The importance of SEO audits in a search strategy

Losing traffic momentum? A site poorly ranked on certain queries? Pages that are invisible to Google or not yet indexed? If you run into this kind of problem with your website, it’s time to launch a strategic SEO audit. Before making any changes, it’s important to analyze the weaknesses but also the strengths of your website. So the first step is the SEO audit. This assessment helps identify the factors blocking a good position in the SERP. The audit therefore provides an overall picture of a site’s SEO practices in order to improve its pages and rank them better in Google’s results.

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit is a complete diagnosis of a website whose goal is to identify the aspects that block or hinder its SEO performance, and to define the corrective actions needed to improve its position in search engine results. This step is essential in an organic search strategy.

Free SEO audits

Many offers for free or very cheap SEO audits are available online. Often fully automated, these audits have the advantage of being delivered in record time. But should we really be tempted by these fast, low-cost offers?

Free audits are often a pretext to bring in a second, paid and more complete proposal. These pre-sales audits are therefore a sample that gives some cursory information about the state of a site. Unlike a “real” diagnosis, they won’t help improve your position in Google’s pages.

For an SEO audit to be effective, it must carry out a complete check-up of the entire site. This long and meticulous work can only be done by an SEO expert. Unlike an automated tool, they are able to understand the website’s industry and therefore grasp its business challenges. The SEO consultant also prioritizes the changes to make to a site. They decide which optimizations are the most urgent and which ones can be set aside.

Unlike an online audit, the expert doesn’t abandon you without explanation. A technical audit, as its name suggests, cannot be fully understood by an SEO novice. The expert is a good teacher and adapts their explanations to your level in SEO. Unlike free online tools, the SEO specialist doesn’t just point out SEO errors. They also explain how to fix them. That is what our solution and our experts strive to do; they take the time to support you in your project and explain the areas for improvement to work on in order to reposition your site in the top spots.

An effective audit backed by personalized follow-up can’t be free. SEO know-how comes at a price. The cost of an SEO audit varies depending on the size of your site and the number of pages to analyze.

Semji automates part of the audit by analyzing the SEO performance of your content pages against your audience’s search intent. Ask us for a demo to discover all the features of Semji that will save you time while producing 100% optimized content.

Different analyses for a complete SEO audit

To achieve its goals and deliver the best recommendations, the SEO consultant must carry out a complete analysis. To be sure not to forget anything, they must follow an audit strategy and build their analysis around several major areas:

Onsite audit

Analysis of everything that makes up the site, such as its structure, its performance, its architecture, its internal redirects or its internal linking. The Onsite portion makes up the largest part of an SEO audit and requires a meticulous, in-depth analysis. The SEO expert is also attentive to the use of structured data and metadata, the structure of URLs, whether the site is adapted to mobile format, and so on.

Offsite audit

Netlinking audit or link audit: checking the backlinks to find out whether they are high-quality, varied, natural and appropriate to the site’s theme. Without numerous quality backlinks, your site won’t stand out because it won’t benefit from “link juice.” The more numerous and higher-quality the links to a site, the better it ranks. Analyzing competitors’ backlinks, referring domains, referring IPs and anchor diversity can also be part of an Offsite audit.

Semantic audit

Study of the keywords a site ranks on thanks to its content or its internal linking. The semantic audit therefore takes stock of a website’s content to check its length, its structure and the quality of the semantic fields used. It also helps identify keywords that aren’t being used and that have potential for the site’s traffic if it manages to rank on these queries. The consultant identifies these keywords by carrying out a comparative study between the various competitors. They are also attentive to internal and external duplicate content. With duplicate content on indexed pages, the site risks being penalized by Google Panda and suffering a slowdown in indexing.

An audit is therefore a substantial document, split into several parts, that can run to more than a hundred pages and requires a long effort of SEO expertise. Each audit concludes with several actionable SEO recommendations and a large number of optimizations to carry out to improve your site’s organic search.

