What is SEO Technical Audit and Why Should You Care?
An SEO technical audit is a process in which you look at the technical aspects of a websites SEO and see how they are doing.
Audits are an essential part of the SEO process as SEO standards and rules are always changing. Whether your competitors have upped their game, or the search engines have changed what they are accepting, your websites optimization occasionally will need a refresh, and the way to tell this is through an audit.
The reason this is important as your site has done the work to get to the front page of Google, and if you fail to update the SEO to match the new rules, your website will start to fall in the ranking. Every time Google crawls your site, your site will drop, and it is a long process to fix it. Thus, staying on track through SEO technical audits is a great way to ensure your site can maintain, if not improve its ranking!
Why is running scheduled the SEO Audit important?
When it comes to an SEO audit, the importance of a schedule comes down to the fact that search engines routinely change their requirements. For instance, in the latest Google Update that we saw a few months back, Google confirmed that technical issues such as broke backlinks or 404 errors would cause harm to the rankings and performance of a website. An audit can catch these issues and ensure that a routine change does not harm a site. Here are a couple of other reasons why scheduled SEO audits are essential for your website.
- Audits help to monitor the health of your site, which will, in turn, lead to better rankings.
- Audits will allow you to identify unexpected errors that may happen on the web or mobile version of the site.
- Audits will ensure that your website indexation is correctly done, to avoid future issues.
- Audits typically come with an in-depth performance analysis which will help better your ranking over time.
How Often Should You Perform SEO Audit?
When talking about scheduled audits, naturally, the next question is: how often should I perform an SEO audit? The answer is it depends, as each site is a little different. Some factors that may come into play include:
- Age of the site
- Size of the website
- Is the content regularly updated, or is it more static?
- Do you have a monthly blog that is being published
- The platform in which the site is built upon.
A good rule of thumb is:
- Smaller audits every month
- Large audit every quarter or any time you make a significant change to your website
Top 3 Tools to use for audit
There are a couple of tools that any site would be smart to use for their SEO audits
- Screaming Frog - £149.00 Per Year
Screaming frog is a desktop crawler that will showcase issues such as outbound links, broken links, security, anchor text and more. The program is quite simple but does an excellent job for auditing with a clean interface. You can check up to 500 URL's for free through the program.
- Ahrefs Site Audit- from $99 per month
Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO option that has SEO audit, keyword research and content and site explorers built into the platform. The interface is sleek and makes using it quite simple for users.
- SEMrush Site Audit- $99.95- $399.95 per month
SEMrush is one of the industry standards and is an auditing and research tool. This program can even track competitor's data and provides tools to better your ranking based on what your competitor is doing. This is a great all-in-one tool for people who want to also use SEMrush for SEO and PPC.
Overview
Regularly scheduled SEO audits are a great way to ensure that your site is operating optimally. Complete monthly smaller audits, and quarterly larger audits. If you complete any significant changes to a website, double-check that it will be a positive change with an SEO audit as well. Finally, tools such as Screaming Frog, Ahrefs or SEMrush will ensure that you get the most out of your audit. Simple does it, and with SEO audits, your site will be operating at peak performance!