SEO Audit + Plan Of Attack
An SEO audit is a deep dive into your website to surface any issues that may affect your organic visibility. The goal of an audit is to develop a list of optimizations in priority order by the impact that can improve your user’s satisfaction and in turn your rankings in the search engines.
Technical SEO Audit
SEO is broken down into a couple of areas, technical being one of the most important. If your website has technical issues that impact the search engine’s ability to crawl, render and rank your content, your rankings will struggle. You can have the secret to life published on your site, but if the search engines cannot find it, they will not rank it for your users. Some main areas a Technical SEO Audit will check are:
- Frontend Scan
- XML Sitemap Scan
- Site Architecture + URL Structure
- Structured Data
- Response Codes + Indexability
- Page Speed
On-Page SEO Audit
On-Page SEO is just as important as Technical. If you have a super fast site that is easy to render, but no content that is helpful, you will struggle to rank. Many believe that you just need to create content to rank. Content, content, content is what they say. While content is important, blindly publishing is the wrong way to go. You want to ensure you are creating content that solves your user’s problems. Some areas I check for On-Page SEO include:
- Current Rankings + Target Rankings
- Competitor Keywords
- Internal Linking
- Content Performing/Under-Performing
- Image Optimization
- SEO Elements (Titles, Descriptions, etc.)
Off-Page SEO Audit
One of the last areas of SEO is Off-Page SEO. This includes backlinks, social profiles and anything that is not your website but references your company in any way. This is a very important area because a lot of these are seen as ‘votes of confidence’ in the eyes of search engines and users. Some Off-Page SEO Areas to check are:
- Backlinks
- Social Profiles
- Competitor Audits
- Local SEO (Google My Business / Bing Places)
Tracking + Additional Checks
Before you start investing in SEO or any area of your website you should ensure that your tracking is set up properly. So many times I have experienced companies that think SEO doesn’t work, but they have no visibility into their data. Data should fuel every decision you make, so you better make sure it’s correct and you have easy visibility. Some areas I will check for Analytics + Additional areas include:
- Analytics Code (and how it fires)
- Is Data Flowing Properly
- Do You Have Permissions To View Data
- Conversions / KPIs
- Any Checks You May Be Worried About
