A website audit is a full analysis of everything related to your website’s level of search visibility. A complete and detailed 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.
Can’t I Just Use One Of Those Automated Reports?
There are many “automated” website seo audit tools where you can do it yourself. 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 overview of your website these reports are meant to be “lead generation” tools and not meant to be a real 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.
This Is An Example Of An Automated Report!
Below is a Lead Generation tool that we have access to – it works with SEMRush and if you have an account with them, this is the tool they offer so that SEO companies can generate leads for SEO clients.
DISCLOSURE: This tool does work – so feel free to run an audit on your own website to see how you are doing! You may receive an email from us in the coming days which is educational in nature, not a sales pitch – from which you can simply unsubscribe if you do not find it interesting! We will not contact you again after that – puppy promise.
They way we see it – if you want us to help you after you get this report – you will contact us right?
Other Website Audit Tools That Are Free!
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.
Here are a few more audit tools you can try:
SEOptimer
Raven Tools – this tool does require a Google login
Website Grader
Why Do I Need An Audit?
Over the last year we have seen incredible changes from the search engines in how they compute the search results when someone does a search. 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
Some business owners may not even comprehend what these factors entail! But as a website owner can you answer these few questions?
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!
If you CAN answer these – CONGRATULATIONS!
An audit may still offer some benefits since most professional SEO audits are much more comprehensive than the 7 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 Design spends approximately 2-3 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 complete interactive report that you can view online or download to your computer!
Our hands on approach and immersion into data from various sources gives you the best chance of improving your online business!
Every website seo audit we run includes at least 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
We provide a detailed analysis of every item that is affecting your website! An average website seo audit report can be upwards of 20-30 pages!
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!
INCREASED ORGANIC TRAFFIC
IMPROVEMENT IN CONVERSIONS
ADDED 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!
THOUGHT? QUESTIONS?