SEO SITE AUDITS

Site Audits Help Determine Any Issues or Crawling Errors

An average glance at a website’s statistics can only provide a shallow understanding of which strategies are successful and which are not. When traffic is booming and conversions are strong, most webmasters stick to whatever’s working. When something goes wrong, however, you need a more accurate diagnosis to pinpoint the problem and develop the most effective solution. Whether your business is declining or simply not growing to your expectations, an SEO site audit may be able to turn it around.

Image of person holding coffee in one hand and pointing at computer screen with other hand where an SEO site audit is happening

What is an SEO Site Audit?

Site-monitoring applications such as Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools work well for day-to-day usage. They display traffic numbers, keywords, bounce rates, viewer activity and indexing status, along with a number of other features. By contrast, an SEO audit probes deeper, testing every aspect of the site for coding errors and weaknesses that impact optimization. An analytic service reveals issues, but an audit diagnoses them. We use a combination of complex programs and expert knowledge to conduct our audits, testing many different areas, including the following primary contributors to SEO and profitability.

Site Architecture

Site architecture is the organization of a domain’s pages and how they relate to each other. For example, a website with a horizontal structure has many top-level pages that only link to a few others lower in the hierarchy. A vertical site, on the other hand, has a long trail of related pages building on top of each other. A mix of both styles is often best.

An audit examines a domain’s overall architecture, as well as its navigation system. Vertical structures provide greater depth on a topic, but they can make it difficult to move between subjects quickly. Crawlers also tend to get lost traveling through dense webs of pages, lowering their potential indexing rates. An intuitive menu system and some restructuring can make a site more accessible to readers and bots alike.

Image of pieces of papers with different layouts portraying site architecture and person with pen laying it out on paper
Image of person holding a magnifying glass over web page with crawling error as it says 404 Not Found

Crawling Errors

Crawlers are fairly sophisticated programs, but even they can’t work miracles. When a URL returns a 404 error, it reflects badly on the site, hinders SEO and could present a poor image to users. Google’s Webmaster Tools offers a comprehensive list of crawling errors, but it does not describe how to solve them. An audit explores every bad link to determine the source of the trouble, and then rectifies it by either fixing the code or redirecting the broken link to the proper location. As long as a crawler is met with a functioning page, there won’t be an SEO penalty.

Unique Content

Now more than ever, Google and its competitors are emphasizing unique, valuable content, and they are penalizing anything that has been scraped or appears too often elsewhere. Even duplicate content on the same domain is grounds for a slap.

Besides checking the status of your posts and pages, and perhaps locating a few thieves, a good audit will also examine the words themselves for keyword density, relevance and internal linking.

Conversion Optimization

Finally, the most perfectly optimized website in the world is still a loss if it is incapable of turning a profit. By looking at where readers enter a website, where they go and when they leave, an auditor can begin painting a picture of where you win clients and where you lose them. The results may point to poor positioning, unconvincing copy or a cumbersome checkout page, but everything short of a terrible product can be fixed.

SEO is so vital for marketers because it brings in more potential buyers, but that means nothing if it doesn’t translate into improved sales. A well-rounded and experienced SEO auditor understands this and approaches a website like a business, not just strings of code. If you are tired of lackluster performance and want to start solving problems rather than working around them, give us a call today to begin your audit.

For a more detailed quote on any of the services provided, please use the contact form to get in touch with Paul directly.

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