Boost Your Organic Traffic with a Free SEO Audit Report
SEO audits are necessary. Not just advisable, but necessary. An SEO audit is like taking a car to a mechanic for regular check-ups. There might not be anything wrong, but on the other hand, if something does not look right, it is far better to know and fix it before any real damage is done.
An SEO audit analyses how well your website corresponds to best practices – procedures accepted as valid and most effective by professional SEO experts. A search engine optimisation audit is the first step to developing a performance plan with measurable results.
The audit identifies underlying issues impacting organic search results. A quality audit will reveal technical and structural problems, such as slow page loading, an unsatisfactory mobile experience, or poor navigation and URL Structure.
It will also reveal on-page SEO issues, including duplicate content across many pages, missing meta or alt tags, broken images, or broken internal and external links.
Potential off-site problems an audit can reveal are undesirable backlinks pointing to your site. These would include links from an unrelated site with a low trust score, self-created links on online directories, forums, blog comments, and links you have clearly paid for.
An audit will also look at user experience, keyword usage, heading tags, ensure Google indexes only one version of your site, find indexing problems, and more.
While SEO audits will vary depending on the SEO freelancer or company doing the audit, an audit should include at the very least the following:
- Indexation analysis
- Redirects
- Status Codes
- Canonical Tags
- Page Load Speed
- URL Structure
- txt
- XML Sitemap
- Content Duplication
- Mobile SEO analysis
- Crawlability
- Legacy Domain Issues
- Site Content Structure
- Keyword Research and Use
- Meta Data Check (Page Titles, Descriptions, Heading Tags)
- Schema Markup
- Internal Linking & HTML Sitemap
- User Experience
- Image Optimisation
- Crawl Budget Analysis
- User Agent Analysis
The information collected based on these factors allows a knowledgeable auditor to make accurate, practical recommendations for a website.
An audit is a routine procedure that any business owner should conduct regularly. It is effectively a “health check” for a website.
Signs Of A Quality SEO Audit
Signs Of A Quality SEO Audit
It is impossible to produce a quality SEO audit in a matter of seconds. This is not to say free SEO website auditors do not have their place, but it takes time and expertise to uncover the root causes of underlying issues affecting your site’s visibility.
Depending on the size of a site, a detailed audit can take several weeks to complete. Due diligence is necessary when suggesting significant changes to a site, and an SEO specialist must complete a comprehensive exploration to make practical and factual recommendations.
A poor SEO audit may appear as a “one size fits all” template. While some technical recommendations are the same for any website, an auditor should perform an individual analysis as the foundation of an SEO audit focusing on every area of the site in question.
Reasonable Expectations During And After An SEO Audit
While performing an audit, an SEO professional analyses and uncovers SEO improvement possibilities for your website. During almost every audit, a few low-hanging, easy-to-implement opportunities are discovered. When these are found, often the auditor will usually communicate with you, asking if you would like them to implement the changes immediately. This way, if the site is large and the audit is likely to take a while, rankings can rise in the interim, and visibility will improve before the rest of the audit is completed.
When the audit is finished, you will usually be invited to join the SEO auditor in a phone or video call to discuss findings and recommendations.
In addition, you should expect a comprehensive report on your site’s health.
Why It's Essential To Audit A Website Regularly
The company website is the cornerstone of any online business, so it’s crucial to ensure everything is in order regularly. We must remember a website is a live virtual billboard. Preferably, it will not remain untouched or ignored for long. In an ideal scenario, fresh content is added frequently, and old content is removed to keep the site current and up to date. Due to regular changes, audits should also take place as a matter of course. It is optimal to have your business site audited at least once yearly. This way, you can get critical issues fixed as they arise.
An audit is not the only important part of SEO, but it is the initial stage to ranking well. Other aspects of a robust SEO strategy include:
- Monitoring your competition’s SEO activity
- Looking for prime backlinking opportunities
- Keeping an eye on the most recent search engine best practice guidelines
- Watching to see if Google rolls out any critical updates, such as the recent Google’s “Helpful Content Update“.
