An SEO audit can vary from a very complex, technical study of a website to a more simple, check list of some of the more generic SEO problems. SEO audits will be different for each person or company depending on the required outcomes. Their importance cannot be understated for anyone wanting to improve their online presence and organic traffic. They give you a solid idea of where you stand in the complex world of SEO and allow you to set goals and create a strategy for your efforts.

What is an SEO audit?

In very basic terms, an SEO audit is the exercise of running your website and/or your online presence through a list of current, industry standard, SEO-related checks. The results of your audit will indicate if you have any major SEO concerns. A general audit will include an overview score for your website. It will check that you have used meta descriptions, title tags and alt descriptions across your pages. Page speed, XML sitemaps and mobile friendliness are also part of an SEO audit, as well as checking social media pages are linked.

All of this data will help you see how and where your website is attracting visitors organically. It will also identify any areas where your SEO efforts need improvement or even where you have critical issues around the SEO of your website.

Why is an SEO audit important?

Your audit will give you a clear indication of where there are problems with your SEO. An SEO audit will become your guide to create an action plan to improve your metrics and, in turn, your organic SEO results.

How often should you run an SEO audit?

Google and other search engines change their algorithms often. Very often. Which means that SEO best practice for today might be different tomorrow. Running audits on a regular basis will help you keep up with anything new. As mentioned before, an SEO audit can vary in complexity. With this in mind, you may want to do a regular (say monthly) inhouse SEO audit using one of the free online tools. You could then look at doing a more technical audit annually. If at any stage you make any major technical changes to your website, it is advisable to run a technical audit.

You can run inhouse SEO audits every time you make content changes and/or add a blog post just to see how you are doing.

Next steps…

There are some great free, online SEO auditing tools. You can run your website through one (or all) of them to give yourself some idea of how well or how poorly your SEO efforts are doing. We recommend WooRank, which will run the basic checks for you as a starting point. For a more technical page speed audit, we like Google Pagespeed Insights.

Once you have done your audit, put together a list of things you would like to focus on improving over the coming days, weeks and months. You can work on creating an SEO-friendly marketing strategy.

At Flicker Leap, we offer a variety of website SEO audits. We offer a consulting service to advise on where to focus your time, energy and money to improve your organic search results. If your audit uncovers any technical SEO concerns, contact us for a quotation to resolve the problems. Happy auditing and may the metrics be ever in your favour!