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Why regular SEO audits are crucial



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Why regular SEO audits are crucial

Are you a digital agency offering SEO services? Maybe you are SEO freelancer that has a lot of long-term SEO clients. Or may you just have a website and manage SEO yourself. 
Why regular SEO audits are crucial
It doesn't matter who you are and for whom you are working for. If you are responsible for SEO, you should know that regular SEO audits are crucial for any websites out there! 

Just see it this way: website and blogs continuously need updates, fixing bugs, CMS cleanups, design revamps and anything in between right? The same goes for SEO! 

For time to time, you just need to look at all the data, go through all the results and draw some clear conclusions. 

So what does an SEO audit consists off?

First of all, you need to understand that there is no standard SEO audit out there. Different SEO specialists will build slightly different SEO audit checklists. 

I personally have some different checklists I go through when doing an SEO audit. For example, I won't give out my best-kept SEO secrets at my day job; I usually keep them for myself or for very high paying freelance clients. 

Therefore SEO audits will be different from agency to agency and from SEO specialist to SEO specialist. But overall most SEO audits will include some of the basic SEO best practices:

  • On-Page SEO checklists
  • Keyword plan and overall level of optimisation 
  • User experience 
  • Content analysis 
  • Backlink audit 
  • Analytics statistics of organic traffic
Keep in mind these are general chapters in an SEO audit, depending on who's doing the audit each section should be pretty detailed, and each analysis should be thorough. 

A good agency or a good SEO specialist will implement an SEO audit molded on the niche of the website their auditing. Why? Because every niche is different and in some niches, some things may be more important than others. It is real to understand what SEO factors are essential for your niche and make sure everything is implemented correctly. 

Make sure you ignore past optimisations 

When doing an SEO audit, it is essential to through everything; it doesn't matter how much past SEO work was implemented. You need to analyze everything as the site had no SEO at all.

Keep in mind things change in the SEO world every day so what was valid one year ago doesn't mean it is accurate now. Analyze everything and implement latest best practices. 

How often should SEO audits be done?

For all the websites I'm responsible concerning SEO, I'm doing a full SEO audit every six months. Why? Because six months is a decent period, one year would be too long and anything less than six months is just wasted time.

Six months is just perfect to update past SEO strategies and to implement new SEO strategies. This only applies if you are the one doing SEO long term. 

Be honest in the SEO audit

I find that it is imperative to tell the whole truth in an SEO audit. 

Most of the times the client may have no idea what you are talking about in the audit, and this is precisely why you should tell the truth in the conclusions. 

Sometimes SEO audits are done by a third party just to check the quality of the second party. A lot of clients come to be just to implement audits, I essentially check what other freelancers or agencies had done in terms of SEO. 

And I always tell the truth. If they have a good SEO and things are doing well, I could always find problems and claim their current agency is inefficient and that I can do a better job. But I choose to be honest and tell the truth. Asking for a second opinion is normal and natural, if one of your clients does it, don't get insulted over it. 

I act the same for my clients. Some may not understand why certain things where good to go 12 months ago but now we need to waste time changing them, this is why it is important, to be honest, and explain why and how things are changing in the SEO world. 

What are the overall benefits of regular SEO audits?
  • You get the chance to repair past SEO mistakes;
  • You get the opportunity to update SEO best practices;
  • You can fix a wide range of errors like 4xx errors, server errors, mobile optimisation errors, crawl errors;
  • You will be able to repair a lot of on-page problems such as duplicates of all kind, strange URLs, wrong indexed pages, canonical issues, etc;
  • Best SEO practices can be implemented site-wide if no SEO work had been done before;
  • You generally improve the SEO for that website with each and every audit. 

Comments

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TommyCarey
This discussion couldn't be more accurate Why regular SEO audits are crucial

I actually have a free service on my marketing website that allows anyone to get free audits. Now, these aren't 100+ page audits, they're free audits for people to input whatever page they want, they usually add their homepages, and they get scored on a scale of 1 to 100.

