Find out where you stand with a site audit

Among our variety of SEO services, a website audit is usually the first piece of SEO analysis that we perform. It helps our specialists gain a strong understanding of how well your business is positioned within search results, and identify any areas that should be addressed through an ongoing SEO strategy.

These audits are usually spread between four main areas:

• Technical SEO Audit
• Keyword Audit
• Backlink Audit
• SEO page audit

Technical SEO Audit

Our technical SEO site audits typically include checks for issues such as (but not limited to):

• Redirect chains and loops
• Page loading time
• Duplicate pages
• 4XX status codes
• Broken internal links/external links
• Slow page loading speeds
• Incorrect pages in sitemap.xml
• Missing meta and alt information
• HTTPS issues
• Uncompressed and unminified JavaScript and CSS

Identifying these kinds of issues during a technical SEO audit helps us to identify how well optimised your website is for search engines, and therefore organic traffic. This process also allows us to determine whether your site is using the search engine crawl budget effectively.

We use a number of SEO audit tools including SEMRush, Screaming Frog and Google Search Console to complete this process, and our team will be happy to share our methods with your development team so that we can address issues together.

Keyword Audit

As well as developing a better understanding of your site health, we also investigate your current position within organic search against a selection of keywords. These keywords can be words/phrases that you’re already tracking. Our team can suggest options based on how much keyword research you have prepared.

Based on this process, our specialists are able to suggest amendments and additions to your tracked keywords that may help your site to capture more relevant, high quality traffic. This is often achieved through a period of keyword research and collaboration between both parties.

Finally, we may also recommend instances where landing pages could be built around keywords to best capture search engine traffic.

Backlink Audit

Backlinks have long been held as a good indication of the quality of a website, but previous “black hat” link building techniques (which focused mostly on the number of links) have resulted in many sites having a potentially toxic link profile.

Our experts seek to better understand the health of your current backlink profile and advise if your site is being affected by a large number of poor-quality links. In extreme cases, this type of profile can result in a penalty being applied by Google, and manifests in lost rankings until the links in question have been removed.

SEO Page Audit

Finally, once we have started to apply recommendations from the actions above, we may then be able to suggest options for improving the SEO for specific landing pages. This is commonly achieved by analysing page content and then comparing it to the content that has been published by your competitors, then compiling recommendations for improving content or making technical tweaks on individual pages.

We may also investigate the data that you have gathered in your Google Analytics account to see if we can identify any opportunities for improving how traffic moves around your site.

Do you need assistance from an SEO audit company? Contact us today to speak to a friendly member of our digital marketing team and find out how we can help.

SEO Audit FAQs

What is “crawl budget”?

Crawl budget describes the number of pages that search engine spiders and bots crawl and index on a website over a certain period of time (as well as any javascript, mobile variants, pdf files etc). If the number of pages on your site exceeds your crawl budget, it means that a portion of your site won’t be indexed.

One of the biggest wastes of crawl budget are technical issues on your site, which can cause bots and spiders to crawl the same pages many times over, or not be able to access certain areas. This can be caused by issues such as duplicate content, redirecting content or broken links.

What is a landing page?

A landing page is typically a page on your site that has been designed to encourage visitors to purchase a specific product or complete a specific goal. Usually, landing pages follow a pattern of best practice to ensure that visitors only have one action to complete. This is usually achieved by having no navigation, no distractions and a single call to action.

Once the visitor has completed the goal, they are usually then sent to a “Thank You” page that allows them to access the rest of your website.

What is a backlink?

A backlink is a link from an external website that links to your site. Also referred to as “inbound links” or “incoming links”, high quality backlinks are incredibly important for SEO. This is because backlinks are used by search engines to determine the authority of a web page.

In early SEO practice, authority was based on the total number of links that lead to a page. However, modern SEO guidelines now state that authority is based on the quality of links that lead to a page. In summary: It is better to have 1 link from a high-quality domain than 10 links from low quality domains.

We know that industry jargon can sometimes be tricky to understand. For the ultimate list of A-Z industry terms, check out our Digital Marketing Glossary.