Nicole McCullumAs the founder of a website redesign company, I subscribe to the philosophy that it’s important to improve conversions and maximize opportunities on existing website traffic by plugging the leaks rather than spending more money on increasing traffic. It makes more sense and it’s a whole lot cheaper. Oftentimes clients are able to see an increase in leads by focusing on increasing their conversions. The same can be done for SEO. If you are currently frustrated with the results that you are getting from your SEO campaign, then it may be time to look at the foundation of your SEO to see how solid it is. That’s where an SEO Audit comes in.
An SEO Audit can help you uncover the leaks in your SEO Strategy. Fix those leaks and you will increase the quality of your website rankings on search engines.
What is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is a deep review and analysis of the foundation of your website. It reviews and analyzes the top factors that influence search engine rankings to show you what you are doing right and what you can improve upon in order to boost your rankings.
How is an SEO Audit conducted?
An SEO Audit can be done manually or it can be done using free tools that are specifically designed to diagnose your website for SEO. For the purpose of this article, I explore 3 tools that you can use to conduct an SEO Audit of your website.
SEO Audit Tool #1 – SEOsitecheckup.com is one of my favorite tools. I love the simplicity of it, and you can uncover significant issues with your website using their free version. The free version analyzes over 40 different elements on your website from basic to technical and provides you with a score out of a 100. It also provides you with a detailed report via a PDF download or email that you can utilize to make improvements on your website. I also like the fact that it is web-based and doesn’t require you to download software.
SEO Audit Tool #2 – RavenTools.com is a suite of online marketing tools, some of which are specific to SEO, including an SEO Auditor. It allows you to see how you stack up against the competition as well as uncover SEO issues and opportunities. I like that it is also web-based and includes a site crawl. Another plus is that you can link it to Google Webmaster Tools to track rankings and keyword data. You can also integrate it with your social media accounts to keep track of your social signals as well as manage your social media accounts. All in all, it provides a host of useful data that you can use to improve your SEO quality. Although Raven offers a 30 day free trial, to get the continued benefit you would need to sign up for a paid account.
SEO Audit Tool #3 – Screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider is widely used by industry experts and it’s also a free tool for crawling up to 500 URLs, which is ideal for small businesses. It’s a bit more sophisticated than SEOSitecheckup.com and Raven Tools. It tells you how many pages have been crawled and provides you with a real time view as the pages are being analyzed. It definitely goes a bit more in-depth which makes it more difficult for a non-technical person to understand. It also allows you to export the data into a spreadsheet. It does, however, need to be downloaded to your desktop before it can be used.
These tools are all great for conducting SEO audits in an expedited and efficient manner. However, you do need to have a solid understanding of SEO best practices in order to understand and interpret the data that it gives you. If you are not tech-savvy, you will need your Webmaster to implement some of it for you.
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