An SEO audit is an evaluation of the overall performance and competitiveness of a website- sort of like a health and wellness checkup you’d get at your doctor’s.  It is a great way to determine whether your site is performing at its peak, or catch issues that may be limiting its success when vying for attention from search engines.  It’s also a good tool to use to provide basic internet marketing metrics to management.

When performing an SEO audit, an auditor (like me!) will assess your site against a checklist of SEO best practices.  These best practices govern subjects like content effectiveness, loading and speed metrics, user interface design, and search engine penalties, all of which affect how often your site is shown to users and how it is received by your target audience.  As a general rule, sites that load quickly, update regularly, are keyword-optimized, and don’t use any unethical or bad practices such as duplicating content or faulty redirects will have a better SEO score.

When an internet user types a question into Google, the results they’re shown aren’t just random.  Search engines “choose” which sites to display on the first page based on how well the page adheres to best practices.  Its SEO score is determined in a review and vetting process as soon as the content hits the internet.

Content– the value, relevancy, and consistency of– is the most important criteria bots use to rank a site.  The more frequently a site is updated, the more frequently it’s crawled.  Pages with original content marked correctly with relevant search terms that accurate reflect the content of the page will typically rank higher in a search than competing pages.  In simplest terms, Google and other search engines will deem your site trustworthy if it can easily tell what each page is about and sees that your pages contain content you didn’t copy and paste from somewhere else.

In turn, users are more likely to trust a website that has active social media activity and ranks high in the search.  There’s a reason the saying goes “the best place to hide a body is page 2 of Google.”   Most people aren’t going to spend the effort to visit a site that’s stuck on page five– and why would they?  After all, Google has told them that the best content is right there on the first page.  This is why investing in unique and engaging content by hiring a creative professional is one of the most cost-effective, lasting strategies you could employ to get customers to your site.

At minimum, an SEO audit needs to tell you about four things:

Your overall SEO score will tell you how well your site follows best practices, which makes it far more likely your site will show up in a search for the keywords you want to target.  SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the practice of increasing the quality and quantity of web traffic to your company site. This only includes organic searches, not paid SEM campaigns such as PPC advertising.

The quality of traffic refers to how relevant your page is to the keywords your audience is using.

The quantity of traffic refers to the number of potential customers clicking on your site.

An SEO score shows how your site ranks based on its page and domain authority, the relevancy of your content, outside trust factors, keyword useage, and social media metrics. This includes on-page work and off-page mentions such as links from another, unrelated site.

Your Domain Authority score predicts how well your site will rank on search engines. Sites with higher domain authority scores get better search results– this means that they will appear in major search engines like Google above and more often than their competitors. Your DA score is the single most important score that determines your overall SEO ranking. Anything below a score of “10” is a weak site and will not compete against well-established, well-trafficked sites. A score of 50-60 is where most competitive sites reside.

The criteria that search engines like Google use to rank your site changes constantly, so it’s a good idea to have an SEO audit completed at least once a year.  If you are frequently experimenting with internet marketing strategies or switching up your content, you may even consider getting an audit done more regularly to make sure your site is still optimized for your most valuable business keywords.