We receive a lot of requests for SEO audits. It’s probably one of the most popular services brands ask for when they first approach us. Yet, truthfully, we often find ourselves steering many of these brands away from immediate audits.
Why? Not every brand needs a full SEO audit right from the start. It’s a crucial step in the SEO process, but timing and circumstances play a significant role. So, how can you be sure when you genuinely need one?
What is an SEO Audit?
First, let’s break down an SEO audit in a more detailed way since, in the industry, “SEO Audit” can mean different things to different people. An SEO audit is a thorough examination of your website to assess its ability to appear in search engine results pages (SERPs). It involves several key components:
- In-Depth Technical Review: This is the backbone of any SEO audit. It involves checking your website’s technical aspects, such as site architecture, XML sitemaps, website loading speed, URL structure, and mobile responsiveness. It also looks at how well your website is optimized for crawling and indexing by search engines.
- Accessibility Checks: This assesses how easily users and search engines can access and navigate your site. It checks for things like broken links, 404 errors, and robot.txt files and checks whether your website is easy to navigate for users.
- Analytics and Tracking Examination: This involves assessing the tracking tools you have in place. It ensures you’re properly tracking metrics and that Google Analytics and Google Search Console (or other relevant tools) are set up correctly.
- On-page SEO Analysis: This looks at individual webpage elements that can impact your SEO, like title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and image alt text. It also includes an analysis of your content to ensure it is high quality, unique, and relevant to your target audience.
- Off-page SEO Analysis: This investigates factors outside your website that can impact your rankings, such as backlinks. It includes reviewing your backlink profile to ensure you have high-quality, relevant links pointing to your site.
- Competitive Analysis: This looks at what your competitors are doing regarding SEO. It helps identify what they are doing well, where they are failing, and where opportunities may exist for you.
- Keyword Analysis: This involves analyzing the keywords your website currently ranks for, identifying new opportunities, and ensuring your website is optimized for relevant keywords.
- User Experience (UX) Evaluation: This involves looking at your website from a user’s perspective. It includes an assessment of the overall layout, design, and navigation, as well as checking whether the content is engaging and provides value to the user.
Remember, an SEO audit isn’t a one-size-fits-all checklist. It should be tailored to the unique needs and goals of your business. The purpose is to identify any potential obstacles to your site’s performance in search engines and provide actionable improvement recommendations.
When Should You Do an SEO Audit?
Understanding when to perform an SEO audit is crucial. Just like you wouldn’t take your car for service after every drive, you don’t need to audit your website’s SEO every time you make a minor tweak. However, there are certain situations where an audit is not just beneficial—it’s necessary. Here are some instances when you should consider performing an SEO audit:
- After Major Website Changes: Whenever you make considerable updates or changes to your website—like redesigning your site, overhauling the site structure, or adding a significant amount of new content—it’s a good idea to perform an SEO audit. These alterations can often lead to unforeseen SEO issues, such as broken links, redirect errors, or keyword cannibalization. An audit will help you catch these potential problems early.
- Periods of SEO Inactivity: If you have yet to actively work on your website’s SEO for a significant amount of time, an audit can be an excellent way to gauge where you’re at and identify areas for improvement. SEO is not a ‘set it and forget it’ operation; it needs consistent attention and optimization.
- Sharp Drop in Organic Traffic: If you notice a significant decrease in organic traffic, it’s a clear signal that something is amiss. An SEO audit can help identify the root cause—whether it’s a penalty from Google, technical issues, or changes in search engine algorithms.
- Outdated Website or Proprietary CMS: If your website is old or uses a proprietary Content Management System (CMS), an SEO audit is necessary. Old websites may need to be optimized for today’s SEO best practices, and some proprietary CMSs can limit SEO capabilities. An audit will help identify these potential roadblocks.
- Before a Rebrand: If you plan to rebrand your business, doing an SEO audit before making any significant changes is wise. You’ll want to ensure that your new brand maintains the SEO equity you’ve built up and avoids potential pitfalls during the transition.
