What Is A Website SEO Audit & Why Do I Need One?

What Is A Website Audit

A website seo audit is a full analysis of everything related to your website’s level of search visibility. A complete and detailed web audit will give you a deeper understanding as to why your site is not generating the traffic you think it should or why your sales and conversions are not improving.

A comprehensive website auditing service will offer you feedback on everything from your technical issues to your content and everything in between. 

Can I Just Use One Of Those Automated Audit Reports?

There are many “automated” website SEO audit tools where you can do it yourself, but these are not mean to be a full website analysis.

You may visit other SEO or web developer websites and see a cool tool that says “What Is Your SEO Score” or “Get Your Free Website Analysis” – and then you put in your website URL and voila’ in a few minutes you have this really pretty report with some great information!

While this can be a useful low level overview of your website these reports are really meant to be “lead generation” tools and not meant to be a real website audit. Often when you use these tools you will have to enter your email – or the report will come back showing issues and they encourage you to contact them for help.

These tools are in no way a true representation of the health of your website and do not offer you a real value in terms of what needs to be fixed to improve traffic and conversions.

Some Website Audit Tools That Are Free!

Yes, there are some free audit tools – but these are not robust reports – but are usually meant to be lead-gen tools to sell you more products or services like we noted above.

A really popular one that a lot of website owners use is Woorank, and at a glance it is an OK tool to give you a general overview of your websites health. But important to note is that it only pulls data for the URL you input. So if you use your home page URL, you only get the results of that page. You are missing out on the other hundreds of pages or so that are on your website.

And also note that on the page when your report appears, you will see a button that says “Start Your Free Trial” – this is lead generation to sell you their services.

Here are a few more audit tools you can try:
SEOptimer
Raven Tools – this tool does require a Google login
Website Grader

Again – these are all low level audits that only tells a small part of the story of your website. You may try running several of these audits and find that they also return different results – which can make it all the more confusing for you to address website issues.

Unfortunately, there is no free SEO audit tool that will give you a full comprehensive look at how to improve your website.

Why Do I Need A SEO Audit?

We have been involved in the SEO world for over 12 years and we have seen incredible changes from the search engines in how they compute the search results when someone does a search during this time. Even though we do a lot of work as web designers for nonprofits and small businesses – auditing is a passion and getting people to realize that audits are critical to their online business is something we work hard at!

It used to be that you could just add keywords to your title tags and content and header tags – get a few back links and there you go – you are ranking!

It is NOT AT ALL like that anymore and most business owners have not been able to keep up! There are hundreds of factors used by the search engines to determine how your site will be returned in the results.

Some of the more recent additions to these factors include:
–Site speed
–Responsiveness
–Content
–Authority
–Technical Code

As a website owner it is important for you to know your website!

How many of these questions can you actually answer?
1) How many back links do you have?
2) Are any of your back links low quality?
3) Do you have any broken links on your website?
4) Do you have Schema implemented?
5) Is your site loading too slow?
6) Is your URL structure helping or hurting you?
7) Do you have any Meta issues?
8) Does your mobile website pass validation?

These are just a FEW of the many things needed for proper optimization! If you do not know the answer to these questions – you NEED AN AUDIT!

An audit may still offer some benefits even if you can answer the questions above since most professional SEO audits are much more comprehensive than the 8 items above and will include areas you may be less knowledgeable about.

What A Good SEO Audit Includes!

An in-depth website SEO audit is not a quick process. Properly done it can take several days if you have a larger website but on average 2 Dogs Media spends approximately 2-3 full days running an audit on an average sized business website.

Why so long you ask? Well, because we care about finding all of the issues and offering simple and easy to use direction on how to improve your web presence. We do an in depth manual review of your website as well as run several reports to retrieve a variety of data that we then analyze and input into a well organized spreadsheet!

Our hands on approach and immersion into data from various sources gives you the best chance of improving your online business!

Website SEO audits we offer can include some or all of the following items:
1) Technical Audit – making sure your site is well coded and runs fast
2) On-site Audit – full review and analysis of all pages for proper keyword use in all pertinent areas (H1-H6, title tags, content etc.)
3) Off-site Audit – analysis of back links and anchor text and authority and trust
4) Social Audit – review current mentions and visibility
5) Local SEO Audit – if you are a local business, we make sure your website is optimized for local and that you have citations and other elements needed to capture local listings

As an example we provide a detailed analysis of every item that is affecting your website as well as tools or suggestions to help you fix them.