The objectives of an SEO audit

Finding SEO errors

The SEO expert’s objective is to find all the errors that need to be fixed to improve search rankings. To do this, they identify the flaws that could hinder indexing. The purpose of this service is above all to grow traffic continuously and sustainably. That is why the consultant has to keep up with all Google news and know it inside out. Google’s Web Spam team regularly makes recommendations to webmasters about the good SEO practices to adopt. By constantly staying up to date, the consultant can deliver effective recommendations that are in line with Google’s guidelines.

Revealing new SEO opportunities

The SEO audit isn’t just for pointing out existing errors. The analyses are also done to spot resources the site hasn’t tapped into, using advanced SEO techniques. For example, a neglected semantic field that nonetheless matches the site’s theme and has great potential for traffic, or the identification of new queries to rank on. To find new opportunities, nothing is more effective than studying the competition and the market players who already have an SEO strategy that works well. A comparative study will reveal the path to follow for your site.

When should you do an SEO audit?

In the case of an SEO audit, as with many other things, you shouldn’t wait for things to get worse before acting. That is why an audit can be done at any time. You don’t have to wait for a trigger to carry out a website analysis. However, certain specific events in the life of a site or a company are conducive to an audit. For example, a site redesign that isn’t kept under control in terms of SEO can be a disaster for rankings, traffic and business. It is therefore wiser to accompany the redesign with an audit, and even to do it before any changes. It’s also preferable to do one when creating a site or when it experiences an unexplained drop in traffic.

The tools used for an SEO audit

To carry out audits, SEO experts arm themselves with several tools to collect the various data useful to their analyses. Each part of the audit requires one or more tools:

• Botify, Oncrawl and ScreamingFrog Spider: crawlers that mimic the behavior of Google’s robot. They start by exploring the homepage, then progressively follow the internal links while going through the site’s robots.txt and XML sitemap. Thanks to this crawl, these tools are able to detect duplicate content, problematic URLs, orphan pages, internal links pointing to 404 errors, title issues on pages, and so on. These tools also detect pages that aren’t visited by Google because of poor linking or coding errors that hamper the robots’ navigation. If the SEO consultant could use only one tool, they would surely choose a crawler, which is essential for an audit.
• Ahrefs and Majestic: online services that provide analyses of backlinks. This information makes it possible to measure the popularity of sites and therefore to closely monitor their netlinking. These tools inform the consultant about the number of links, the link anchors or the quality of the domains that link to the analyzed site.
• SEMRush and Yooda Insight: tools that make it possible to collect ranking information on keywords, traffic and the competition. It’s thanks to these tools that a site can find out how it ranks compared to other sites in the same industry.
• GTmetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights: software that runs performance tests on sites to find out their loading speed. They then give optimization suggestions such as reducing the size of resources or optimizing images.
• SEOQuantum and Visiblis: semantic SEO tools to optimize page content. They deliver an assessment of the content’s relevance to a query.
• Copyscape and Kill Duplicate: tools for detecting external and internal duplicate content. Duplicate content negatively impacts your site’s search rankings because, of two similar pages, Google will rank only one. What’s more, the robot will waste time crawling identical pages instead of content that is no doubt more important.
• Google Analytics and Google Search Console: free Google services for analyzing traffic and indexing. Google Analytics provides a lot of data on traffic, return on investment or visitor behavior. Google Search Console makes it possible to check whether a site is properly indexed by the search engine and to keep it in the SERP results.
• Kibana, Oncrawl and Botify: server log analysis tools. They allow the SEO consultant to understand Google’s crawl activity thanks to the history of the robot’s visits and actions.

Find other semantic SEO analysis tools such as Alyze, Text Focus and many more in our ranking of the best tools.

Lighthouse, the new Google extension for SEO audits

Google’s latest 2018 innovation: Lighthouse. This free extension offers a check of several important points in terms of SEO. Simply install the plugin on the Google Chrome browser to get a report on the page of your choice. Lighthouse therefore delivers an analysis of a page and not of a website, unlike a complete SEO audit.

Even though the term SEO audit is used to promote the extension, the automated analyses only deliver basic information. Lighthouse can be a starting point for an SEO analysis but can in no way, on its own, constitute a high-performing audit tool.

Do you need to carry out an SEO audit? Contact us right now and discover how Semji can help you with this analysis project!