The SEO Audit
As businesses and major brands continue to expand their online footprint, the demand for results driven search engine optimization (SEO) continues to grow. Most businesses are realizing that by refusing to cultivate their digital footprint they run the risk of losing customers, and fading into oblivion.
The SEO Audit is perhaps the most critical component for developing an effective SEO strategy. A well-executed SEO audit provides a breakdown of everything you need to boost your presence for search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
At Good Guys SEO, we provide premium SEO audits that outline everything there is to know about your website. Our audits dig deep into your site’s organic performance, and existing SEO strategy to create a sleek, streamlined SEO strategy that achieves optimal search rankings and better usability for your clients.
Interested in learning more about what an SEO audit is and how it keeps your site ranking at the top of search results? Simply keep reading!
What is an SEO audit and why is it important?
The value of an SEO audit is immeasurable. SEO audits are the most effective way to diagnose problem areas and locate weak access points on your site. It is important that this take place before any changes are made in the following areas:
- Technical SEO – This part of the audit reviews your site structure. It defines how healthy your website is from a technical standpoint and suggests improvements such as crawl issues.
- On-Page SEO – This analyzes on-site content focusing on any visible elements, such as copy and imagery.
- Off-Page SEO – This section of the audit focuses more on off-site content and recommends improvements for off-site activities, such as link building.
What are the benefits of an SEO audit?
An SEO audit will not only identify weaknesses in your SEO plan, but it provides recommendations on how to correct them. For example, your contact information may not be the easiest information to locate on your site. By adding a separate page that provides your location will ensure that you are included in more locally based searches. Or maybe you’re not using relevant keywords on your site pushing you outside the Google crawl.
Here are just a few of the benefits of the SEO Audit:
- Provide ongoing updates on the technical health of your website to highlight actionable tasks to improve online visibility.
- Develop an ongoing SEO plan for improving internal performance metrics.
- Immediate resolution of on-page issues to improve your rankings in search engines.
- Conversion rate optimization
- Provide an enhanced experience for users.
- Content auditing and optimization. Remember Google ranks content.
- Identify areas for improvement that will improve search visibility placing your brand in front of the correct users.
- Identify your competitors, and their best practices offering recommendations on how to increase your site’s search rankings.
If your site is already ranking for some keywords, we can improve on them. If you’re getting minimal traffic, we’ll increase your conversions. We’ll strengthen the pages that are weak while building supporting pages and writing articles that enhance your relevant keywords. These are just a few simple actions that provide real improvements to your site’s performance.
Our comprehensive suite of audit offerings use a combination of hard data, strategic brainpower, and a wealth of SEO acumen to give us a complete look under the hood at your and your competitor’s websites:
The Deep Dive
Low quality pages, content, poor structure and lack of web mentions can cause search engines like Google to lose trust in your website, resulting in fewer crawls, indexes and rankings.
Our custom-built Website Quality Audit (WQA) tool assesses the quality of your website by looking at a number of different data inputs, including inbound links, titles, content depth, sales from organic traffic, keyword rankings and more
We use this data to do a deep analysis of your website’s technical deficiencies, as well as the performance of your content.
The output is a matrix with itemized actions to take to improve SEO performance, broken down into Technical and Content actions.
What goes into the SEO Deep Dive?
Our WQA tool imports API data from 6 vital SEO data sources:
- XML sitemaps – to get a list of URLs included in your Sitemap.
- Screaming Frog – to get a full list of URLs and files uploaded to your site, page titles, metas, canonical tags and word count per page.
- Ahrefs – to get a list of the links pointing to your website and which pages they point to.
- SEMRush – to get your current keyword rankings and which pages they correlate to.
- Google Analytics – to get sales, leads, and traffic data from search engines only.
- Google Search Console – to get SERP impressions and page level click through rates in Google.
It then aggregates this data and allows us to assess quality metrics at the page level. From here, we can make a decision about what to do with every page on your site.
What comes out of the Website Quality Audit?
After each page on the site is classified into categories, we can quickly assess each page for quality..
We assign each page an “Action” (Technical and Content) based on our analysis of the data points.
These “URL Actions” dictate:
- Which pages to clean up (i.e. redirect, NOINDEX, etc)
- Which pages have no potential for traffic and to ignore (i.e. contact page)
- Which pages we will focus on for the campaign (i.e. perform KW research, updating content elements, target with links)
Keyword research
Keyword research tells us what your audience is searching for. These terms and phrases act as inspiration for content topics people will care about.
Using our Keyword Gap Analysis, we are able to scrape your competitors’ websites to understand which keywords are driving the most traffic to their sites. We then compare this data to your website, which helps us identify “gaps” that need to be fixed.
This data will act as a foundation to create new content on your website. The keywords we deliver to you will be grouped into topics, giving you a roadmap for how and what you want to create in the coming months.
Analytics Review
To properly optimize, track and report on a client’s campaign we need to make sure the data is sound, so we check that all tags and data collection platforms are tracking properly:
- Google Tag Manager. Audit, analyze, setup and optimization.
- Google Analytics checkup. Review of goals, events, enhanced eCommerce and more.
- Google Search Console checkup. Review of sitemaps, robots.txt, 404 pages, dead links, inbound links and more.
- Structured Data audit. Identify all structured opportunities as well as all errors and warnings
Other audits and analytics services include
- Internal Linking and Backlink Analysis
- Google Analytics tagging audits
- Google Search Optimization audits
- Technical Audits
- Content Audits