relevant. Our goal is for you to perform better both technically and with the search engines.