The importance of a search engine optimization (SEO) audit was very low at the beginning of the SEO industry. No one understood the algorithms used by search engines enough to create this analysis process to gather information. Moreover, the industry was quite small, and this process was almost no need. But the times have changed. And nowadays, you can’t do SEO without off-site, on-site and technical SEO audit. 

In this article, you will find out why the technical SEO audit is essential and why it becomes even more important with the industry’s growth. You can also find a lot of useful information about a full audit. And you can use the information to choose the right SEO company to work with. One that provides a complete audit and uses it to create the best SEO strategies for your business. 

The Higher the Competition, the Higher the Importance of an SEO Audit 

One of the main reasons for the increase in the need for an SEO audit is the massive rise in competition. SEO is the best long-term online marketing method compared with any other alternative. As a result, more and more webmasters and business owners choose to make use of it to grow their online businesses. And that creates a rise in the competition. 

A higher competition will always force professionals to adapt and improve. It becomes harder and harder for businesses and SEO experts to reach the top ranks for useful keywords. The SEO processes you must use are incomparable to the ones used a few years ago. And they are continuing to evolve. 

This evolution affects audits in two main ways. First, the analysis process becomes more and more complex, and a lot more information can and must be gathered. Second, the usage of an audit is expanding. In the past, audits were used to determine a website’s current SEO state and check the results produced by SEO efforts. But nowadays, they are also essential to creating effective strategies. 

The 3 Essential Parts of a Full SEO Audit 

Because of the rise in complexity and evolution of the SEO industry, experts separated the full SEO audit into different parts based on the separation of the SEO services you can find on the market. There are three categories that an audit must always consider. So, you need to ensure that your SEO partner offers audits that cover the following SEO parts: 

• Technical. This part of SEO covers the foundation of any website. It does not matter how good an SEO strategy is. If it does not take care of the technical part of your site, then the results you can expect are limited. For this reason, you must ensure that the audit gathers all the information your SEO partner needs about the technical part of your website.
• On-site. All the content used on your website falls into this category. It is the main optimization work of any SEO campaign. Most of the SEO efforts will go into this. But make an effective strategy for this part. An SEO expert needs to know a lot about the current state of your website. And your SEO partner can gather the information through an audit.
• Off-site. In recent years, the importance of off-site SEO has risen. It is a lot more important today to create effective backlinks that will grow the authority and reputation of your business. But some links can also cause harm. So, an audit must also cover the off-site part of SEO to find the types of backlinks that an SEO expert must eliminate and the ones that must be multiplied.

What Is a Technical SEO Audit? 

A technical SEO audit is the analysis process used by SEO professionals to find all the information they need about the technical part of your website. It has two main goals, and you must ensure that your SEO partner understands this and can implement a top-notch audit that will gather all the information needed. Moreover, you must also ensure the use of this information for the creation of the SEO strategy. 

So, what information should a technical SEO audit gather? Well, everything about the functionality of your website. The main purpose of this SEO part is to ensure that every page on your site works properly without any errors or problems. And the first task of the audit is to find all the errors and problems that could negatively affect the functionality of your site. 

The second purpose of this type of audit is to create solutions for all the problems found. You should never proceed with an SEO campaign that doesn’t ensure the perfect functionality of your website. And otherwise, the campaign results will be drawn back by the technical problems. 

Steps of a Technical SEO Audit 

This type of audit must check many steps. And you may need some tips to implement a technical SEO audit properly: 

• Link functionality. As the name implies, this part will check every link on every page of your website. And its goal is to find the problematic ones. And of course, the SEO team must either solve the problems directly or give you the solution, and your IT team can implement it.
• Loading speed. The loading speed of your website is also mandatory. If the pages load too slowly, your visitors will not be satisfied, and search engines will deduct points and reduce ranks.
• Mobile compatibility. Nowadays, more than half of the searches made on Google are from mobile users. So, you should understand the importance placed by search engines on this part.

What Should You Know About an On-Site SEO Audit? 

As mentioned above, on-site SEO audit will analyze all the content on your website. It is much more complex than the other two parts and has much greater importance. Even though the technical part of a website is the foundation and will affect the results produced by the SEO efforts, it can’t compare with the on-site part that produces the bulk of these results. 

Many factors will affect the results produced by the content you have posted on your website. But three of them have the biggest effects. 

• Quantity. The more content you have posted on your website, the better. But it must also follow the guidelines of search engines such as Google. Otherwise, you can expect the content to have negative effects.
• Quality. The quality of the content is hard to quantify. You can only consider some factors, such as the goal of the content, methods used to accomplish that goal and entertainment value.
• Keyword optimization. The SEO strategy’s core is optimizing the content for the keywords that you and the SEO agency will decide. You can consider the keywords as the guides for search engines. So, you must ensure that every piece of content is properly optimized.

What Should an On-Site Audit Cover? 

What can be considered content on your website? Well, almost everything. When a visitor comes to your site, everything he sees can be considered content. Every page on your site contains content that the audit must check. Be it made from words, sounds or images, all of them can be considered content and should be optimized.

The on-site audit must check the quality of all the content used on your website. Finding the pages that drag your ranks down because of the content is essential and rectifying the problem. So, the first step is to find the pages and content that negatively affect your website’s SEO. 

The next part is to provide solutions for all the problems found by the audit. The possible solutions are eliminating the problematic pieces of content or editing and optimizing said content. These are the most basic solutions. But the long-term must also be considered, including creating new content in the future. 

Make Sure the Audit Also Covers the Off-Site SEO

Lastly, off-site SEO must also be considered and included in the audit. At first glance, this part may seem the simplest one. But it is not. Even though the SEO audit must only analyze the backlinks, the process can be very complex. And a lot of work and knowledge is required for proper implementation. 

So, you will need a reliable SEO agency with the skills and tools needed for this part of the process. Luckily, the agency can use many professional tools on the internet. So, as long as you find a skilled team of SEO experts, you won’t have a problem. Of course, you will need to spend some effort and time to find the right agency for your company.

Through the audit process, your SEO partner will find your website’s worst and best backlinks. And the following tasks would be to find ways to eliminate the bad links and focus on creating as many good ones as possible. Remember that the best methods to create top-quality links must always be based on content.