SEO audit services in Brighton
An audit is a dry old word: it smells of mothballs and dusty libraries. Don’t be put off!
An SEO audit is not an exercise in bean counting:
it is future-proofing and it can be game changing.
So, if it helps, let’s call it SEO 2020 Attack Plan.
“Balaclavas on, I’m going in!”
- A comprehensive audit of your website must be packed with actionable advice to increase your search visibility.
- It must clearly identify not just room for improvement but any areas that may lead to search engine penalties.
- The offpage and onpage factors must be personally reviewed, rather than automatically processed, if you are to gain in-depth insight rather rather than receive pointless pointers.
- The detailed, bespoke report (approximately 40 pages) must come complete with access to ongoing expert advice if you are going to implement it effectively.
A SEO audit is far from an exercise in going over old ground. It prepares the way for new developments and offers you a springboard into improved search visibility.
I’m a Brighton-based SEO expert with more than 15 years online marketing experience. I can audit your site and provide you with a report that makes it perfectly clear what needs to be done, but, what´s more, I will show you exactly how to do it.
I won´t just be there for the audit either. I’ll help you implement the findings and can offer the following services as well:
If you need help with your SEO give me a call for friendly advice and insightful comments. They come free with every enquiry!
“Content itself doesn´t win.
Optimised content wins.”
Li Evans
Why you need a SEO audit
If one of your aims this year is to drive more traffic to your site you are probably considering SEO as a key tactic. You’re looking into keyword research, content marketing, outreach, link building and…
… Stop right there.
Before you start building your dream house you will want to make sure that the site you are going to develop it on is not resting on quicksand.
SEO needs a firm foundation if you are going to grow your traffic rather than sink without trace.
And that’s why you need a SEO audit.
“Good SEO work only gets better over time. It´s only search engine tricks that need to keep changing when the ranking algorithms change.”
Jill Whalen
What a SEO audit gives you
In two words: confidence and insight.
In four words: absolute confidence and actionable insight.
In a few more words:
- During the SEO audit your website is comprehensively reviewed.
This not only helps you identify how you can optimise effectively but it lets you do this with confidence.
- You are provided with actionable insights for any issues that are uncovered.
These can be implemented immediately and are often far from minor quibbles: they will be issues that are severely affecting your ability to rank effectively on the search engines.
“Without knowledge action is useless and without action knowledge is futile.”
Abu Bakr
Exactly what is covered by a SEO audit?
Can your site be accessed?
Your site needs to be crawled by the search engines if it is to ever walk all over them.
- Blocking the crawl?
- Robots.txt
- Robots meta tags
- Hiding from the crawl?
- HTTP status codes (or error messages)
- Flash and JavaScript navigation
- Inviting the crawl?
- XML sitemaps
- Accommodating the crawl?
- Site architecture
- Site performance
Can your site be indexed?
Penguin updates from Google have targeted sites carrying bad links. The penalties applied often remove sites, or sections of them, from the Google index. You need to remove the penalty from your site before you can move forward.
- Have you sanity checked?
- A series of checks will be undertaken to ensure that the pages that should be crawled are all indexed by the search engines.
Could your on-page ranking factors be improved?
Are there simple things you could be doing to improve the ranking signals you send to search engines through your website? Your site could be housing duplicate content you are not even aware of, and there may be many ways it could be hiding its ranking potential under a bushel.
- Are your URLs optimised?
- URLs too long?
- Are keywords and hyphens used in URLs?
- Are you using subfolders or subdomains?
- Are you using parameters or static URLs?
- Is there any URL-based duplicate content?
- There often is: it’s easy to create but it can hit your site hard if it is not removed.
- What is the content itself like?
- Is it valuable, accurate, readable, substantial, accessible, relevant and targeted?
- How is the content structured and organised? (This is known as the information architecture of your site.)
- Is there evidence of keyword cannibalism or actual duplicate content?
- How well is HTML markup used?
- Meta titles, meta descriptions and other <head> tags
- Images
- Outlinks
- H1 and H2 and other <body> tags
How is your site performing offpage?
In a recent review of leading SEO experts the consensus was that offpage links alone account for 40% of Google’s infamously secret algorithm. What happens outside your site is just as important to its rankings as what happens on it.
- Are you popular?
- What does your traffic growth look like and how does your performance compare with your competitors?
- Are there any trust issues?
- Are there malware or spam threats on your site?
- What does your backlink profile look like?
- How many unique root domain links are there?
- What percentage are followed and what percentage are nofollowed?
- What does your anchor text distribution look like?
- How topical and relevant are your links?
- What is the authority of your linking domains?
- How are the links distributed across your site?
- What are the Domain and Page Authorities for your site?
- How well engaged is your business socially?
- What is your site’s social currency: mentions, conversations, followers and shares
“Knowing is not enough: we must apply.
Willing is not enough: we must do.”
Bruce Lee
Why there is no such thing as a free SEO Audit
I’m sure you have seen free SEO audits offered online. So you may wonder why you should pay for one.
Consider this:
A complete SEO Audit costs just £400 for a 40+ page report based on actual analysis of your site, as opposed to some headlines based on formula-driven conclusions drawn from a limited set of data.
It’s actually not expensive at all, considering its value to you. Most websites contain hidden dangers, all contain hidden opportunities.
Let’s find them, deal with them and get optimising with confidence.
“I am a firm believer that knowledge is power but only if it leads to comprehension.”
David Amerland
Get in contact for a comprehensive report that offers you comprehension.