What is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is where we take an in-depth look at your whole website and find areas where you could improve to make it easier for your business to show up in search engines.
It’s a bit like an MOT.
We check through all the fundamentals to see how it’s working, and come back with ‘advisories’ for what needs fixing so your website can run well.
Except you won’t ever get a fail – partly because we’re not that mean, but also because there’s nothing that can’t be fixed.
Most issues have simple fixes. The tricky part is being able to find those issues in the first place, understand what they are and resolve them.
That’s where getting an SEO audit done for you can help massively because it means you’re having an expert pair of eyes take care of things, and diagnose exactly what the problems are and how to fix them.
Read on to find out why an SEO audit is important, what it involves and how to go about getting one.
Why an SEO audit is important
The main benefits of an SEO audit are:
They uncover issues you didn’t know were there
It gives you clarity on what is or isn’t working
You’ll know exactly what you need to do to improve your SEO
It saves you the time and headache of trying to figure it out on your own
An SEO audit is important because it can detect issues with your website that prevent it from performing as well as it can. When we say performing, we mean being visible in search engines so people can find you and click through to your site.
Going back to our MOT analogy, think of your website like your car. When you look at it day-to-day, you’re seeing the outside of it and how it looks to other people, but once you open up the bonnet, there’s a whole host of other stuff going on to make it run.
Your website is the same. There’s technical stuff going on in the background to make it work, but also to essentially communicate with search engines so their bots can ‘crawl’ your site and understand how to categorise it, and which searches it should show up in.
An SEO audit takes a thorough look at every aspect of this process to find things that might not be working as they should, so you can improve them. An example of this could be missing alt text from your imagery (a description of the image which doesn’t show on the page, but helps screen readers interpret it).
Because you can’t see it on the webpage itself, you might not know this is missing (or that you need it in the first place), so an audit draws your attention to these ‘invisible’ details and leaves you feeling clear and confident on what you need to do to improve your SEO.
What does an SEO audit involve?
When we do an SEO audit for a client, we use an SEO tool to look at every relevant aspect of your website to pick up on any technical issues or areas for improvement.
These could include:
Broken links – If you’ve linked to other pages which have since been moved or taken down
Missing meta descriptions – A short description of your page which people see on Google
H1s that need optimising and other on page seo stuff – Where the title of your page doesn’t include the right keyword
Too-long URLS – The URL might need to be shortened to fit the recommended length
Large image files – Images might need to be compressed to improve the load speed
A crawling tool showing relevant audit documentation
These are just some examples of the kind of things an SEO audit can pick up on.
It will also do this in bulk, so we’d find every page on your website with a broken link for example, meaning every instance of this issue is accounted for.
There’s a lot of technical jargon here, but don’t let this scare you off.
You don’t need to know all of this because you can get an SEO audit done for you (hooray!) So what will it look like when it’s handed to you?
When you receive a completed SEO audit, you can expect:
A comprehensive document that outlines all detected issues. This will be a Google Sheet with a tab for each aspect of SEO and a full list of every instance
A summary of recommendations – this is a list of what we recommend you do next to improve or fix these issues
A video which talks it all through – this is to help you understand all the information we’re throwing at you so you can confidently work through it
A completed SEO audit document highlighting priority areas
An SEO audit is often the missing piece of the puzzle for small businesses who want to improve their SEO but don’t have the time or resources to dedicate to it.
This cuts out the guesswork so you can focus on making changes that will have an impact.
