8 Reasons to Perform a Full SEO Audit of Your Web Site

Performing a full SEO Audit of your website on a regular basis, perhaps at least once every six months, is key to maintaining your web presence and maintaining your organic search engine rankings. It has been a while since I personally performed a highly technical SEO Audit of my own web site, which I just completed. There were several things that I checked, and each of these are detailed here.

There are several reasons why you really need to perform a full SEO audit of your website. Here are a few:

The search engines are constantly updating their algorithms.
Google updated their Google Webmaster Guidelines. Make sure your are compliant.
SEO last year is different than it is this year. The rules have changed. What was acceptable last year is not acceptable this year.
You may have content on your site that it outdated. Find that content that people aren’t visiting anymore.
The search engines, as well as your own site visitors, like fresh content. Make sure your content is fresh.
View the errors on your website during an SEO audit. Fix those errors and recover lost traffic to your site.
Find who is linking to you and find the good, bad, and toxic links to your site.
View the links to your site and clean up your link profile, which will help search engine rankings.

Those are only a few reasons why you need to perform a highly technical SEO audit of your website on a regular basis.

What To Review in a Full SEO Audit

Certainly if you don’t have the means or knowledge to perform an SEO audit and know exactly what to look for, then you need to hire someone such as myself to perform that SEO audit for you (yes, I know, that’s a shameless plug for my SEO consulting services). Anyhow, here is a list of what I usually look at when I perform an SEO audit of your website.

Crawl the website. I usually use 3 separate crawlers by 3 different companies in order to find all the errors and grab all the data I need for later analysis.
Review all the meta data, such as title tags, meta description tags, heading tags.
Review all the URLs for consistency and other duplicate issues.
Review internal links and internal link structure.
Look for 301, 302 redirects and 404 errors as well as server errors.
Look to see how many pages there are on the site (are there too many, generated automatically by a calender, etc.?)
Compare internal link anchor text to each page’s topic.
Run checks on page load speed.
Run checks on W3C compliance.
Review Google Webmaster Tools for errors, html suggestions.
Review all internal anchor text.
Review all page content on each page
Gather all the backlinks and historic backlinks to the website. This is actually more difficult than you would think. There are multiple link sources because each link source doesn’t get all the links.
Compile all the links and review them.
Look at anchor text pointing to the site. Are there issues?
Are there bad or toxic links pointing to the website?
How often does the website get new links? Did the site used to get a lot of links but now notsomuch?
Are there over optimization issues? Too much exact match anchor text pointing to the website?

This is not my entire list of things that I check and analyze when I perform a technical SEO audit of websites. But, you can get an idea of what is involved. There are so many issues that can arise when you have a website that if you are not doing an SEO Audit of the site on a regular basis (at least every 6 months) then you’re going to have issues with the website that prevents you from ranking as well as you can in the search engine results. If, for example, you find 404 errors on the site and you fix those issues, you’re going to get more traffic to the site.

Have you done an SEO Audit?

When was the last time you received a full search engine optimization audit of your website? I recommend a full SEO audit on a regular basis (every few months or at least once a year). Talk to someone who has over 20 years of search engine optimization experience who can steer you in the right direction, not just someone who is going to try to “sell you” search engine optimization or search engine optimization services.