These are components of a successful SEO approach and should be implemented along with the recommendations generated after an audit.
Can You Do An SEO Audit Yourself?
As mentioned, SEO audits are a vital part of keeping your SEO strategy up to date. If a site is not well optimised for search, you’re not going to be visible to search engine users, and are missing out on free search engine traffic, as well as the opportunity to build your brand and gain potential customers.
However, not all businesses have the resources to pay for a professional site analysis. If you find yourself in this situation, there are some free tools you can use to help you perform your own SEO audit.
Steps to Auditing Your Own Site:
- To start, register your website with Google Search Central, formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools. After you have verified the site’s ownership, you have access to valuable tools and information, including the search queries used to find your site, links pointing to the site, crawl errors, and HTML improvement suggestions.
- Submit an XML sitemap to the Google Search Consoleto ensure the search engine can quickly scan and index the content on your site and easily update its index anytime you make a change.
- Add your site to Google Analytics. GA allows you to collect data about the visitors to your website. You’ll see how many users leave your site immediately (bounce), how they come to your site, and if they visit several pages. You’ll also see the device they used to visit. You can gather an abundance of information through this Google tool.
- Download the free version of Screaming Frog to crawl your website. Screaming Frog is a free app that crawls and analyses every page of a site with up to 500 URLs. If you have a larger site, you will need the paid version, which has many more features and crawls a website just as a search engine would. The paid version currently costs £149 per year. Screaming Frog lets you quickly identify redirects, duplicate pages, page titles, meta descriptions, URL issues, heading tags and more. You can export the data in an Excel file to help you analyse the results.
Keep in mind that these are just a few fundamental suggestions for analysing and auditing a site and performing these steps will not give you the same insights as a professional SEO audit. Furthermore, you will need to know the meaning of the data, as misunderstanding your findings could harm your site if you take incorrect steps to fix issues.
Benefits Of A Professional SEO Audit
While you think a professional audit is out of reach financially, you might like to consider the following:
A professional audit will save you time
Time is a limited resource for business owners and often hard to come by. Getting a professional audit will free up time for yourself so you can focus on other tasks.
Your site’s visibility will improve
By having a list of issues and opportunities identified by a professional to enhance your website’s health, depending on your knowledge, you can resolve the problems yourself or work with the professional to fix them. A healthy website that ranks organically for profitable keywords will bring in revenue, which should more than cover the initial outlay for an expert audit.
You will gain an understanding of your competitor’s strategy
A professional SEO audit delivers a more detailed look at what your main competition is up to. An SEO specialist will perform complete competitor analysis, recording the keywords your contenders rank for, pages that are successful for them, their backlink profile, and their overall marketing techniques.
With this data, you’ll learn what your competitors are doing that you currently are not. You can improve your own marketing approach by reproducing competitors’ successes.
The ROI of a professional SEO audit is high
The price for an expert SEO audit varies depending on the agency, but the investment is worth paying in just about every case. According to research, more than 53% of traffic comes from organic search compared to 27% from paid search. Investing in a thorough study of your website’s health will improve your ranking in organic search results and generate revenue for your business.
Free SEO Ranking Report
For a limited number of responders, I am offering a professional audit with a free SEO report. My SEO audit is the start of an end-to-end solution to improve your website’s visibility in the search results.
Because search engines change their algorithms frequently, what is working well today might not work in a few months. When executed correctly, my free audit will be the first step to improving your site’s performance, enhancing SEO, and increasing brand awareness and conversions.
How To Get Your SEO Report Free By A Google Certified Digital Marketer
To receive a free premium, professional SEO audit that will identify everything underlying issue there is to know about your website, fill out the form below, and I will contact you as soon as possible.
Remember, like my time, slots are limited, so contact me for a free SEO report and analysis while spaces are still available!