What Is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is a comprehensive review of the current state of your website that focuses on objectively reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of your site in relation to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which is also sometimes referred to as Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
The goal of an effective SEO strategy is ultimately to attract as many visitors as possible to your website via online search engines such as Google and Bing, by ranking as highly as possible in relevant online search results, and there are many factors that contribute to the success (or failure) of that strategy.
A high-quality SEO audit basically provides a client with a detailed report that outlines the current state of their online search visibility from the perspective of an SEO specialist, and a good SEO audit will also help to inform the development of an effective SEO strategy.
What Should an SEO Audit Include?
SEO audits should begin with a comprehensive, data-driven, objective analysis of your website from an SEO perspective, and then shift the spotlight to your key competitors.
With this in mind, my personal approach for conducting SEO audits typically includes two main sections:
- Part 1: Client Website Analysis
- Part 2: Competitive Analysis
The client site analysis portion focuses on a variety of key data sources and technical analysis that is specific to your website, including:
- Website visitor analytics
- Search engine data
- Estimated organic traffic
- Estimated keyword rankings
- On-site technical SEO observations
- Website speed
- Google Business Profile
Once we have a clear picture of these items for your website, the competitive analysis portion of the SEO audit then evaluates how your key competitors are performing for some of these same metrics.
Part 1: Client Website Analysis
Website Visitor Analytics and Search Engine Data
One of the first things that I ask a client for at the beginning of an SEO audit engagement is access to some key data sources, including website visitor analytics (e.g., Google Analytics), as well as search engine data, specifically Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Visitor analytics tools such as Google Analytics allow us to answer key questions, such as:
- How many people are visiting your website each month?
- Which pages are those visitors viewing first (i.e., “landing on”), and are they viewing other pages as well once they are engaging with your website?
- How specifically are those people finding you? For example, is it social media, paid advertising, clicking on search results, or navigating directly to your website?
- Which countries is your traffic originating from?
The next two data sources that are absolute treasure troves of valuable information for SEO purposes are Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. If you’re not familiar with them, these tools actually have a few important purposes:
- Initial submission of your website to these search engines
- Ongoing monitoring to ensure that these search engines are actually crawling and indexing your website content
- Providing you with detailed data about how often your website is showing up in a search engine like Google (i.e., impressions), how many searchers are actually clicking through to your website from the search results page (i.e., SERP), and the wording of search queries associated with those impressions and clicks (e.g., “dog washing station”)
On a related note, something that I commonly see with Edmonton small businesses is that some or all of these data sources have not yet been configured for the business. This may seem counterintuitive, but this is actually a good sign, because it means that the client probably hasn’t been helped previously with their SEO strategy, making it even more likely that they will benefit from my SEO services.
Estimated Organic Traffic and Keyword Rankings
SEO specialists typically pay for one or more SEO-specific tools, and a couple of key features that these tools offer for the purposes of an SEO audit are organic traffic estimates and keyword rankings.
Google Search Console is absolutely our best “source of truth” for measuring organic traffic, and it helps us to understand which queries a website seems to be ranking for, but SEO-specific tools are absolutely invaluable for helping to illustrate both organic traffic and keyword rankings over time.
For example, I can easily use a tool like this to quickly check if a specific website is a “zero” or a “hero” from an SEO perspective.
On-Site Technical SEO Observations
The technical SEO portion of an SEO audit involves manually reviewing the HTML code for each of the key website pages, such as the home page and the service pages if I’m auditing a service-based business (e.g., law firms, HVAC companies, etc.). Some key HTML elements within the code that I focus on include:
- Page titles
- Headings (particularly h1, h2, and h3 headings)
- Page meta descriptions
You can usually tell very quickly during this portion of the SEO audit if the person who wrote the content and developed the website was knowledgeable about SEO or not. For example, I regularly encounter websites with vague page titles and headings that are missing a clear, strong connection with what a company actually does.
Search engines are smart enough to look beyond just page titles and headings when they are indexing and ranking content, but if your main (h1) heading on your home page is something like “About” or “Our Work” (or worse, there is no h1 heading at all and/or there are no meaningful h2 headings), is your website doing a good job of helping both humans and search engines to understand what exactly it is that your business does?
The lesson here is that there are plenty of websites out there, and if you don’t take care of the basics properly, Google will happily rank your competitor’s website instead of yours.
Website Speed
Google used to place greater emphasis on the speed of a website as being one of many search ranking factors, but even then, it was believed to be a “tie-breaker” at best. This hypothetically meant that if there were two web pages which would otherwise rank identically based on other ranking factors, such as content quality, the faster page might rank higher than the slower page.
