Seo Audit Services
Get an actionable audit report with a complete action plan.
You are only an audit away from resolving that SEO problem
What is an SEO Audit service?
A website SEO audit is a service that consists in analysing a website wih or without a particular problem in mind. The goals are to
- diagnosing what the issues are
- kickstarting an SEO strategy
- providing actionable SEO recommendations
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 will be an actionable list of recommendations.
Types of SEO Audits
What do I need an SEO Audit for?
SEO audits have the potential to help you kickstart the right SEO strategy for your business, whatever stage of maturity your business may be at.
Although you may feel that your website is well-optimized, an SEO audit could reveal the one critical issue holding your website from doing better.
The goal is to help you avoid time and money wasted on useless tactics-based approaches to SEO and focus on optimizing tasks that can bring the greatest return for your investment.
What Type of SEO Audit do I need?
Commonly, an SEO audit refers to a ‘technical SEO audit’; however, an audit can also be related to effective 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 pivot to all other types of audits:
- Content Audit: assesses the content quality and relevancy.
- Link Audit: Looks at your incoming external backlinks.
- Performance Audit looks at aligning content with objectives.
Pick the SEO Audit service you need
Technical SEO Audit
A technical SEO audit 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. This is the list of checkpoints I typically go through when performing a professional technical SEO analysis.
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 falls under the scope of an SEO technical audit.
Information architecture, however, is more about effectively organizing, labeling, 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 & Qualifications
I understand that there is a need for reassurance when it comes to outsourcing marketing services.
The best proof I can provide to show my validity in performing professional SEO audits is my 20 years of experience in SEO, which you may check out on my LinkedIn profile. Please read my numerous client recommendations in diverse industries such as Health, Education, Adult, Wellness, Jobs, and many others, as well as my Google profile.
Find more about my professional career as an International SEO Consultant.
Request your SEO Audit from as low as €995
My proposed SEO audit services range from essential studies for small or medium sites to large websites looking at 20K to 200K pages or even millions. The basic audio can already provide significant value for a small to medium business owner as there will be previous advice to help you boost your business.
An audit gets more complex if your website is large, running on JavaScript, or if an algorithm or manual penalty has hit you. I’m also able to conduct a study on your competitive landscape from where I would draw out valuable insights about your competitors and the reasons why they may be ranking higher than you on the search engine results,
In short, I can deliver anything from a basic audit to a masterpiece audit packed with unparalleled market intelligence information and actionable recommendations.
Feel free to send me a message outlining the specifics of your project.
FAQs
Do I need an SEO Audit?
Most websites benefit from regular site audits in order 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.
Why are you packing all different insights into a single SEO audit?
For the sake of simplification and to avoid complexity.
Often SEO agencies and consultants sell these packed into one single audit and report.
I find that for the most, and in particular for Small businesses a technical SEO audit is enough to get them going. I do still cover essential items from the other types of audits like ‘thin or paginated content’ or toxic links in case you have been hit by negative SEO. So this helps you be more focus without necessarily having to spend money if budget is scarce.
Every website and business model is different so in the majority of cases a tailored proposal looking at what the business wants to achieve, is better, but in general, people like to see prices on websites, to get an idea of costs, so this is the reason for the packages.
My website boasts more than 5K/50K/500K/1million URLs, can you still run an SEO audit for me?
Yes, of course I can crawl your website up to 10million urls and conduct an SEO audit for even larger websites, but I will need to assess it individually before I send you a customised quote. Obviously if your website is bloated to the point that there are unlimited no. urls to be crawled ( and this exists) then I will plateau the cost in order to avoid wasting money and time on useless crawling of duplicated urls based on similar issues. Again for large complex website models, I can conduct a preliminary analysis and send you a tailored quote.
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 leading 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 sufficient when dealing with small and even medium-sized websites:
- ScreamingFrog, it’s a must
- Sitebulb, for better visualizations and validations
- SEMrush crawler does present the https issues nicely.
- 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, Sistrix, and Ahrefs at the Core. In addition, I run Sitebulb on a separate machine executing parallel crawls in text-only and javascript to help with issues and error detection on React or Angular-based websites.
- Oncrawl, to crawl large sites, conduct a more thorough analysis of the data
- Sistrix, for analysis on large-scale websites, looking at rankings and traffic by segments.
- Ahrefs site audit to ascertain traffic strength, performance gaps and crawl issues, as well as backlink health
- Mangools, to perform ad-hoc keyword research or targeting
How would my SEO Audit will be delivered?
SEO audits should always be actionable. The main report should have a recommendations section following each area being audited. This recommendation section should be easy enough to follow if the client will read just that.
In addition, I always provide a Google sheet outlining the complete list of recommendations sorted by priority. This will save you time in internal discussions about what should be prioritized first.
I will hand you a 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, and quotes from Googlers or top SEO industry leaders. So, the report itself will be both informative and educational.
Not Budget to commission a Professional SEO Audit?
Suppose you have a website that needs attention and does not have a budget to commission an SEO audit.
In that case, I may be able to offer you a discount for your startup or even a free audit if your company qualifies as a charity.
If you run a commercial business, I can only suggest you contact me with all the details, and I will do my best to propose a custom solution with estimated deliverables and outputs in line with your budget.
The alternative to outsourcing an SEO audit is to try and follow industry advice and audit checklists to perform the analysis yourself. You may want to read some of my articles on technical SEO.
