As a consultant, one of my first questions to any new client was whether or not their website had ever been audited. On other occasions, I was handed a printout of the audit from a programme, typically a proprietary one, that merely listed a bunch of stuff without providing any background on how the client runs or taking into account their short- or long-term goals. Visit licreative technologies for more information.
In fact, this is quite common. In fact, if you look for “seo audit” or a variation of the term, you’ll get adverts from businesses promising free SEO audits or from software developers like Semrush and Ahrefs boasting about their audit capabilities. Do you think they’re useless now?
That’s ridiculous. As we’ll see, they can be a useful indicator of your site’s overall health and can be implemented in a number of ways to affect change. However, will these measures be as effective as the old-fashioned, manual labor conducted by skilled SEOs who are chained to a radiator in our basement? They aren’t feeding us, and I can’t keep going on like this much longer, so I’d say it’s time to call the cops.
What Exactly Is An Seo Audit
A search engine optimization audit is a comprehensive inspection of your website that looks for potential problems that could affect its search engine rankings. They are the starting point for making recommendations to clients and are done at the beginning of every new relationship. You may get one that covers all the bases, from technical SEO to content performance to linking, or you can get many tailored to your specific needs.
What’s The Point Of Conducting An Seo Audit
The same as when you take your automobile in for repairs and have to wait for a diagnosis. You could take it in and demand that they “repair it,” but your brake pads are so worn out that the last thing you’ll hear before you slam into the back of a semi that just hit its brakes will be a high-pitched shriek.
Audits Of Search Engine Optimization: Manual Vs. Automatic
Your website has been compared to a car, as we have seen. Something is off, so you take it to a store for inspection. Using this analogy, a consultant or agency is the garage and your SEO expert is the mechanic. Have you ever taken your car to the mechanic to have an odd noise looked at, only to be told that the serpentine belt is wearing, the filter needs to be changed, and maybe you should replace those wheels since you’ve had them for more than three months and hoo boy we’re coming into the rainy season and you don’t want to go skidding off a cliff.
An SEO audit tool essentially does this function. It points out every issue with the website without making any suggestions as to which ones should be fixed first. To the agencies and consultants that use them, everything looks like a top priority, although in reality, that’s almost never the case.
Two key factors are considered during a manual audit, though.
- Use of a website by actual people.
- A method for ranking suggestions.
Unless the SEO auditing tool you employed developed consciousness, this cannot be accomplished with it. And if that’s the case, you have bigger fish to fry. Data and attractive color schemes (think green, yellow, and red) are the main attractions of these tools, which can help you tell when your website is likely to crash and burn. Insights are what they lack.
Which Concerns Ought To Be Given The Most Weight? Exactly How Can One Get Better?
Only a skilled SEO analyst capable of deducing the relevant insights and applying them to the website’s strategy can provide satisfactory answers to these issues. Manual auditing relies heavily on this principle. Websites are analyzed using automated audits, which have a very specific focus.
They disregard the peculiarities of human nature. They don’t give any thought to the significance of the information, especially in terms of the demands and goals of the company. Plus, from the viewpoint of an agency, where every dollar counts, they lack the ability to prioritize. A search engine optimizer may take the findings of a manual audit, give each finding its proper weight, and guarantee the client the highest possible return on investment.
If you rely solely on automated SEO audits, you won’t be able to take advantage of the chances that can be revealed through careful investigation and a comprehension of the information provided by these reports.
When Is It Appropriate To Use A Robot To Conduct Your Seo Audit?
Does that mean the results from SEO tools’ automated reports are meaningless? That’s ridiculous. In reality, they work wonderfully as a type of triage, allowing you to remain on top of less pressing but still important issues while also fixing the most common ones (particularly for websites that post frequently). Consider it similar to getting the oil changed in your car. You are filling the tyres to the proper pressure, perhaps vacuuming the cabin, and turning off the tyre pressure warning light.
Your inbox can get reports detailing the overall number of 404s discovered in the most recent crawl on a weekly, biweekly, or monthly basis, depending on the frequency settings of the programme you use. Although this automatic method isn’t flawless, it can help you avoid problems from escalating over time, which in turn will make future manual audits more effective.
How Often Should An Seo Audit Be Done By Hand
When it comes to conducting manual SEO, it’s important to tailor the frequency to the specific needs of your company. At the outset of every new client relationship, Portent conducts a comprehensive manual SEO evaluation.
This cannot be renegotiated, as it determines the parameters for, and the order of priority for, a plan of action. Beyond that, the frequency of manual audits will depend on the scope of your site and the resources at your disposal. A manual SEO audit should be performed once a year, before any site migrations or redesigns, or more frequently if your website is extremely large, once a quarter.
Conclusion
A company may be aware that SEO Audits is something they need, but they may lack the expertise to really implement the strategy themselves. While it is satisfying to work our SEO magic and see the results in the form of increased ranks and traffic, I think it is equally important to inform our stakeholders of not only our methods, but also our rationale.
There are a variety of ways to handle this, but if you just tell them, “You have a bunch of broken links and they should be fixed,” you’re not helping. Having access to relevant information is crucial. You’ll have a satisfied stakeholder if you take the time to explain everything that was discovered in your SEO audit to them.