An average website seo audit report can be upwards of 20-30 tabs in a spreadsheet!

Are There Any Tools So I Can Audit My Website Myself?

We understand the cost for an in-depth audit prepared by an SEO Professional can be prohibitive for some. There are a few options available for running your own audit that can make some impact on your business – we have noted a few websites above that offer a free trial – then some have monthly pricing for more features.

Below are 3 of the more common website audit service tools we use here at 2 Dogs Media – we highly recommend any of them for you auditing needs – we do receive compensation from the links if you make a purchase – but we assure you we will never recommend something we do not use ourselves!

Ahrefs

With the Ahrefs site audit tool, you can do a full check of your website for 110+ common technical and on-page issues. With such a wide scope, you won’t miss a thing that could downgrade you in SERP – empty tags, duplicate content, problems with a server, nofollow internal links, too large or broken files, etc. You don’t necessarily have to know what all those 110+ issues mean. The dashboard gives a commentary on each of them and ways to get things in order.

Just like other tools in Ahrefs’ toolkit, Site Audit is a cloud-based tool. So, you won’t need to bother with installation. Just enter your domain or URL, configure a few parameters, and crawling will start.

Your website audit will go fast and finish with the most comprehensive results. That’s because the crawler is the only one to support JavaScript page rendering as of now.

SEMrush

We use SEMRush for a bulk of our SEO services – and it does offer a decent audit tool that will help you get a good overview of issues that may be going on with your website.

The tool below will help you see what you can expect to see with an SEMrush account. Once you enter your domain you will be taken to a page on SEMrush where you can see a lot of great information about your website.

SEMrush is a monthly fee based service, and it is pricey if you are a smaller website or blogger — it is really more used by SEO agencies and big brands. But even using it for 1 month is a great investment and will allow you to get some great data that can help you improve your website.

TIP: enter your domain as mywebsite.com (no www or http – this will give you the best results)

Website Auditor

Website Auditor by SEO Powersuite is another fantastic option and the one I recommend highly for beginner users who may need something a little more affordable. Website Auditor is a website auditing software that you install on your own computer and is a powerhouse when it comes to auditing functionality.

Below is a screenshot from the software – this is just a small portion of what this software can offer. Not only does it give you the issues your website has – it offers suggestions on how you can improve those issues.

Website Auditor is a one-time purchase for the software – then there is small fee to keep the software updated with the latest algorithms. It is probably one of the most cost effective options on the market for running your own audits.

We have the full SEO Powersuite line of tools and can attest for their value. Learn more about Website Auditor here or read our full in depth guide and Website Auditor review here.

Why Should I Use An Agency To Complete My Audit?

Simple – websites are complex! You are an expert in YOUR field – why not leave it up to the audit experts to do what THEY do best, which is make your website SEO friendly.

No matter how many different do it yourself audits you try, you are going to find issues that you do not know how to address.

• Canonical issues
• Duplicate content
• Redirects
• Robot files and tags
• Internal link structure
  …and so much more!

This is why SEO agencies do what they do – they live and breathe websites and SEO and know how to not only provide an exceptional audit experience but can address those issues to bring you the fastest improvements.

Many agencies offer the website audit – and then will consult with you and your team to help you implement the appropriate changes. This allows your team to learn more about how to handle the website and can help keep costs down.

Other agencies do everything – from the audit to the on-site improvements. This we do believe is the best option if you are serious about improving your website. It is an investment – but one where you should see a ROI if done well.

Another Bonus

If you work with an agency on your SEO audit – they can also offer more advice on other areas your website can use improvement as well. If you are not converting on landing pages or your click through rates from the search results are poor, they can help you.

The audit is not JUST about the process of creating the audit – but the consulting and communication after the report is done to get your site to the level you want it to be!

What A Good Website SEO Audit Accomplishes!

A well done website SEO audit will give a business owner a great starting to point to improve their online presence. It will include all of the current issues the website is facing that is preventing it from doing as well as it could and also a complete assessment of what the business owner can do to improve the areas that are lacking!

Once a client implements the suggestions – they should begin to see a positive impact to their online business, it can take several months to see the full impact these changes will have!

The ultimate goal of any good audit will be the following:

• Increase in targeted organic traffic
• Improvement in conversions
• Growth in revenue

So, if you are ready to get a comprehensive audit done for your website – make sure you do your research and find a partner that provides more than just an automated report! This investment could be the next step to helping grow your business!