Wooster Media Group was recently asked to consult on a website redevelopment project for a manufacturer of industrial equipment (thank you David Joyal of Web Pyro for the referral). The question arose: Because the site is in development, when is a good time to conduct an SEO audit? In working on a proposal, here is part of what it said:
What is an SEO audit?
Wooster Media Group conducts search engine optimization audits for businesses and organizations that want to grow organic traffic to their websites. What would your sales look like if you were able to increase the traffic to your site by 10 to 20 percent or more? What would that do for volunteer or donor engagement for your nonprofit organization?
An SEO audit is an in-depth analysis of your website to determine whether it is helpful in driving traffic to your site from search engines, or if there are underlying technical and style issues that are hampering those efforts.
If your site has never undergone a detailed SEO audit, let me give you a brief overview so you will get an idea of how it unfolds and what the deliverable is. Depending upon the number of pages a site has, an SEO audit will take around 10 hours to complete.
An SEO audit involves crawling your site like Google’s search engine bots would. The crawl will return a lot of data concerning your site, like how many pages it contains; what is the status of each page; if there are any error codes; it will produce information about page titles, page headers, meta descriptions; and if images are missing ALT text.
Other work will include looking at page-load speeds, mobile responsiveness, if there are any malware issues, and other factors. From the audit and the crawl (the crawl is just one part of an audit), I will create a report with a list of recommendations. Some of these recommendations are very technical and will require a web developer to address the issues. Some of the recommendations will not be technical, and they can be addressed if you have somebody in-house, or I can handle them if you like. Sometimes if there are a number of issues to resolve, it is not uncommon to prioritize them and tackle a number of them each month.
When should you do an SEO audit?
If you have never had an audit done, then you should do one before beginning any marketing efforts. It doesn’t make any sense to spend thousands of dollars on a marketing campaign without knowing whether your website is technically sound.
Also, if you have a website in development, then it is a good idea to have an SEO Audit done pre-launch. Claudia Pennington, CEO of DIY Marketing LLC, recommends an SEO specialist be given a week between when the site owner signs off on the finished site and when it launches. This will give insights into whether there are any limiting factors prior to going live.
Pennington also recommends a second SEO audit immediately after the site launches. This will offer insights into whether all the technical and stylistic changes were made. If there are any pages that were redirected, the audit will show whether the 301 or 302 redirects are working properly.
Are you ready for an SEO audit or want to discuss it?
If your business, organization, ecommerce site or blog can be helped with more organic traffic coming from search engines, then please feel free to schedule a free consultation.