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Important Steps You Cannot Afford to Miss During an SEO Audit

This article is more than 8 years old.

An SEO audit is a complicated and time-consuming endeavor. It needs a proper planning phase where you’ll have to interact with the client and nail down the specifics of your strategy. As tedious as this may sound, the resulting inaccuracies in your audit results will make your recommendations ineffective and, ultimately, affect your reputation as an auditor.

To avoid these pitfalls, consider following the steps below before conducting an SEO audit:

Communicate with the Client

A good site audit, be it an SEO audit or a content audit, requires that you and your client be on the same page when it comes to results and expectations. To achieve this, clear communication is crucial. You need to have a good understanding of the business and your client to fully grasp how your efforts and SEO knowledge will affect their bottom line.

Insight into the business goals and vision of the client will further help you prepare a better audit strategy and deliver a more effective list of recommendations to the client. Some of the things you can consider asking them beforehand are:

  • Where do their leads come from?
  • What is their conversion rate?
  • What sources of conversion are there? What are they?
  • How accurate and reliable is their data?
  • What are their goals for the next months/years?
  • What keywords they wish to ranks for and why?
  • Do they have a mobile-friendly site?

It is important that you ask these questions to learn about the business and avoid making any assumptions that could hinder your and the client’s business goals.

Arsen Rabinovich, CEO at TopHatRank says, "I always ask my clients to give me as much information as they can, and make sure I keep all their pointers in mind when working on an audit. Today, you have to go beyond technical when auditing a website, understanding your client's business, products and goals will allow you to focus your work in the right direction and bring true value to the table."

Define Goals Clearly and Accurately

Most clients may state vague goals while discussing web properties. This is normal since they may not fully understand the technical aspects of SEO. Unfortunately, SEO auditors cannot work with such goals. Therefore, you’ll need to spend some time explaining how they should create more specific goals before you proceed with strategizing.

Chances are that your client has not even thoroughly considered all the necessary details. To make things easier, you can decide what kind of data you need, how the data will be analyzed and with what tools, and why the results will be useful. Run this by your client first and then create a timeline for both the deliverables and the auditing steps.

Get Admin-Level Access to Site Analytics

This step is necessary because you will require the data saved in the site’s Google Analytics database or any other third-party platform they may be using. Just remember to take your time while collecting data. The longer the duration of data collection, the more accurate your analysis will be. A few years’ worth of data is a goldmine for an SEO Audit.

Get Admin Access to Google Webmaster Tools

Admin access to Google Webmaster Tools is a must. GMT is pretty powerful and provides query data and specific sets of keywords that are not available on Google Analytics. Earlier this year Google unveiled a new portal for its Webmaster page that offers lots of new features including a step-by-step guide that walks you through and identifies issues you are having with your site.

Get the Google AdWords Data

Ask if the client has ever invested in Google Adwords. This data will be quite useful during the SEO auditing process as it can give you valuable insight into cost metrics, bounce rate, conversion rate, etc. These KPIs will help you while formulating your SEO strategy. Google AdWords will also reveal how efficiently the business was managed, how effective the ad campaigns were and much more.

This simple top-level analysis will clear up any confusion for the client and for you as well. It will also help you reduce the number of times you have to call up and get specifics from the client. So, plan properly and your next SEO audit will flow smoothly.

If you liked this post, check out all my personal blog posts.