Seo Audits: How Important Are They, And What Should They Include?
With the landscape for SEO in a constant state of flux
, it's very easy to become caught in the furore over how to build backlinks to your site in a sustainable way, how to market your content, and how to create relationships with other sites, however the quality of the website itself often seems to be overlooked.
There's no point investing thousands in an outreach or linkbuilding campaign when there are fundamental problems with your website that could prevent it reaching it's potential. It's like spending 1,000,000 on building a house on a swamp. As the old saying goes, the wise man builds his house upon the rock. Your website should be build on solid foundations that allow it to grow over time, without having to come back and hot-fix and troubleshoot constantly because all of a sudden you're not appearing in search rankings because, for some bizarre reason, your content management system is outputting 100 versions of the same page.
Ideally what you should have is a level of SEO consultancy incorporated in the construction of your site. Most web companies will tell you that they use 'SEO build principles' but this statement is fluffier than a newborn duckling. What you need is an SEO professional with you every step of the way, to ensure that things are being done correctly from the start and to make sure that you make the most of the opportunities that are available.
In many cases, due to either budget restrictions, or the fact that you just didn't realise how important this was, SEO is forgotten at the start. This is where a Comprehensive Audit comes in to it's own.
What's in an SEO Audit, and how much does it cost?
This can vary massively depending on the provider and the site. An audit might be priced anywhere between 100 to 3000, but in most cases this price difference corresponds directly to the quality of the analysis, and the complexity of the task. An audit of a 5 page site shouldn't cost an arm and a leg, but similarly, don't expect to be able to get a good audit of a 5000 page mega-site for the price of a can of beans. (this statement is subject to inflation).
In my opinion there are some fundamental points which any site review should consider:
Content
Duplicate Content
Page Hierarchy
Page Titles
Accessiblity
Site Architecture
Technical Issues
Canonicalisation
URL structure
Internal Link Architechture
Backlink Profiles
Linkbuilding Opportunities
I tend to break these down in to three main categories when working for
Candidsky:
On-Page Review - this is all about how we target keywords on the site, where we put them, and whether or not the pages are set up in order to leverage the most important signals to their full effect (such as the use of and tags, Page Titles, Image Alt Text etc)
On-Site Review - here I look at issues which affect the whole site, rather than each page individually, this is often where serious issues are uncovered (such as problems with internal linking, duplicate content, crawler accessibility, URL structure). This tends to be the more technical part of the audit, and something which really does require a trained eye.
Backlink Analysis - Once I'm done checking out the pages of the site, then the whole site itself, I start to look at where the site is featured elsewhere on the web, namely who links to it, and how they do it. In addition to this I build a list of desirable linking opportunities that people can either take away to a linkbuilder, or bring back to us to action.
What makes a good audit?
Writing a good audit can be hard for anyone. It's about striking the perfect balance between providing enough information for the client to be able to understand what you're talking about, and not waffling for 200 pages. In my opinion, if you can write it in half as many words and it still makes sense, you should. Most importantly the information should be actionable and valuable, with plenty of examples.
What do you get from an audit?
An audit should essentially provide a list of actionable changes, with examples, that will put a site on the right track. It's about establishing a strong and sustainable base for your offsite and content based efforts.
How often do you need an audit?
This really depends on the site in question. If it's a small, static site that doesn't change much, the odds are you won't need one more than once every year or so, with the odd health check to fix any broken links etc. If we're talking about a regularly updated site with tons of content, links, and activity, I'd say this should be done once every six months or so, with monthly health checks to make sure everything is going according to plan.
by: Si Fryer
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