Why regular SEO audits are crucial

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. 

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.