SEO Audits
Overview
The type of SEO audit that a business requires depends solely on the situation it faces. Like many of my other SEO Consulting services, my SEO audits are one-time transactions aimed at providing solutions.
One of the most frequent situations in which I’m hired to conduct an audit is when a business has just undertaken a website redesign or full rebuild and wants to ensure that the new site is properly optimized.
Another situation where I’m hired to conduct an audit is when businesses have been making efforts to publish content and improve their SEO either on their own or with an agency and things are not working. The goal of these audits is to analyze existing content and determine why it’s not performing as expected.
Lastly, many businesses hire me to audit their site after core Google Algorithm updates to diagnose decreases in ranking / search visibility. After an update, Google’s search results fluctuate a lot, sometimes for several weeks to a month. When the dust settles, some sites inevitably lose the rankings that they previously held. As a result, their traffic takes a sizable hit. When this happens, while tough, the best thing that site owners can do is nothing until a specialist has conducted an audit.
Outside of these situations, the only types of sites that I recommend conduct audits absent of an impending problem are large eCommerce stores and news publishers. For those sites I recommend one at least bi-annually.
What My SEO Audits are Not
Software Generated
While the automated "SEO audits" from SEO tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs can be valuable for agencies to balance portfolios of 50+ clients to keep track of the general health of a site, they often provide zero business value and report issues that don't exist.
Cheaply Outsourced
Auditing is one of my highest skills in SEO, and it's what many in the industry know me for. I take a lot of pride in my work. When you hire me to conduct an audit, you get my brain - not that of a less experienced contractor that I can hire at a cheaper price.
Retainer Bait
For many agencies, SEO audits are more of a sales tool than a service. I will not uncover 100 problems with your website and then pitch you a retainer to fix them. I provide high-quality, one-time SEO audits. No strings attached.
A 50 Page Slide Show
My audits are straight to the point and first and foremost actionable. If a small issue exists that is very unlikely to affect your revenue, I usually don't even report it. My job is to help you solve problems, not create more.
Current rate: $135/hour
Comprehensive Technical SEO Audit
Minimum completion time: 16 hours
Average cost: $2,750
My most popular SEO audit. Ideal for new and redesigned websites and ideally conducted before they’re launched to identify problems. If a website migration is required soon-after the audit is complete, the services can be bundled.
White-label available.
Areas Covered:
- Code quality:
- Has the site code been written according to best practices and quality standards?
- Site Performance:
- Is the site loading resources efficiently and has it been optimized to load quickly?
- KPI: Core Web Vitals – field data (if had)
- SEO:
- Have on-site factors been optimized and are best practices in place across the board?
- Some things I check here include but are not limited to:
- Structured data (schema.org)
- Metadata (title tags, meta descriptions, canonical elements, link relationships, etc)
- Crawling/indexing (ties in with code quality) — can search engine bots effectively parse and extract information from pages?
- Accessibility:
- Alt text on images (this is used by screen readers for the vision impaired and by search engine bots to help understand what a page is about)
- Font sizes and color contrasts
- Accessible HTML (also ties into code quality)
- Security:
- Check HTTP protocols and methods
- Dependency check – does the site depend on 3rd party software that may cause vulnerabilities now or in the future?
Deliverable:
Content Audits
A content audit is basically what it sounds like. I audit the content on a website when growth is slow to identify impediments and opportunities to get things going again. While I typically look at content to some extent in every audit, a dedicated content audit is far more focused and in depth.
*Before anything we’ll meet to discuss your current business goals and revenue targets*
Content Audit Checklist:
- Overall content quality
- User Interaction Data
- Competitive analysis
- Information accuracy
- Internal link architecture
- Keyword cannibalization
- Target audience and demographics
- Historic demand and seasonality
- Semantic relevance
- Structured Data
- Usage of images / media
- Accessibility
Deliverable:
The signals that influence ranking are different for various searches. Therefore, first I organize my recommendations by plotting content out on a spreadsheet by search intent and user journey phase (eg. stage in buyers funnel). Then, I list the milestones that need to be met for specific pages to achieve the desired ranking improvements. This way you can prioritize your efforts in a way that maximizes your ROI.
Google Algorithm Update Penalty Audits
Several times each year Google updates its core search algorithm. Each time there are always “winners” and “losers” – some sites go up, others go down, and like we saw in Google’s recent March 2024 update, some sites get flattened and lose their traffic over night. Google used to give more detailed information about how updates were going to change their algorithm and offered guidance for site owners and SEOs to prepare for them. In recent years they’ve shifted away from that, now offering more generalized guidance about what their algorithms seek to reward. Read Google’s guidance on creating helpful, people-first content.
What I generally look at:
- The existence of qualities that any previous Google Algorithm Update sought to punish or suppress (not just the most recent)
- Violations of Google’s Guidelines (now called Google Search Essentials)
- User Experience (UX) and Information Architecture (IA)
- User Interaction Data (Google Analytics, Hotjar, Clarity)
- Everything else covered in previous audits
Deliverable:
- The most likely reason that the website was punished
- A list of options available and recommendations for where to spend your budget until the site recovers
- An organized roadmap prioritized by impact and realistic estimated timeline** to recovery based on my experience
* The reason that such a wide price range is provided is because sometimes the reason for a rankings drop is very obvious (like if there are manual action), other times it is extremely opaque.
** Since it rolled out, there have been no documented recoveries from Google’s Helpful Content Update. Re-assessments will likely not be made until the next core algorithm update after a site was affected. There is no fixed timeline for seeing potential ranking improvements after removing unhelpful content.
Prioritized Task Board Example
An example of what a prioritized task list that I deliver with my SEO audits looks like.
