Getting your website ranked on the search engines can be a daunting task. There are a lot of factors that are considered by search engine algorithms that need to be perfected for your website to rank highly.
A great way to find out if your website is following the best SEO practices is to perform an SEO audit.
There are two ways you can approach getting an SEO site audit, one is using a website for a free automated SEO audit or relying on an SEO agency or expert to complete one for you.
In this article, we’ll compare each so you can decide which one will work best for your website.
What is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is when you have a person, agency or automated tool that takes a look at your website and determines if you have the best practices in place for your website to perform at its best when trying to rank highly on the search engines.
An auditor can do an SEO site check up manually or use SEO audit tools. They will look for things like:
- Site Title – Is your site title your H1 tag?
- Header Scale – Are you using H2, H3, H4 to decipher the important content on your site?
- Keyword Best Practices – does your site follow the best keyword practice? No keyword stuffing, keywords present in title tags, etc?
- Quality Blog Content – Are you creating timely content that provides value to your audience?
- Meta Descriptions – Are meta descriptions following character & space counts and attaching searchers?
- Schema – Is your site using rich schema snippets?
- Google My Business – Can your business be found on Google My Business for local SEO?
- Backlinks – Are you generating backlinks to your site to boost site authority.
- Internal Links – Are you using internal links to support your content and give your website structure?
- URL Structure – Is your URL following character counts and contains your intended keyword.
- Sitemap – does your website have a sitemap?
- Is your site indexable? – Is your website being indexed by the major search engines?
An SEO audit will also check your website’s history. They will use tools that provide historical data and graphs that showcase your keyword, backlink, and traffic history.
Manual auditors will assess and then ask questions to look more deeply into major fluctuations in the number of keywords you ranked for, the number of backlinks you gained or lost, and how they relate to the amount of traffic you possessed at a given time.
Why are SEO Audits Important?
When you have a website, your ultimate goal is to have it work for you. A website works for you by bringing in traffic that will convert on your product or service being offered. If you have a website that generates no traffic, you are working against yourself.
As mentioned, a valuable way to get traffic to your site is to have it optimized for the search engines. You are trying to rank for keywords that your ideal customers use when searching for solutions to their problems, and you want to be the first result they see.
However, with building websites becoming more accessible and more industries shifting towards a digital footprint, it’s beginning to become more difficult to rank for desirable keywords.
This is where SEO audits come in.
Sometimes, you think you can be doing everything right but one small detail you might be missing is the reason you cannot rank as high as your competitors. For example, you can write the best content pieces in the world but if your website is loading slow, you won’t rank because you are providing a bad user experience.
Search Engine Optimization is a specialty that requires great attention to detail and a lot of effort. Putting this task on more general positions like marketing specialists or digital marketing managers won’t yield the best results for your business because SEO is a full-time job. There are too many things you need to be managing for your website to rank optimally.
It takes a trained hand to get down to the real issues that are preventing you from ranking well. Getting underneath the hood and figuring out what you need to do is accomplished by first performing an SEO site checkup.
Use Free Automated SEO Audit Tools
If you want to get a free SEO audit, there are plenty of tools out there that offer automated SEO Audits. These audits scan and index your website and check to see if your website is following the best practices of SEO and will alert you of any errors that may be affecting your rankings.
The following websites are my recommended free SEO Audit tools:
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is probably the most popular company that produces SEO tools for marketing professionals. They are known for their “site explorer” that provides an excellent backlink analysis and are believed to have the second-best web crawler that mimics Google’s web crawler very closely.
They offer a free SEO site audit and provide lots of information presented by easily digesting graphs and charts. You can set up daily, weekly, and monthly site audits.
SemRush
SemRush is the next best competition to Ahrefs. They offer the same technical SEO report that is provided by Ahrefs; however, this tool does a better job of identifying and rating the content on your website. Their content explorer tool is useful because you can see how well your site content is ranking and what you need to do to improve that piece of content to rank higher.
The interface is very easy to use, perhaps better than ahrefs, and connects to your google analytics, google search console, and social media accounts.
https://www.semrush.com/features/site-audit/
Get a Free SEO Audit
Perhaps a better alternative to a free automated SEO is to find an expert that can perform a manual SEO site checkup.
The problem with automated SEO audits is that the results of your website are scanned and when the data is populated in front of you, most people don’t know where to start or what it means. These tools were made for SEO agencies and experts.
An expert in search engine optimization will understand what needs to be addressed first. You may see that your website is not ranking for a particular keyword because the tools suggest that you’re not using semantic keywords (keywords that are very similar to the keyword you want to rank for).
However, what that tool isn’t telling you is that your website isn’t loading fast enough or something else is wrong with your website structure. An SEO expert or agency will identify that right away and suggest speeding up your website and making sure that your website is structurally sound.
Also, the free automated SEO tools you find on the internet are not technically free. They are watered-down versions of the full product that the company offers. While the free versions do have very helpful features and reports, they aren’t enough to make any sure judgments as to what needs attention and what doesn’t. To access the full product, for a small business you can expect to pay close to $1000 a year to use these tools.
Tapping an SEO Agency or expert for an audit can cost anywhere from virtually nothing to at most $500 for larger well-known SEO agencies. So in the long run, you will get more for your dollar if you use an SEO agency or expert instead of using a free automated SEO tool.
Tommy Cat Media offers a free website and SEO audit. Simply visit https://offers.tommycatmedia.com and complete the form. We’ll take a look at your website and grade how well your website is following the best practices in Search Engine Optimization from 1 to 5 (5 being the best). Tommy Cat Media will effectively communicate areas of needed improvement in language that is very understandable and will quote you out on the time and cost needed to fix any dire problems your website faces.
Conclusion
You have nothing to lose when you submit your website for an SEO audit. Whether you choose to do a free automated SEO audit or use an SEO agency or expert to perform a manual one, you will be getting valuable information that can be used to your advantage to help you get your website to the top of the search engines.
