SEO AUDIT SERVICES
What is an SEO Audit service?
An SEO audit is the analysis of a website with the goal of evaluating the website’s ability to rank organically on the search engines.
The analysis goes through various phases of research and discovery taking into account key ranking factors, website performance best practices, and professional SEO knowledge.
The resulting report should include all issues found and recommendations for how to fix them.
Do I need an SEO Audit?
Most websites benefit from regular site audits to inform ongoing search engine optimization.
An SEO audit should be the first step in helping you find bottlenecks, platform weaknesses, and growth opportunities.
In essence, it is a roadmap to achieve greater website performance, search engine visibility, and more sales than your competitors.
What kind of SEO Audit do I need?
TECHNICAL SEO
CONTENT AUDIT
LINK ANALYSIS
PERFORMANCE AUDITS
What is included in an SEO audit?
Commonly an SEO audit refers to a ‘technical SEO audit’. Nevertheless, an audit can also aim at appropriate keyword-targeting, content and PR, relevant backlinks, reputation management or negative SEO, or for small local businesses: local SEO.
Technical SEO audits focus on the technical aspect of your web infrastructure and often pivots to all other types of SEO audit services:
- Content Audit: assesses the content quality and relevancy.
- Link Audit: looks at your external incoming backlinks.
- Performance Audit looks at aligning content with objectives.
Learn more about the different SEO Audit services
Technical SEO Audit
- Website Accessibility
- Website Crawl Health
- Indexability Issues
- Cloacked urls
- Pagination compliance
- Nofollow vs noindex set up
- Javascript use & compliance
- Nofollow vs noindex set up
- Sitemaps: HTML / XML
- Robots.txt configuration
- Website Speed
- Nofollow vs noindex set up
- Duplicate Content
- Thin Content
- Hidden Content
- Under/Over-optimisation
- Hidden Content
- Image SEO
- Video SEO
- Title tags and meta tags
- Mobile SEO & AMP
- Local SEO
- Social presence and SEO
- News SEO
- Canonicalization
- Site Architecure issues
- Breadcrumbs
- Dynamic url formations
- Internal linking
- Inbound links
- Semantic Mark up
- Social Mark up
- International SEO
- Geo-targetting
- HREFlang compliance
- HTTPS, mixed content
Website Architecture
My typical first step throughout a website audit is to understand the information architecture in order to establish the website sections or segments.
When SEOs refer to site architecture it is important to establish the distinction between information architecture and technical architecture. The latter is about the concepts laid out above and fall under the scope of an SEO technical audit.
Information architecture however is more about effectively organising, labelling and making the content usable and findable. These are rather scoped within the content audit.
Content Audit
Auditing your content is as important as auditing the technical aspects of your website, or the backlink portfolio. It will give you insights as to how each content type in your website is performing against your overall goals.
Your overall goals for each type of content, may in turn be different. Therefore, in order to conduct a compelling content audit, it is important to establish what ‘quality’ means.
In the context of an overall audit, quality content means relevant content that drives relevant and engaged traffic or content that drives conversions (leads of sales). Therefore KPIs can be drawn out from those principles.
Auditing the Information Architecture
Auditing the information architecture is paramount in order to ascertain whether issues or gaps exists, that could be critical to the overall content strategy for the website in question. A semantical analysis of the content is paramount here as it may reveal opportunities to enhance the information architecture.
What typical outputs can be expected of this type of audit?
Typically a content audit will give you an outline of the content that’s performing the best, average and poorly across you website/weblog. This will enable you take action accordingly either by pruning your content, improving, combining or adding more.
Link Audit
Link Audits look at external incoming backlinks and they assess adequate brand popularity, or factors like link toxicity or other forms of negative SEO.
Link audits should highlight issues or problems across your website, as well as advantages and opportunities, without getting deep into user-intent keyword targetting, content or link building.
Performance Audit
This is the part of the SEO audit that will tell your client how well they are doing in terms of business performance. It is naturally based on the KPIs the client has set as the right ones for their business: leads, conversions, sales, or at times it could be simply search engine visibility: branding
This type of audit will comprise looking at: KPI data, keyword rankings, competitor analysis and semantic analysis of the content. This clearly overlaps with the content audit which may also be looking at the semantics of the content, keywords or topics being targeted and how it all snaps up together.
