What is a Website Audit?

A Website audit is a common practice service when completing SEO. It helps to provide both clients and myself an outline of the most important issues to begin working on. Most of the time, these are the issues that will initially have the most impact on Google’s search engine ranking positions (SERP’s). As part of my Auckland SEO services, an audit is completed at the first stage of beginning any SEO for a site. Improving a site’s SEO is not always about fixing technical issues… Sometimes it can be a lot more about how a site is presented to customers, as well as how easy & functional it is for them to use.

Google is a search engine dedicated to providing the most relevant & authoritative results to their users search queries. In order to do so, Google relies heavily on the information that a website provides. SEO is about helping to improve a website not only for Google, but also the people who visit the site. Google tracks data such as site load time, text, images – even what people do on a website! If people are not doing what is expected – such as leaving straight away and clicking on another site. That may indicate that the site is not the best option to be displayed in their search results when compared to competing sites. This is why it is also important to think about the user experience. For a more in-depth breakdown of an SEO Audit, you can read this article.

I aim to provide value with my audits, and try to make them as easy to understand and follow as possible. A lot of my clients are not always “web-savvy” and I understand that. This is why I split my audit into two. There are two audits that I usually complete:

Content & Technical Audits.

 

Content Audit:

An on-page/content audit focuses on elements that help to improve the website, as well as the user experience. I use my knowledge and experience to help find any major opportunities for improvements. These issues are usually fairly straight-forward when pointed out and I like to include reasoning and brief descriptions about why I recommend the changes. Coming from a teaching background, I feel it is important that clients understand why these changes are recommended, and help them to better see what is going on. SEO can be very technical so it is very easy to throw a bunch of words and jargon at people and sound like you know what you are doing. That is not what I am about, so if anything seems off just let me know or ask the question.

Technical Audit:

This part of the audit covers more of the technical elements of SEO. These are usually issues with the coding/html, links to and from your site, data analysis and tracking, and many more that a lot of people miss when putting a site together. As mentioned before, Google wants the best, and if your site isn’t up to scratch with all these issues, it will have a harder time getting results. These issues can sometimes be fairly difficult to understand and some elements require quite a bit of knowledge about site architecture/design. All of which I am more than happy to provide resources and articles about, but aside from brief descriptions, some of these are usually beyond the scope of describing within an audit. If your site is needing an improvement, let me find all the issues for you and provide you with an SEO audit. The best part is, if you feel confident in your abilities to implement the chages recommended in the audit then you are welcome to. Alternatively, I can sort them out for you as part of my SEO service. Contact me for a site audit today.