An SEO audit is essentially a health check for your website; think of it as a service or MOT for your car. Ideally, you get your car serviced regularly to avoid anything bad happening and to save you money further down the line to deal with the little things before they become the big things and cost more. An SEO audit is the same, it picks up any issues nice and early so they can be dealt with quickly before they become issues and can result in a loss of traffic and income.

So, what does an SEO audit include?

Technical SEO

• Website speed - how long does it take for your website to load? A slow-loading website not only bumps you down in search engine rankings but also provides a bad user experience. If your website is slow to load, you may be losing clients at the first hurdle. You have less than three seconds to keep someone on your website; if your website isn’t loading, you’ve probably lost them already. Images that haven’t been sized correctly, Javascript and CSS code that isn’t being used all slow down your website.

• 301 redirects, 302 redirects and 404 errors - Uhoh. Errors and redirects should be kept to a minimum and 404 errors shouldn’t be happening at all. If you have any 404 errors, make sure you get these fixed ASAP.

• Crawl - can search engines actually crawl your website? Do you have the correct robot.txt file and sitemaps?

OnPage SEO Issues

• Meta descriptions and titles - ideally should be between 35-70 characters and should include your keywords for that page. Meta Descriptions should be under 160 characters, include your keywords, and a good CTA if relevant.

• Headers - these are like your signposts to search engines, you should have one H1 title per page, that includes your relevant keyword.

• Internal linking - linking to other pages on your website helps search engines to understand and navigate your site.

Competition

• Without knowing who your competitors are, you have no idea how to gauge yourself next to them. Understanding your competition gives you a perfect insight into what they are doing well, what they aren’t, and what you can do to get above them in search rankings.

BackLinks

• Your backlinks - how many do you have, are they spammy and how can you build on them?

• Your competitor’s backlinks - how many do they have, and can you use the same ones?

Below is a video explaining exactly how I can run an SEO audit for you. You book one with me here.