Competitor and SERP Analysis
Competitor and SERP analysis is often the missing gem of seo audits. This type of study will help you and give you the clues as to the type of content, IA or link building strategy that you need to follow based on how the SERPS are built up around the keyphrases or topics related to your business.Endorsements & Recommendations
I understand that when it comes to trusting an SEO audit company there is a need for reassurance, particularly if the issues affecting a website are very technical, eg : websites having taken the leap onto Javascript frameworks. You want to make sure you are going to engage the right SEO professional.
These are some of the reviews I have got about professional SEO audits done for previous clients:
David assisted our in-house SEO team with a thorough technical audit report of our website. He really helped guide us in the right direction when it came to his international SEO recommendations. And didn't hesitate to provide us with one-on-one sessions as much as needed. Definitely recommended!
In addition to our own in-house SEO expertise we were looking for an independent technical SEO audit and advice to help address a variety of technical queries. David’s audit was thorough, filled with insight and actionable recommendations. Good communication throughout, supported by video consultation.
We leveraged David Search Engine Optimisation expertise 2 times in 2 International SEO projects. There are three remarkable aspects of his SEO methodology: 1 his capacity to simply explain complex SEO subjects, 2 the top-notch SEO tools he uses and 3 the actionable recommendations (and results). Also, David & his team are able to communicate in three 3 languages (Spanish, English & French).
David's site audits are very thorough and are filled with great actionable insights. His wealth of knowledge and experience in SEO are of great value and any company looking for a reliable SEO consultant should consider hiring him.
I loved working with David, he is a really professional and passionate SEO Expert !
David conducted a technical SEO audit for our Ecommerce website with a good eye on International SEO. The report came packed with recommendations at many different levels to improve our global efforts, from JS crawling and identified issues to hreflang. I would highly recommend him.
Feel free to check out my Linkedin profile where you can read many more endorsements and recommendations mentioning my professional SEO audit services.
Request your SEO Audit from €
How much does an SEO audit cost?
This depends very much on a mix of factors such as website size, complexity, and project scope. From the auditor’s point of view, the fees charged will also depend on factors such as professional experience, knowledge, and country of residence.
At this moment, my most basic SEO audit service starts at €995 for websites with less, or around 1000 URLs. This audit service on its own can bring a significant amount of value to your business.
In contrast, an SEO audit for a large website containing half a million URLs or more could range from €2500 to €5000 depending on the factors explained above. The way I typically identify those factors before quoting is as follows:
i. through your brief
ii. checking basic indexation through a preliminary crawl
iii. speaking to the client and asking some questions.
One of the things that make the leap from the basic €995 audit is the elements of ‘competitor analysis’, ‘SERPs analysis’ and ‘log-file analysis’. Those stages of an audit service are time-consuming and require patience and a lot of back and forth cross-referencing between the individual tools used.
For professional websites with large sales volumes, this information can provide valuable insights and a great competitive edge on the search engine results, if the recommendations are implemented.
Essential Audit
Up to 1,000 indexed urls
€995
- Basic SEO Audit
- Focused on key levers
- 36 checkpoints
- includes backlink audit
- 1 hour consultation
Complete Audit
1,000-20,000 indexed URLs
from €2,000
- All checks in ‘Essential’ plus:
- Deeper Content Audit
- SERP and competitor analysis
- Javascript websites (eg: React)
- 1 hour consultation
FAQs
What if my website has been hit by a Google Core Update ?
If your website happens to have been dropped following a Google Core Update, a purely technical audit won't help. You will need a website review focused on E-A-T. Read more about E-A-T here.
A site review focused on E-A-T is a totally different exercise and consists in analysing multiple elements, aspects and features of your website's content, backlinks, trust factors, authoritativeness and expertise.
I quote for this service individually and this typically varies between €2,500 and €4,000
It is very difficult to provide price structures for audits on the website because every site presents a different model that's to be quotes based upon complexity, history, marketing actions taken, penalisations, content.
