Professional SEO Audit

Is your web site working as hard for your bottom line as you are? It should be—but chances are that your website architecture and content strategy could use some evaluation and tweaking to enhance your overall Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

What is an SEO Audit?

The goal of a well-planned and implemented SEO audit is to identify the technical problems with the pages, content and other components of your website and provide guidance for approaches that will generate superior rankings. When Consorte performs SEO audits for our clients, we provide each of them with an extensive report on all of our findings, often between 10-50 pages, depending on the complexity of the site and depth of the study. A good web developer will then use this audit report as a blueprint for a web site overhaul that will have a direct and positive effect on your organic traffic.

We often find it best to conduct an SEO audit in conjunction with an SEO keyword research, which allows us to restructure the taxonomy (i.e. categorization) of your site based on keyword targets. In this way, we’ll be able to recommend navigational changes and product/page categories that will boost your organic traffic. Note that an e-commerce website often necessitates a more in-depth audit than a content-only web site due to the complex taxonomy behind shopping categories, filters and product attributes.

The Big Questions

When we’re teasing out the technical problems with your site’s code in order to develop appropriate solutions, here are some (but certainly not all) of the important questions we’re asking:

  • Are important HTML tags and other components like page titles and headings and meta descriptions present and optimized?
  • Are these same HTML tags marked up with microformats to help Google to deliver rich snippets to users and to understand its unique semantics?
  • Are all pages listed in XML sitemaps and are these being implemented correctly?
  • Are there any broken links to dead pages that need to be redirected?

It’s important to examine the makeup of your site from every possible angle in order to determine what’s working for you right now, as well as what isn’t.

SEO Audit Deliverables

After we’ve checked your site very thoroughly, we’ll present you with a document that details and prioritizes the changes we recommend. Some of the first listed items, e.g. static pages, don’t have the biggest impact on your traffic, but they are quick and simple to employ so that you can begin to see improved performance almost immediately. Other recommendations involve more of your time and focus to implement—think complicated changes to the markup of each individual page—but they will produce bigger returns as well.

In addition to changes specifically recommended to increase your search engine performance, our team usually likes to throw in some “bonuses” that help you in other ways, like strategies to increase the potential percentage of users who click through to your page from Google and other search engines.

Here’s what you can expect for SEO audit deliverables:

  • Anywhere from 24-80 hours of research, study, and recommendation, plus up to two hours of consulting time to review and clarify the reported findings. Don’t worry, we’ll give you an estimate of the time required and ongoing work to implement the recommended changes would be quoted in a separate proposal.
  • The review of the layout and design of your homepage, category pages, product detail pages, blog, and any other primary pages that are visible to users who are not necessarily logged in.
  • The discovery of any architectural issues with your site, as well as recommended changes (which may require development work from you and/or your internal team.) These restructuring changes may include issues like microformats, meta tags, XML sitemaps, and URL structures, among many others.
  • The development of a strategy and timeline for resolving these issues.
  • The evaluation of your content for any issues present, as well as suggestions for improvement.
  • The performance of a high-level audit for duplicate content. Please note that it’s likely we won’t find everything in the first round, but we’ll look for major issues that require immediate attention.
  • The performance of a high-level audit on page speed in order to identify any bottlenecks present. Google takes page speed into account and ranks slower pages more poorly than fast ones.
  • The review of links to your site and recommendations for fixes if any point to dead pages.
  • The option of combining all of this with a social media audit, as the two usually go hand-in-hand.

Your site is only useful for your business if the people who are looking for your products and services are able to find them. With a careful and comprehensive SEO Audit, you’ll have a much clearer picture of what’s helping to guide organic traffic to your page, as well as what isn’t, and what you can do about it. Remember, knowledge is power, and when you’re working with Consorte Marketing’s team to learn more about how your well-optimized your site currently is, you’ll be empowered to push it to the next level.