If your product aisles are disorganized and messy, your customers will have a hard time finding what they need.
The quality of your products on display also matters. Moldy vegetables, expired dairy products, and jars with broken seals will scare off your customers quickly.
That is, of course, if you can even attract customers to enter the store in the first place. If there are no obvious signs hanging outside with your store’s name or what you offer, then your most valuable customers will walk right past you without realizing you exist.
Websites often have similar struggles as those mentioned above — an illogical, confusing site structure, poorly optimized content, and other technical issues that make the site invisible to search engine users.
And over the years, you’ve probably worked with various SEO and marketing companies that completed some work, but have missed many technical issues that have led to where you are today – ranking everywhere but on the first page of Google’s search results.
An SEO audit is a process of evaluating your website from a user and search engine perspective. Think of an audit as a road map. It provides a clear path for the fixes and changes needed to help improve your visibility in search results.
The results of the audit are compiled into a valuable document that highlights critical areas of your site that need particular attention and effort.
Our objective is to dig deep to deliver an audit that ties in with your business goals and helps you implement improvements that result in better quality visibility, traffic, and in time, leads and sales.
Businesses often rely on automated tools to highlight items on their website that need attention. These items are useful from a foundational perspective, but one key element is missed: the humans looking for your business.
Instead of relying on the same old tools to tell you what they think is incorrect, we have real humans reviewing your site. We start from the ground up to uncover the most significant areas that need work.
When conducting a SiteCare SEO audit, we focus our efforts on the high-reward action items. These items are the factors that will yield the most impactful results for your website. We don’t prioritize tasks that won’t deliver significant changes in your visibility.
Crawl accessibility refers to whether search engines can access your website for indexing. Search engines, like Google or Bing, make use of crawlers or bots to access and crawl your website. Our goal is to make sure there is a clear path for the search engines to do their work. If the most critical areas of your site aren’t accessible to these crawlers, then they are practically invisible to search engine users.
To ensure crawl accessibility, we review how search engines index your site, check to make sure your sitemap is in good shape, and ensure that the site hasn’t been affected by a penalty. We take a look at the following items listed on right.
During our on-page review, we go beyond title tags and audit the site with a fine-tooth comb to reveal opportunities for improvement. The improvements may be structural changes or technical implementations, such as schema or rich snippets. The list on the right outlines some of the items that we take a look at when conducting an on-page audit:
The objective of our off-page audit is to assess the quality of the backlinks pointing to your site. Backlinks are links connecting another website to your website. They serve as nods of approval for search engines. The number of links pointing to your website, the quality of those links, and the ratio of links to/from websites is known as your “link profile.” We want to make sure that your link profile is healthy, which means we need to pay careful attention to the quality of your links.
The quality of a link is based on the E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness) of the website linking to yours. The more high-quality links that you gain, the better your site can rank. For example, a single backlink from a reputable, highly trafficked industry publication can be more impactful than 20 backlinks from small sites with very little E-A-T. The inverse is true, as well — an abundance of low-quality or spammy backlinks can damage your rankings. On the right, take a look at some of the other factors that we take a look at when conducting an off-page audit:
Once we have completed the SiteCare SEO Audit, we send you our findings, answer any questions, and discuss the next steps.
Want to see our work in action? Here’s a sample of a real SiteCare SEO Audit:
Since delivering our findings and implementing our recommendations, the client’s website has experienced a 20.6% increase in new users and a 19% increase in sessions in just one month, compared to the previous period. Now that’s what we call “results.”
You want new customers and readers to find you online. A SiteCare SEO audit is a roadmap that will help you deliver on that goal.