There are often websites that have both the need for a proper technical SEO audit and also the need to improve E-A-T as they have been hit badly during a Core algorithm update. Whereas some others, in particular, small businesses usually have enough with basic technical SEO audit.
My website boasts more than 50K/ 500K/ 1million urls, can you still run an SEO audit for me?
Yes, I am able to crawl websites up to 10million URLs with a single crawl. Furthermore, I am able to conduct an SEO audit for even larger websites by segmenting crawls into the different sections that comprise the website. Often large and complex websites have specific technical problems so the best bet is to come forward outlining your problem and requesting an audit that may give you direct answers to your specific technical challenge. I will need to assess this individually to send you a tailored quote.
Typical scenario: a website that's bloated with content to the point that there is unlimited no. URLs to be crawled. I won't need to crawl the entire website then and charge based on no. urls. Having access to your Google search console may suffice to work out the root of the problem.
What SEO tools do you use to perform SEO audits?
For the basic type of audit, I typically use a combination of desktop-based tools, like Screamingfrog and Sitebulb with some cloud tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs. From the Standard type of audit (20,000 urls) onwards I would use mainly Cloud-based tools like Oncrawl, Safecont and LinkresearchTools.
The above is only a small subset of tools used for technical SEO analysis. The list will go on to tools that focus on content analysis, internal links and social media amplication and Market Intelligence like 'Oncrawl', Sistrix and SEMrush onto sophiscated link auditing tools like Ahrefs, Majestic and my preferred one: LinkresearchTools.
Are you able to run all four types of audits highlighted above and send me a report with recommendations based on those four areas?
Simple answer: yes.
I can indeed provide you with a more thorough research and set of recommendations at all levels and specifying the converging areas: technical, content, links and performance data., all in one.
If say, you go for the 'Standard' package, I have to cap the audit time and report writing time to about 20 hours. So I can give you a comprehensive report for that length of time, but of course, a report with recommendations could go on for e
Tools I use for SEO Auditing today
The main SEO tools I use to crawl websites and perform analysis or forensic assessment for the basic SEO audit package are mainly desktop-based crawling tools. I find it it sufficient when dealing with small and even medium-sized websites:
- ScreamingFrog, it’s a must
- Sitebulb, for better visualisations and validations
- SEMrush crawler does present the https issues nicely
- Ahrefs to ascertain traffic strength and backlink health
- Siteliner for duplicate content
- SEMrush crawler does present the https issues nicely
- Website Auditor by SEO Powersuite
- Google Page Speed and GTMetrix
- Google Search Console and Google Analytics
- Google Lighthouse
- WebpageTest.org
- A range of Chrome extensions for page markup, snippet validation, seo analysis, LRT toolset, GTM, etc
For websites going beyond 20,000 urls I prefer to use more robust, cloud-based crawling tools. I have used Botify extensively in the past.
Today I use a combination of Oncrawl, Safecont and LinkresearchTools at the Core. Though there are many times when I still run Sitebulb in parallel on a separate machine and without executing javascript. It takes a bunch of hours but I like the way it clearly presents and illustrates data.
- Oncrawl, to crawl large sites conduct more thorough analysis of the data
- Safecont, for large-scale duplicate content identification
- LinkResearchTools, the one and only tool to identify penalty risk
- KW finder, to perform adhoc keyword research or targetting
How would my SEO Audit will be delivered?
SEO audits should always be actionable. My audit services do include an actionable and easy-to-follow report that should have a recommendations section following each of the areas being audited.
In addition, I can provide a Google sheet outlining the full list of recommendations sorted by priority. This will save you time in internal discussions as to what should be prioritized first.
I will hand you a very comprehensive SEO report that will pack a minimum of 25 sections for the ‘Essential’ SEO Audit.
The SEO report will also include information about patents, algorithm updates, references as well as quotes from Googlers or top SEO industry leaders. So the report itself will be both informative and educational.
You can’t afford a Professional SEO Audit?
If you happen to run a ‘not for profit’ website and need help, I am happy to run an SEO audit for you for free and send you a short report with key recommendations. Ideally though, your company boasts Charity status.
The alternative to a professional SEO audit is to read free SEO training material and audit checklists and learn to perform the analysis by yourself. You may want to read some of my articles on technical SEO.
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