SEO Audits: What’s the Point?

SEO audits take a look under the hood of your current organic search performance – this means seeing what you are doing well and what you could be doing better to rank in search engines. ‘Better’ here is attracting more traffic by better matching search queries and intent with information you have on your website.

There are hundreds of ranking signals. The idea of an audit is to work out which of those signals need improving to better your appearance in the search results. Naturally, not all of these signals matter. What matters, to an extent, depends on the business you are and the objectives you have. Being clear on this upfront helps inform and direct the audit.

How to prepare for an SEO audit

Ahead of auditing, it’s helpful to think about any core business changes and any goals and objectives you have in mind.

• Have you recently migrated your website? And, did you notice an impact on your organic performance/general performance following it?
• What resources do you have available? Do you have a developer or copywriter on hand? Understanding resources helps define recommendations so they’re specific and actionable based on your business context. 
• What are the business goals you are wanting organic search to contribute to?

What is the value of an SEO audit?

Highly functioning organic search can help you reduce spend on paid media (although, it’s often also complemented by it), boost brand awareness and drive commercial sucess. It makes the most of the time and money you put into creating content on your website – whether that’s long form blogs, services copy or core product pages. Typically, by conducting an audit, you will be able to form a roadmap for:

• Improving organic rankings
• Increasing traffic to your site
• Increasing the number of conversions and leads
• Improving brand awareness
• Improving user experience
• Ensuring there are no underlying issues preventing success

What does an SEO audit cover?

Audits typically cover the following aspects. However, the amount of insight you already have into the problem space can determine where to focus an audit.

• Keyword research – what you rank for, what your competitors rank for, what you should rank for but are not
• On page SEO – content optimisations, content styling i.e. metadata, H tags and content creation
• Off page SEO – typically actions taken off site to show your website’s authority, like backlinks
• Technical SEO – how pages load, how images and assets within them load, how your code and bots work together
  
  

If your business falls into a certain SEO niche, you should audit for that too. For example, if your business relies on local customers, a review of your local SEO should form part of the audit.

SEO is a team sport – while you can optimise for on page, if your off-page strategy is lacking, or your technical SEO is sending poor signals back to crawlers and bots, then you might be wasting your time and effort. Taking a holistic approach helps to remedy this.

Audits also indicate untapped avenues to explore in branded keyword heavy, or highly competitive, spaces where fresh thinking is needed to help you reap the advantage from ranking more effectively.

SEO audits vary in size and depth

The size and scope of the audit will determine the depth and documentation. For something smaller that gets you started, you will often receive a short document outlining your current performance, listing an overview of findings for those main SEO areas and next steps.

This type of audit is indicative and requires further analysis as a next step but will give you a good overview of where you are currently at and the potential your business has for organic search going forward.

The other type of audit is more detailed, consisting of documentation for each area of SEO. With each document listing a more detailed analysis of the findings alongside a prioritised summary of actions per type of SEO factor.

Try it out

The more information and context that’s provided to frame the audit the more successful it will be. This applies to audits of all sizes, whether you’re after something small and tactical, or something more in-depth to aid the implementation of a long-term organic search strategy. Whether it’s a health check or a rebuild you’re after we can help.