SEO Audit
You may have contacted a local marketing company for advice on how you can improve your businesses search engine optimisation. Before that company offers you a quote, to complete work on a monthly basis, they first need to carry out what is called an SEO audit.
The price to carry out an SEO audit can very much differ between which seo company you hire to do the work, and also how large your website is.
For example, let’s say that you run a local gym, and you have a website that just has let’s say 10 pages in total, it’s not going to take very long to do an audit on a website that just has this number of pages.
However, alternatively you might run an e-commerce business, and you potentially have over 1000 different products which you sell, and every single product has its own page, therefore it is likely to take an seo company a very long time to carry out an seo audit if you own a e-commerce website with a lot of pages.
Granted there are certain seo tools that can be used to help save time, and at the click of a button they can start to generate an seo report, however often a lot of business will also need an seo consultant to interpret what the report is saying.
After all it’s a bit like reading a fault code on a car, it’s all well and good a tablet generating a report of all the various fault codes to do with that car, however what is really needed is a qualified mechanic to interpret what’s the fault means and, what might be causing it.
For example, there might be a problem with the exhaust on the car, let’s say with the DPF, and that might need totally replacing, what might be causing the problem is oil might be burning within the engine, and this is the same for your company website.
Obviously, your company website won’t have a problem with burning oil, but the what is needed is an seo consultant to look over the report to recommend ways they can start to improve marketing. Exactly the same way that a mechanic would look over the fault code to do with a car that has developed a fault.
What Is an SEO Audit?
So let’s get down to the nuts and bolts of what this whole article is all about, and that is what is an seo audit, well the truth is that seo audits can differ in terms of quality, depending on which company you hire to do this work. One report might be extremely detailed and very good, however another seo audit might be rather basic, and sometimes the information contained within some reports might not be that accurate if it doesn’t read the website correctly, that is if a low quality seo report is used, this is why we think that it’s important to pay for a quality report.
So for example, some seo reports will have a section regarding backlinks, and if the seo report is not very good, what it might actually do is say that the website only has let’s say for example purposes, 10 backlinks, where if you use a really high quality backlink tool, and there are many of these about, what that might actually say that the website has over 500 quality links, so as you can see sometimes some seo reports don’t give the full picture.
What Is Included in an SEO Audit?
So, what should be included in an seo report, well again this does totally depend on your company’s website, if it’s e-commerce website, then you’re going to need a detailed report, because they’re are likely to be many pages, if you have a more basic brochure website, then you will need a more basic seo report, however regardless of the size of your company website, in terms of how many pages it has, there are some factors such as on page seo that should be included in any report.
Within this article we are going to concentrate on what we think are the main factors which should be included in any seo report that you purchase.
On-Page SEO
Often SEO reports will primarily focus on on page SEO, and that’s with really good reason, because on page SEO is really important in terms of helping to improve your organic search engine optimisation.
So each page needs to have a title for example, alt text, it should also have a well written meta title and meta description, you may wish to add anchor text and internal links, but do ensure as with all of the SEO work that you carry out that the work is white hat.
Off-Page SEO
It’s really important that you purchase a high-quality SEO report, and within this report, you should look at the section that mentions about your businesses off page SEO, such as your businesses backlinks.
You should make sure that your businesses off page SEO, such as your company’s backlinks are all built in a white hat, and are all high quality backlinks, this is also very important.
So, for example you should have a lot of do-follow, as well as no-follow backlinks, these backlinks need to all be top quality, so we would highly recommend that they are built by an SEO expert.
Mobile Friendliness
At a minimum level your website should work on smartphones and tablets, for example your company website should be responsive, but we would highly recommend also making sure that your mobile website is very for example it’s all well and good having a company website the work a smart, but you should really go the extra mile and you should make sure that the website is easy to use, make it is easy for your customers as feasibly possible for them to find the products or the services that they want, and allow them to purchase that item quickly.
You must also make it easy for there to make a buying decision, and what do we mean by this the say making a buying decision?
While we simply mean by that is you should have product descriptions, which are well written, you might even want a bullet point some of the main features of that product or service, what you want your shoppers to do is to quickly gather whether that product is what they’re looking for, and remember if you don’t add detailed product description, then the customer might believe that that product is not for them and they may go to a competitor’s website increasing your businesses bounce rate, and having a very high bounce rate is negative to any businesses SEO.
So, do make sure that you have well written product descriptions, you also you might want to use something called split testing, and what is split testing exactly?
Will split testing is aiming to improve your website, you might notice something in the design which means improving, let’s say for example the main menu you may have noticed that it could be made more efficient, in that some of the products can be grouped together, allowing customers to use the main menu a little bit more easily.
Let’s give you an example, let’s say you are shopping for winter clothes, all the homepage you’re not going to want the main menu to have a separate’s button for scarfs, winter hats, winter gloves, why not group all of these into men’s winter accessible women’s winter accessories.
Then when somebody clicks onto that button, they can then select whether they are looking for scarfs, hats or gloves.
The benefits of this is that you have the cluttered the main menu on the home page, so that when somebody is looking for a different product let’s say men’s T-shirts, they can quickly find that button rather than having to go down the long list of product categories.
However, large online retailers, are often reluctant to make sudden changes to their website, they want to see some proof that that change will actually benefit business, so what they might do something called split testing and this is 50% of the visitors will see a main menu which has all of the products mentioned, and another set of customers, that the other 50%, will see a condensed main menu perhaps just say men’s winter accessories, women’s winter accessories, and was the marketing company might find that because they have made change the main menu, for 50% of visitors, the 50% of visitors that have visited the condensed menu, actually went on to purchase more items, was this because they could easily find that page of the main menu?
Well, the split testing has revealed that 50% of the shoppers, that use the new main menu design, actually resulted in more of the shoppers making a purchase, when compared to shoppers that used the all main menu, given this, the online retailer is likely to change their menu design, so we would highly recommend using split testing to continually improve your website.
Page Load Speed
It’s really important that your company website is very fast, if your company website is not that fast currently, then you may wish to switch hosting companies.
Linking Structure
We would highly recommend that you at internal links, on your company website, for example you might want to use this on the blog section of your website, and you may wish to link to your main pages.
So for example let’s say that you run a business which sells ice skates, yes you also have a local shop and you sharpen people’s icing within the shop, and you mention this service within a blog post that you have just written, you may wish to link from the blog post which mentions your ice skate sharpening service, to the actual main page of the website which explains more about how much it cost to get your ice skates sharpened.