What is a SEO Audit?
The SEO audit is the document that analyses the status of a website from the point of view of its visibility in Google, according to the services or products that the business sells or offers. Depending on the type and size of the website, the audit will be more or less complex and/or extensive. The SEO audit is the starting point of any SEO project for SMEs and businesses.
When to conduct an SEO audit
The SEO audit of a website is performed BEFORE starting an SEO project.
The audit marks the roadmap of the project and defines the guidelines to be followed in the following months in order to improve visibility on search engines.
What data is included in an SEO audit
We evaluate the different aspects that influence visibility on Google, such as:
- Web architecture
- Interlinking
- Headings
- Images
- Loading speed
How much does an SEO audit cost
The price of an SEO audit with us is between €200 and €1,000 on average.
The greater the difficulty, competition and size of the website, the more time and work will need to be invested. However, it is included in any monthly SEO consultancy.
Required tools
to carry out your audit
CRAWLER
ScreamingFrog
The most complete and widely used SEO crawler. Many of the points we cover are addressed with ScreamingFrog.
chrome extension
SEO Meta 1 Click
This Chrome browser extension will allow you to check most of your website’s metas and On-Page state.
tools from google
Search Console & Analytics
These are the two basic tools for analysing the status of a website in terms of its organic traffic.
chrome extension
Web Developer
This Chrome extension allows you to do tests on your browsing to detect improvements.
online tool
Page Speed Insights
This is Google’s tool for measuring the loading speed of a website.
external tool
SemRush or aHrefs
They are two of the most powerful SEO tools. SemRush offers a 7-day trial period.
SEO Audit Template
#1: Web Server & CMS
First of all, we must check whether the server and the CMS in use are working optimally. In particular, you should check:
- Is the SSL certificate working? If yes, is there mixed content?
- Redirections between with/without www
- Geographical location of the server and its IP address
- On multi-language and international sites, is there a CDN active? If not, why not?
- Loading speed of the website, and if it is slow, analyse the causes.
- Server responses: counting of 4xx and 5xx errors and 3xx responses.
Web architecture refers to how content is hierarchised within the website itself.
An optimal web architecture will always be designed to help the user navigate the site. In this section you should check:
- How the contents about similar topics interact with each other
- How the user is guided between the different navigation levels
- How many navigation levels there are from the home page
- How many clicks are necessary to reach the last navigation level
- Are there very similar pages that talk about the same thing?
#2: Website Architecure
#3: Indexation
In the indexing section we will check what and how much Google has indexed from our site and the crawling frequency.
A large difference (saturation) between the number of URLs published and the number of URLs indexed indicates several problems:
If there are more URL’s indexed than we have on our website, we are suffering from cannibalisation. The most common cause of this is a subdomain for testing that has ended up indexed in Google by not taking the proper precautions.
If there are fewer URL’s indexed than we have on our website it is because Google cannot crawl the site effectively or does not crawl it frequently because it considers the site to be of low quality.
Use of noindex and nofollow tags: are they placed correctly on those pages that do not need to be indexed (such as legal pages, cookies…)?
Robots file, Google tools and XML sitemap
On-Page SEO is one of the most important legs of any SEO strategy.
On-Page SEO refers to how SEO works at the level of each of the pages, and analyses the following aspects:
- Originality of content
- Headings structure
- Image nomenclature
- Breadcrumbs
- Schemas
- URL syntax
- Interlinking
- Page formatting
- Meta-attributes
#4: SEO On-Page
#5: WPO
The acronym WPO stands for Web Page Optimization and refers to the optimisation of the loading speed of a website.
PageSpeed Insights is one of the most popular loading speed engines, but you can also supplement the information with tools such as Pingdom Tools and GTMetrix.
In our case, we use all 3 at the same time to get a more complete picture of a website’s performance.
These tools, in addition to measuring the speed and performance of a website, also give you advice on how to fix the factors causing poor performance.
The backlink profile shows us how popular our website is for our niche market and within the internet ecosystem we are part of.
In other words, the backlink profile allows Google (and us) know what are other sites, customers and users that “live” directly or indirectly in our sector saying about our brand or website.
For the above reason, having a powerful backlink profile can help a lot in organic visibility.
For a correct analysis of the link profile of a site it is highly recommended to have a specialised tool such as aHrefs or SemRush.
#6: Backlink Profile
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Ready to fill in, with all the previous information extended and with table of contents, section descriptions and check-list of tasks!