  • 1 being the lowest possible SEO score
  • 100 being the highest possible SEO score

I pay a 3rd party service a decent amount of money to have this on my website, but it easily pays for itself because I have my phone numbers, email, and website on the report that the service spits out to anyone who inputs their information. It will audit their website and pop up a report for them on my website as well as email them an entire PDF of the same thing so they have everything in their own files. Of course, when they do decide to do an audit through my marketing website, they have to input their name and email in order to generate a report and send it to themselves. What I don't tell them is that they are subscribing to my newsletter at the same time through MailChimp muahahahaha!

I usually run an audit every 6 months on my website and my clients' websites. If I'm setting up a website for a client, I will usually do it on a monthly basis because I'll be doing a ton of work and some things may get away from me, and the pages could be messed up without me knowing about it. You know, you set up 100 pages in a day and eventually you start to get burnt out not realizing you're doing little mistakes that could actually harm the page lol.

Audits are essential when you are trying to add loads of content and new pages to your website. This is because you can gradually increase your authority as well as optimize along the way. If you added a page 29 days ago, and you do an audit every 30 days, you might be catching some mistakes that you would never have noticed if you hadn't been doing regular audits Why regular SEO audits are crucial The audits basically save you from getting penalties if you really don't know what you're doing when it comes to optimization lol.

The full site audits are where it's at! My free service will just audit the domain and the page that is input to the system, but the set up is mainly for me to gather more potential clients and not do a full-blown audit. Later on, if they do sign up with me, I will do a full audit on their website(s) and figure out exactly what needs to be done. Working in the SEO and online marketing field for so long, I can usually figure out what needs to be done before I do the audit, but there's always something that slips past me if the site is in complete shambles and I have to do a ton of work Why regular SEO audits are crucial

This was definitely a good write up about how people need regular SEO audits for their websites. I always love reading your content and I regularly shoot you a thumbs up for your discussions Why regular SEO audits are crucial Keep up the good work!

- Razzy



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Corzhens
This is the first time that I have encountered a topic like this. I didn’t know that you need an audit when you do SEO work on your site. I can guess that the SEO audit is about the traffic that your site gets for a certain period and the reason for getting traffic or for not getting traffic that would probably depend on what kind of SEO methods were applied previously on the site.



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potentialwriter
Regular SEO audits are very important. Some links might have become deactivated and need to be reactivated. In as much as SEO tasks include building backlinks, these must be a continuous process. Most campaigns created a while ago might need to be edited or certain keywords might be necessary to be added to make traffic boom in no time. As the world is changing everyday, new SEO techniques are being designed. So, we must meet up with current changes.



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augusta
Yes, it pertinent to always audit our SEO strategies, tactics, keyboard, and campaign anything that has to do with search engine optimization because what was in used before might not be in perfect use in the present.So all of this stuff must be restrategize to suit present stuff, so as to enable more traffic and also makes our site search engine friendly.Thanks for sharing this.



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overcast
I have noticed that some of the SEO audits on the free site are good. But they are not enough. You have to do the link and the keywords analysis too. And for that such type of the audits are paid. I don't know if I can afford some of such amount. But it's worth spending that much money I am guessing. Because for each one of us it could be different for sure. We just have to find out if we can spend it the right way for the SEO. I have seen some of the clients who want SEO done doing this once every year and not monthly.



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kgord
I didn't know that SEO could be audited regularly, but it stands to reason that it is and that it could be. I just think that many people might not understand that this is something that should be undertaken on a regular basis to keep their site up to date and current.



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Corzhens
Gee, it seems that the internet is coming up with new jobs. Last month, I saw the interview of SEO specialists on the evening news. That’s a fairly new job to me. And now here comes the SEO auditor to check on the compliance of a website regarding SEO methods. My question now is this – since SEO is not an exact science and even SEO specialists cannot answer when the effect on the rankings will occur then I guess that SEO audit is also like a guessing game. Pardon me for that comment. I am just being honest with my opinion.



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jaymish2
I like this idea. This makes a lot of sense because of the dreaded google updates. I think that you can include SEO Audits as a service you offer clients. Other websites may come up that reduce the ranking of a site that was ranked higher months earlier. I would offer this service free to current clients and this may lead to an opportunity for more work for you. As you have said the key is to be honest and not create work for yourself.



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