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What to Know About SEO Audits: A Comprehensive SEO Audit Checklist

Contrary to what some business owners believe, search engine optimization (SEO) is not some dark art shrouded in the mystery of guessing and hoping for the best. Although it may seem like that at times, SEO done right is an art and a science.

SEO can make or break your digital marketing success and dictate how effective your marketing efforts are across the board. Without a stellar website, you can’t get the most out of your marketing.

To improve your SEO, there are distinct steps you can take to identify and address issues in your website. In this blog, learn about SEO audits—the best way to find SEO weaknesses and transform your website’s performance and rankings.

What Is an SEO Audit?

At the most basic level, an SEO audit is equivalent to a checkup at the doctor. But instead of using a stethoscope and thermometer, you use complex tracking programs such as heatmaps and scroll-through rates. Business man points to google analytics website charts on his side-by-side laptops.

A good SEO audit combs through every part of your website that can affect your SEO in the context of its performance, what you could do to make it better, and the steps you can take to make those changes. It should also compare elements of your website to highly successful websites to see what industry best practices you could leverage on your site.

In other words, an SEO audit lays the foundation upon which you can tweak your way to a high-performance website.

Why Do You Need an SEO Audit?

SEO audits are not a simple undertaking by any means. They require a lot of time, energy, and expertise to make something worthwhile. With that said, why is an SEO audit worth your time and money?

Without an SEO audit, you will fall into the trap that so many unsuccessful websites do—guessing and hoping for the best. Those companies know their website isn’t working because they do not see many conversions. But to change that, they effectively roll the dice to decide what they are going to change.

Hand rolling two dice on a wooden desk against a white background. They say, “That doesn’t look quite right.” Or they wonder, “Maybe if I changed that to blue instead of red…” In reality, they might get lucky once or twice. But you could say the same thing for anyone at a casino.

Without an SEO audit, you can’t have any meaningful direction and will more than likely spin your wheels as you empty your marketing budget into fruitless endeavors. An SEO audit prevents that one-way ticket to failure by providing you with an action plan and data-backed suggestions.

What to Look For in an SEO Audit

Not all SEO audits are created equally. If you don’t have a reputable, experienced company do your SEO audit, it won’t put you any farther ahead than the businesses that still use the guess-and-check method. Some vital elements you should receive with your SEO audit include the following:

  • Site performance overview
  • Page load speed
  • Internal linking
  • Usability and conversion
  • Sitemap crawlability
  • Traffic channels
  • Top performing pages
  • Content assessment
  • vSEO audit
  • Keyword analysis
  • Citations and listings
  • Backlinks
  • On-page SEO

As you can see by the extensive list above, SEO audits are not a light undertaking. They demand expertise from a range of marketing professionals and a significant investment of time. Therefore, finding the right company to evaluate your SEO is vital to the performance boost you can expect to receive.

An SEO Audit in Action

Now that you know what an SEO audit is and what to expect from one, what results have other companies gotten after an SEO audit?

One of our clients, ProWriters, is a highly innovative cyber insurance company that came to us with a host of marketing problems. Their website and marketing were not up to par and were not bringing in revenue like they should have been—handicapping their growth. As part of our GAP assessment, we performed an SEO audit for them.

The results?

After just one year of partnering with us, ProWriters’ monthly website users increased by 314%. Their page views rose by 380%, and their organic keyword rankings on page one of Google increased by 338.7%. Most importantly, they received 196 new leads in that first year of partnership alone.

The SEO audit we performed as part of the GAP assessment, laid the foundation for the changes we made to their website. Without a quality SEO audit, we would have lacked the direction needed to pinpoint alterations to their digital marketing.

SEO Audit for Your Business

While SEO is not a dark art, it is highly specialized and difficult to perfect. Unless you have a clear direction and actionable steps, you will end up spinning your wheels. To provide that direction, we recommend that you:

  • Find a marketing company with a proven track record of success.
  • Ask for a comprehensive SEO audit.
  • Ensure that the SEO audit covers all of the bases listed above.
  • Make those changes to improve your SEO.
  • Reap the rewards of your investment.

Given the complexity of SEO audits, we recommend you do not attempt it yourself. SEO audits require a team of highly-trained marketing professionals who specialize in different areas. At Farotech, we have a proven track record of success and years of experience doing SEO audits. In addition, we can make the changes suggested in our SEO audit to make the experience seamless and straightforward on your end.

If you want to take your SEO to the next level with a comprehensive SEO audit and team-based approach, click here to learn more.