SEO Analysis is known by a variety of terms: website audit, site audit, website analysis, or SEO audit. While the names may be different, in the context of SEO work, the meaning is the same.
SEO Analysis is comprised of a series of tests and the application of critical thinking, with the aim of uncovering everything that might be blocking the search engines from indexing your website’s data.
We can liken SEO Analysis to a pre-work inspection for an automobile. If you’re preparing to go on a long journey, and you know your performance needs to improve, your car would require an inspection before any work is done on it. A qualified auto mechanic would run diagnostics, check fluid levels, examine tire tread depth, scrutinize brake function, and run a number of specialized tests.
Without first conducting this inspection, the auto mechanic would be guessing what needs to be done. When work is done by guessing, there is a lot of room for error and losses; for example, If a mechanic replaced a carburetor on a hunch, changed the tires, and replaced the starter and the windshield, there would be a high cost to the car owner, with no specific proof that those replacements were needed in the first place. Additionally, there might have been a problem in the exhaust system that was never diagnosed, since it was never examined.
We can liken SEO Analysis to a pre-work inspection for an automobile. If you’re preparing to go on a long journey, and you know your performance needs to improve, your car would require an inspection before any work is done on it.
These same issues are shared by websites when working to improve rank in the search engines: skipping the analysis leads to incomplete work or a “one-size-fits-all” approach to SEO. That approach simply isn’t realistic. It is hard to know exactly what a website needs when the work hasn’t been done to examine it deeply.
At Authentic, we conduct a thorough SEO Analysis at the beginning of any project. The purpose, in part, is to create specific deliverables that will produce positive results; however, it is also for us - we are able to deliver much better results when we know the specific issues your site has.
At the end of the day, we want to do the most effective job at increasing your search rank for every page that we work with in your website.
SEO Analysis: What We’re Looking For
When conducting our analysis, we are looking for a few main things:
- Errors that may cause the search engines to ignore you, or blacklist your sites
- Anything blocking your site from being indexed
- Missing SEO “best practices”
- Content quality
- Missing or improperly used tags
- Evidence of “black hat” SEO techniques
- Server setup and file structure
The analysis itself is much deeper than this, but these are the main areas we will examine.
If you’re interested in increasing your website’s page rank in Google, Bing, and Yahoo, contact us to get startedwith an SEO Analysis. We are the help you’ve been looking for.
