Your website is like a car: it needs regular servicing to keep it running efficiently and at its peak. But how do you know if there are problems with your website? How do you know if it’s helping your business, or hindering it?
A site audit provides these answers by thoroughly & methodically examining your site from top to bottom, inside & out. Problems can be located, causes identified and an action plan to resolve them created.
Once your site is audited and its issues fixed, your business will have a solid foundation for better search engine performance, ready to launch your next marketing campaign.
What an SEO audit will tell you about your website.
Getting your website audited is the difference between wondering if it works and knowing why it’s not.
- An SEO audit will give your website a baseline measure to tell you what is working and the parts that need fixing and how these problems could be impacting your site.
- An audit will tell you why your website isn’t ranking for the keywords & search terms you think you should be. Why your traffic suddenly took a dive. Why the blog posts you are publishing aren’t getting the results you hoped.
- You’ve probably heard how search engines “grade” your website across hundreds of factors and are constantly updating the methods they use to do so. It takes time and know-how to keep up to date with search engine algorithms and changes. As a business owner, you already have plenty on your plate. It’s unlikely you’re going to keep up with these changes, or even know where to start.
But failing to find out about how your website is working or how it can be improved, may see your search engine rankings slipping, your traffic dropping, and your competitor getting busier (at your expense!). None of which is good news for your business.
Endlessly helpful & very responsive. Lots of valuable insights. Couldn’t recommend more!
Abby Aitchison – AA Physiotherapy, Murwillumbah
What’s involved in a site audit?
Our site audits go deep behind the scenes to find out what’s holding your website back, assessing over 160 checkpoints that can affect your its performance in the search engines.
Each audit report assesses factors across three criteria –
How your website performs in search engines
These are the technical SEO checkpoints that look at how well search engines can crawl your site. When the search engine arrives at your site, what can it see?
Is the information laid out in a logical, efficient way so it can easily crawl through it? Does it understand what your business does and be able to pick out the relevant information for its visitors?
Some of the areas we investigate include –
- Site Crawl – can the search engines “read” the areas of your site they need to? Are they blocked from the areas you don’t want them to?
- Indexing – is your website information in their index?
- Mobile-friendly – does your site work on smartphones & tablets? Is it still usable?
- Site speed – does your site load quickly?
- Canonicalisation – does it load from one URL or many?
- Broken links – are you linking to resources that no longer exist, or have moved?
- Schema Data – is your site describing itself correctly & efficiently?
How your site visitors find your website
This is called the on-page SEO and relates to how your website has provided a great user experience, from a visitors’ point of view.
Search engines take into consideration how easy it is to navigate around your website, as well as logically presented pages and quality content to site visitors.
Here we look at –
- Page titles & descriptions – are they too short, too long, are they engaging, do they contain the best keywords & search terms?
- Keyword usage – are you targeting the best search terms for your industry. Are you competing at the right level?
- Internal linking – do the pages on your website link to other pages, creating a flow of authority and a good user experience?
- Image optimisation – do your images work for or against your site?
- Content duplication & quality – poorly written content can hurt your site, as can using the same content repeatedly.
How your website fits in with the wider web
These are your website relationships and connections with the world wide web and is called your off-page SEO.
It includes everything around how the rest of the web sees & finds your website and your business. Here we’re principally concerned with:
- Backlinks – Review of your site’s inbound links, and their quality.
- Brand mentions – Does your company has a reputation problem you don’t know about?
- Competitor review – How you compare against the top sites.
The SEO Audit report
Once your site audit is complete, you’ll have an actionable plan, unique to your site. You’ll know what needs fixing and how to fix it, so you can increase your site’s search engine visibility & performance.
Now you have a clear plan for your website so it can do what it is designed to: increase your business’ bottom line.
Who is the audit for?
You can use the audit report to fix the problems yourself, send it to your web developer or current SEO team, or hire us to implement the changes for you.
My site has improved so much, and is now starting to appear in the search results again after some easy to follow advice.
Cascie Kambouris – The Hope Initiative
White label SEO Audits
We also offer white label SEO Audits to web design companies. Ensure your clients have the best chance of search engine success
How long does a site audit take?
This depends on the size of your site. Smaller sites are usually around a week, with larger or e-commerce sites, up to 3 weeks.
What do I do next?
Contact us today on 1300 755 509 or fill out the form on this page, and we’ll get in touch to discuss your needs further.