- Regular Check-ups: Even if you’re not experiencing issues or making significant changes, conducting regular SEO audits (annually or bi-annually) is good practice. They ensure that you’re keeping up with the ever-changing SEO landscape and proactively managing potential issues.
Overall, SEO audits are not about finding fault for the sake of it. They’re about identifying opportunities to improve your site’s visibility and performance in search results, ultimately driving more organic traffic and supporting your business goals.
How Often Should You Do an SEO Audit?
The frequency of SEO audits largely depends on the nature and size of your website, along with any significant changes or noticeable issues.
An SEO audit may only be necessary for smaller websites when there is a significant change or problem. On the other hand, e-commerce brands or more significant sites might benefit from an annual audit —unless a major site update occurs or there’s a sudden drop in traffic, which would warrant an immediate audit.
Despite these general guidelines, it’s crucial to remember that SEO is a dynamic field, constantly evolving with changes in search engine algorithms, user behavior, and industry trends. Therefore, having a regular crawl of your site conducted monthly is highly beneficial to monitor for any red flags or emerging issues. This proactive approach can often catch potential problems before significantly impacting your site’s performance.
When Should You Complete a Content Audit?
A content audit is a systematic review of all the content on your website. It’s a valuable tool for assessing your content’s relevance, quality, and SEO performance. While not every website needs a content audit regularly, there are some specific situations where a content audit is particularly beneficial:
- Older Sites with Lots of Content: A content audit is essential if your website has been around for a while and has amassed a significant amount of content. Over time, some content may become outdated, irrelevant, or of low quality—potentially hurting your SEO efforts and user experience.
- Poor Performing New Content: If you’ve been adding new content to your site, but it needs to perform better (low traffic, engagement, or conversions), a content audit can help. It can uncover if your new content is too similar to existing content, causing keyword cannibalization or confusing your audience.
A content audit can provide valuable insights into your content strategy, identify content optimization and repurposing opportunities, and ensure your content aligns with your current business goals and audience needs.
What Are the Three Goals of a Content Audit?
A content audit is a valuable tool in your digital marketing toolbox. It involves thoroughly examining all the content on your website to understand its effectiveness and how it contributes to your business objectives. Here are the three primary goals of a content audit:
- Goal #1 Get a Grasp on Your Current Content: The first goal is to identify and understand what content you have on your site and how well it’s performing. This includes reviewing content relevancy, quality, SEO performance, and engagement metrics.
- Goal #2 – Understand Major Content Gaps Between You and Competitors: A content audit should also identify gaps in your content strategy compared to your competitors. This involves analyzing your competitor’s content to understand what topics they cover, how in-depth they go, and what kind of engagement they receive.
- Goal #3 – Set a Content Roadmap for Future Content Creation: The insights drawn from a content audit should inform your future content strategy. You’ll know what content performs well, where gaps exist, and what your audience is interested in, enabling you to create a roadmap for content creation that aligns with your business objectives.
How Long Does an SEO Audit Take?
The duration of an SEO audit depends on several factors, including the size of your website, the complexity of the audit, and the depth of analysis required. An SEO audit typically takes between one to two weeks for smaller websites. An SEO audit can take between two to six weeks for larger websites. It’s important to note that a thorough, quality audit is an intensive process—it takes time to collect, analyze, and interpret the data effectively.
How Many Hours Does an SEO Audit Take?
The number of hours required for an SEO audit can vary significantly based on the abovementioned factors. However, as a rough estimate, a comprehensive SEO audit typically requires 25 to 50 hours. This time is spent on data collection, analysis, report creation, and strategy recommendations. It reflects the effort needed to provide a detailed, actionable audit that offers real value to your business.
How Much Does an SEO Audit Cost?