That said, Google still communicates that “page experience” is important, and the company outlines three Core Web Vitals metrics, which measure the performance (Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP), interactivity (Interaction to Next Paint, or INP), and visual stability (Cumulative Layout Shift, or CLS) of a page.
Have you ever visited a web page that felt like it took forever to load, had advertisements plastered all over it, and it was difficult to actually read the content because stuff was popping up all over the place? A website like that is a textbook example of a very poor user experience.
As a business owner, the speed of your website should be important to you, because each visitor to your website is a potential lead for your business. Do you want those visitors to get frustrated with how long your site takes to load and “bounce” away to one of your competitors? This is why website speed should be one of the items that is included in an SEO audit.
Google Business Profile
Just like having a website is a basic “must have” for a business, every business (particularly local businesses) should have a Google Business Profile (GBP). For this portion of an SEO audit, I mostly focus on some key items:
- Does the business actually have a GBP?
- Does the GBP include a link to their website?
- Does the GBP include other basics, such as a phone number, hours of business, and links to social media accounts?
- Does the primary business category make sense for what the business actually does, and are any additional services listed within the business category?
- Does the business have any reviews? If yes, how recent are they, and does the business seem to be proactive about responding to those reviews?
Part 2: Competitive Analysis
Estimated Organic Traffic and Keyword Rankings
As the owner of a website, you have full access to all of that valuable data that we mentioned earlier, such as website visitor analytics, Google Search Console, and Bing Webmaster Tools. Unfortunately for us, we don’t have access to that same data for your competitors.
The good news though is that there are a number of tools on the market that enable your SEO advisor to estimate the organic search traffic that your competitors are receiving, and (more importantly), gain crucial visibility about which keywords they are ranking for.
This allows us to compare the online search visibility for your website with your competitors, and it also provides an SEO services agency like us with valuable “intel” about your competition, so that we can work together on an intentional, data-driven SEO strategy after the initial SEO audit has been completed.
When I work with local Edmonton businesses, I usually find that at least one of their competitors is already benefiting from SEO, which really highlights why businesses still need SEO, despite some of the claims online that “SEO is dead” due to all of the current hype about AI. It’s probably worth noting as well that Google’s John Mueller recently stated that “Good SEO is good GEO” at a recent Google Search Central Live event (GEO is short for Generative Engine Optimization, i.e., artificial intelligence chatbots, Google AI overviews, etc.).
Website Speed
Earlier in this article we discussed the importance of a good “page experience” for your website visitors. This is why all of my SEO audits include an objective analysis of the website speed of your key competitor websites, using a third-party performance measurement tool, so that we can see how your website stacks up with the competition.
I also wrote previously about how some of the other Edmonton web development companies out there have surprisingly slow websites, which makes you wonder how fast some of their clients’ websites are. This is another great reason to compare the speed of your website with your competition’s sites.
Google Business Profiles
For the purposes of an SEO audit, the competitive analysis portion in relation to GBPs mostly focuses on answering basic questions for each of the key competitors that we’re focusing on, such as whether or not they even have a GBP, and roughly how good their GBP is qualitatively if they do actually have one.
It’s important to keep in mind that each SEO engagement is going to be somewhat unique to the needs of a specific business. For example, I have seen some SEO firms that really focus quite heavily on optimizing GBPs, whereas for me, the primary focus tends to be the client’s website, while still also assisting a client with their GBP if needed as a secondary or tertiary task.
Conclusion
Hopefully you’ve found this article about SEO audits to be informative, especially if you’re an Edmonton business that is trying to decide which SEO agency to consider working with.
I’ll leave you with a final thought to consider as well, which is that I’ve seen a few local competitors offering free SEO audits on their websites. Based on what you’ve just read, how detailed and useful do you think those free audits are likely to be?
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About the Author
John is a multi-disciplinary professional who has spent twenty years mastering the intersection of business, finance, and information technology. His technical journey began with building and repairing computers, a foundation that led to him being recruited by a pioneering video alarm monitoring startup as a network administrator and web developer. He subsequently attended the University of Alberta, discovering a passion for finance while completing his Bachelor of Commerce degree, and he later became a CFA charterholder.
He has over a decade of experience in the finance industry, including roles with Canada’s largest independent mortgage finance company, a highly successful private lender, and a boutique private equity firm. John also previously owned and operated a dedicated IT consulting practice, and he was the sole web developer for an online media company that he co-founded.