Why an audit is so important?
-
Hi Mozzers,
I was wondering what are the greatest benefits of an SEO audit and how to explain the necessity to do it to a customer?
Thanks for your answers,
Jonathan
-
Thank you very much everybody. It's very helpful!
Regards,
Jonathan
-
I love doing audits as they allow you to see the things that don't work, and the things that need work.
When an audit is completed, you end up with a very clear roadmap of what you need to do in order to correct issues. Jane and Donna have both covered pretty much all of the points.
What I particularly like, is finding those areas that might otherwise go unchecked and only performing an audit will reveal them. I end up with a long list of checks, and as I go through them, they pass or fail. If they fail, how can they be corrected.
OK, they can end up very long, but I still see them as one of the most comprehensive studies any site owner can have completed.
-Andy
-
Hi Jonathan,
Agree with Donna - these are all very good reasons.
From the perspective of what an engagement will look like without an initial audit, a consultant can be left trying to piece together small fixes, unsure of whether some issues are more important than others because they have not had the time to develop a full picture of how a website is structured and how its CMS works / is managed.
Clients tend to be less willing to implement changes if they have not received them when they expected to, i.e. in an audit process with a prioritised list of changes and reasoning behind why the changes are necessary. The process of fixing a website can get arbitrary - emails and calls here and there about random issues. Web developers usually don't like operating like this: they want to know that the next push is for SEO purposes and that a set amount of time will be dedicated to making the changes proposed or working with an external team (you) to find compromises if what you suggest isn't possible. You can schedule whole days on-site with a client to get this stuff done and worked out, rather than badgering devs or managers for months with the things you discover along the way.
Audits can also tell the consultant a lot about how the site works that they might not have been told otherwise by the client (who might not know or understand themselves), both from the manual investigation and use of tools to analyse the website. I find that as a consultant, this knowledge sticks with you - if you learned that a client's CMS performs a certain task a certain way early on, you go into every situation understanding how it works and expecting certain functionality. This increases efficiency for the rest of the engagement. You are rarely taken by surprise by an issue, and many on-site issues are much easier to avoid / solve when both you and your client have a comprehensive document outlining how the website is structured.
I hope this helps!
Jane
-
I'm a big fan of SEO audits. From a customer perspective:
- they tell you what's broken;
- they tell you what's working well;
- you can prioritize the work that needs to be done;
- you can more easily identify the skill sets needed to complete the work; and
- identify inter-dependencies so you acquire what's needed, when it's needed.
Audits also give you a baseline that you can use to draw "a line in the sand" and know where you're starting from. You can then more easily demonstrate measured improvements over time.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Reusing an already 301 redirected URL for a very important keyword
I have a question about reusing an already 301 redirected URL Till now I never reused an URLs that has been already redirected with a 301 redirect. However, I just started working on a website where in past they created a lot of 301 redirects without thinking about the future, and now certain URLs, that are currently redirected with a 301, would be very useful (exact match) and needed (for some of the most important keywords for this specific business), to maintain an optimal, homogeneous and "beautiful" URL structure. Has any of you ever reused a URL that was previously redirected with a 301 redirect? If yes what are your experiences with it? Can content on the reused URL (that was previously 301 redirected and than the redirect removed) normally rank if the page is reestablished and the redirect is removed (and you do great content, on page, internal linking, backlinking, .... ) or is such an URL risky / not recommended / "burned" forever and not recommended to be reused again... especially for very important keywords since it present the exact match ?! Thank you very much for all your help! Regards
Technical SEO | | moz46y0 -
How important is it to have separate Privacy Policy and Terms of Use pages?
How important is it to Google's algorithm for a site to have separate PP and TOU pages? Is it necessary for a Terms of Use page in the SEO perspective?
Technical SEO | | agpz0 -
Site Audit Tools Not Picking Up Content Nor Does Google Cache
Hi Guys, Got a site I am working with on the Wix platform. However site audit tools such as Screaming Frog, Ryte and even Moz's onpage crawler show the pages having no content, despite them having 200 words+. Fetching the site as Google clearly shows the rendered page with content, however when I look at the Google cached pages, they also show just blank pages. I have had issues with nofollow, noindex on here, but it shows the meta tags correct, just 0 content. What would you look to diagnose? I am guessing some rogue JS but why wasn't this picked up on the "fetch as Google".
Technical SEO | | nezona0 -
Is content on widget bar less 'seo important' than main content?
hi, i wonder if content on widget bar less 'seo important' than main content.. i mean, is better to place content and links on main cotent than on wordpress widget bar? What are the pros and cons? tx!
Technical SEO | | Dreamrealemedia0 -
Yet Another, Yet Important URL structure query.
Massive changes to our stock media site and structure here. While we have an extensive category system previously our category pages have only been our search pages with ID numbers for sorting categories. Now we have individual category pages. We have about 600 categories with about 4 max tiers. We have about 1,000,000 total products and issues with products appearing to be duplicate. Our current URL structure for producta looks like this: http://example.com/main-category/12345/product-name.htm Here is how I was planning on doing the new structure: Cat tier 1: http://example.com/category-one/ Cat tier 2: http://example.com/category-one/category-two/ Cat tier 3: http://example.com/category-one-category-two/category-three Cat tier 4: http://example.com/category-one-category-two-category-three/category-four/ Product: http://example.com/category-one-category-two-category-three/product-name-12345.htm Thoughts? Thanks! Craig
Technical SEO | | TheCraig0 -
Manual Action - When requesting links be removed, how important to Google is the address you're sending the requests from?
We're starting a campaign to get rid of a bunch of links, and then submitting a disavow report to Google, to get rid of a manual action. My SEO vendor said he needs an @email domain from the website in question @travelexinsurance.com, to send and receive emails from vendors. He said Google won't consider the correspondence to and from webmasters if sent from a domain that is not the one with the manual action penalty. Due to company/compliance rules, I can't allow a vendor not in our building to have an email address like that. I've seen other people mention they just used a GMAIL.com account. Or we could use a similar domain such as @travelexinsurancefyi.com. My question, how critical is it that the domain the correspondence with the webmasters be from the exact website domain?
Technical SEO | | Patrick_G0 -
How important is using hreflang if u have plenty of other geo signals ?
HI How important is it to use the hreflang attributes and supporting sitemaps (and do you need both) ? Since if sites are being set up on country specific tlds (but on top of WP multisite network.domain.com environment) and geotargeted in GWT, as well as country meta tags and local schema etc etc that should send enough signals shouldnt it 🙂 ? Implementation of hreflang seems like an absolute technical nightmare All Best Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Importance of keyword in the content to rank well
Well, I am very beginner seo. our website is www.theprinterdepo.com and our main keyword for the moment is refurbished printers, but there might be hundreds of more keywords. I was analyzing the SERPs and found that for our keyword, the first 2 websites that come up have very different content 1.http://www.geeks.com/products.asp?cat=PRN They rank first, but I dont see a lot of text with the keyword in their text or links 2. http://www.valstarprinters.com/ They mention the keywords lots of times in the text, probably they are doing keyword stuffing? So this makes me thing, how the 1st one ranked there? just by link builiding?
Technical SEO | | levalencia10