The cost of an SEO audit can vary widely based on the complexity and size of your website and the depth of analysis required. At V9digital, we offer “just right” audits starting at $2,500, designed to provide valuable insights for small to medium-sized businesses. However, comprehensive SEO audits start at $5,000 for larger websites or more intricate projects. This reflects the extensive analysis and tailored recommendations provided in the audit report.
What is an SEO Audit Checklist?
An SEO audit checklist is a detailed list of elements to examine during an SEO audit. Think of it as your mechanic’s checklist during a car tune-up—it ensures nothing critical is overlooked. A typical SEO audit checklist might include the following:
- Technical SEO elements like site speed, mobile-friendliness, and XML sitemaps.
- On-page SEO factors include title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and keyword usage.
- Off-page SEO factors, including backlink profile and social signals.
- User experience aspects like website design, navigation, and content quality.
- Analytics and tracking setup.
- Content quality, relevancy, and performance.
While this list is not exhaustive, it represents the key areas most SEO audits will cover. Remember that an effective SEO audit is not just about ticking boxes—it’s about analyzing the data, drawing meaningful insights, and developing a strategic plan for SEO success.
What Types of Elements Get Covered in an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is a comprehensive process that examines a wide range of elements related to your website’s visibility in search engines. Let’s delve into some of the elements that we typically cover during an SEO audit, broken down by category:
#1 – Technical SEO Errors
These involve issues with your website’s backend that could prevent search engines from correctly crawling and indexing it. Some of the technical SEO elements we check during an audit include:
- Various types of server errors (4xx, 5xx status codes)
- Broken internal links or images
- Duplicate title tags or meta descriptions
- Issues with page crawlability (DNS resolution, incorrect URL format)
- Errors with robots.txt or sitemap.xml files
- WWW resolve issues
- Incorrect viewport tags and HTML size issues
- Problems with AMP pages (e.g., no canonical tag, HTML issues, style/layout problems)
- Hreflang conflicts and issues
- Security issues (e.g., non-secure pages, certificate problems, old security protocols, mixed content)
- Redirect issues (chains, loops, broken links)
- Loading speed and structured data validity
#2 – Content Optimization Opportunities
This involves ensuring that your content is relevant, high-quality, and optimized for search engines and users. Elements we check under content optimization include:
- H1, H2, H3, H4 usage
- Metadata optimization
- Readability analysis
- Internal linking structure
- Schema and semantic optimization
- Content word count, text-HTML ratio
- Keyword stuffing, cannibalization
#3 – Local SEO Analysis
Local SEO elements are particularly crucial for businesses serving a local area or having a physical location. During a local SEO audit, we check the following:
- NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) consistency
- Citations and local reviews
- Local listings (missing, claimed, not found)
- Trust Flow Score and Local Domain Authority
- Key Citation Score
#4 – SEO Competitive Analysis
Understanding how your SEO efforts stack up against competitors can offer valuable insights. We perform an SEO Keyword Gap Analysis during a competitive analysis, comparing your website’s keyword profile with your competitors.
This list is comprehensive but not necessarily exhaustive. An SEO audit will be tailored to your website’s unique needs and circumstances, ensuring that all relevant elements are examined for potential improvement.
In conclusion, an SEO audit is a meticulous, systematic process that digs deep into the technical aspects, content, and many other areas of your website to identify areas of improvement. While only some brands need an immediate audit, understanding when and why to conduct one is crucial for long-term SEO success—remembering that an SEO audit should not be seen as a one-time activity but as a strategic part of your ongoing digital marketing plan.
SEO Audits by Volume Nine
Here at Volume Nine, we have years of experience and a team of SEO experts ready to help you unlock the full potential of your website with our comprehensive SEO audits. If you’re considering whether an SEO audit suits your brand or have questions about the process, don’t hesitate to contact us. We’re here to help guide you through every step of the process and provide actionable, data-driven insights that can propel your online presence to the next level. Let’s create a solid SEO strategy that drives your business forward.
