SEO Audit
is the analysis of the problems that a site already online has, to remedy it.
In other words, the site is brought to the Doctor, who visits it, and issues the diagnosis, which will be followed by the treatment. Now let’s analyze the visits that are made to a sick site:
– Market analysis
– Server and Hosting
– Loading speed
– Absence of essential structural elements
– Pages technical structure
– Mobile friendship
– User Experience
– Contents
– Backlinks
– Keywords
– CTA.
It starts with an analysis of the market in which the site will operate, even if it is not an e-commerce. Competitors are found in all fields. There are those who sell goods, who services, who information and who the Brand; however, everyone sells something, not necessarily in the economic and financial sense of the verb.
Then we analyze the server and hosting. In fact, a site (e-commerce in particular) can no longer afford a slow server to load, nowadays. This means thousands of lost revenue per second of latency! Yes, because potential customers leave the competitor, period.
Finally, the error codes, which are the symptoms of diseases on the server side and / or site structure: for example, those starting with the number “5” are relevant to the server, those starting with “3” changes to the site URL.
Speed of page loading.
This is a problem that has several mothers and fathers.
From the graphic structure: for example nested CSS or that call other CSS with @import, to images of several kilobytes of size and which slow down the loading of the page, to the various unmanaged scripts that stop the parsing of the page.
Absence of all or some of the structural elements of the site such as: Robots.txt file, Sitemap file and (where possible) the .htaccess file.
HTML structure of the site itself. Presence of meta tags:
– “Title”,
– “Description”,
– “the H1 … H6”,
– OpenGraph,
– Scema.org,
– ALT of the images and many other specific technical factors.
The compatibility of navigation with mobile devices, whose use has exceeded that of the classic PC for browsing the web pages.
Ease of navigation by users. In fact, often we focus on the “beautiful” at the expense of the functional.
This aspect is fundamental, as the person in charge of the game is the internet user, who with a few clicks with zero effort, can close one site and open another in 5 seconds, or even less!
Content. Yes, because as the algorithms’ ability to understand texts increases, they will become increasingly important (not that they weren’t before, but now you can’t escape!).
So a good grammar and syntax, together with the respect of the so defined EAT that is:
Experience, Authoritativeness and Trustiness
they are the new dogmas to be able to count on a site that gives an adequate ROI.
Backlink. Here there are 2 schools of thought: those who say that for a good positioning are essential and those who say the opposite.
In fact, there are well-positioned sites that do not receive quality Backlinks.
But a good SEO audit, regardless of these currents of thought, must check that the site has not been targeted by negative SEO (of a competitor?) Who has directed bad quality backlilnks towards the site under treatment in order to get it a damage.
Yes, there are also subjects who resort to the “dirty game”!
Call-to-Action. Well, if after all this work, you do not stimulate your visitors to take an action, for example a purchase or download a price list, what have you worked on doing? The web is not passivity!
Your visitors are not passive screen watchers!
Then there are them, the keywords, the keywords with which internet users will find you.
Here an appropriate search for the key to be indexed in the medium and long term, perhaps in agreement with colleagues who follow the paid part (Pay per Click) in order not to step on their feet, is a must.
It is clearly influenced by market analysis, and by corporate strategies.
It is a very delicate aspect because the fruits will take from a minimum of 60 days to more than six months to climb the SERP, so the new keys will also take the same time, and it is easy to pass a year for get a fistful of flies!
“Time is money” is still said today!
At the end of this check-list, the site must be monitored with adequate statistics and analysis software.
If everything went well at the “first hit” all you have to do is continue on the right path of the dictates of SEO, otherwise, a second SEO audit may be needed, to find out also the other aspects that penalize the site, escaped the first scan.
Needless to say, as a medical specialist, Cardiologist, Urologist etc. it is certainly not cheap so even SEO Audit is the most expensive SEO activity, it can even cost tens of thousands of Euros!
I know it’s obvious, but as in life, prevention is better than cure, even on the web, designing the site with your eyes open to good SEO! from the beginning, it’s better …