How To Start A Comprehensive Technical Site Audit

Behind every successful website is a team of SEO experts that monitor ranking status, site traffic, search engine optimization strategies, and overall content. From time to time, the site will be evaluated for its deficiencies or areas of improvement with the use of a tool, process, or system. This is called a technical site audit.

Through a site audit or an SEO audit, one can uncover ways to improve one’s SEO campaigns. One aspect is to identify the weak points in the campaign strategy which are hurting the performance of your website and its overall impact on users. The Internet Marketing Omaha team often starts with an SEO audit before strategic planning and implementation of marketing plans.

The end result is to come up with a list of items that need improvement or fixing, and which action steps are needed to address these issues.

When Do You Need An Audit?

The first step to implementing your SEO campaign strategies is to conduct a comprehensive site audit. The process will give you specific areas that need improvement, and the areas where your campaigns are seen effective. Think of it as an assessment of your SEO performance.

So, how do you effectively conduct a technical SEO audit? By creating a comprehensive checklist. With a checklist, you can ensure that no aspect of your campaign effort is left untouched. Internet Marketing Portland uses a complete SEO audit checklist which makes it effective in its campaign implementation.

Here, we will tackle three out of the nine steps of a comprehensive checklist. Always remember that a good ranking website is the end result of multiple positive ranking factors.

1. Strategic Objectives

What are the long-term goals for your SEO campaign and business ventures? You have to set a clear strategic objective from the very beginning, it should be a reflection of what your business goals are. If you already have objective(s), start reviewing them.

They should be relevant to your business, specific towards your marketing campaign, and attainable within a set time frame. They should also be measurable in some way, where in you can determine at what percentage are you at in achieving your goals.

2. Competitor Analysis

By analyzing your competitors’ performance, you can validate your keywords and pinpoint the missed link opportunities. A good audit result will show:

– Which keywords your competitors are targeting, and which ones are the most profitable for them,
– An analysis of their link profiles which reveal possible linking opportunities for you,
– The types of content that are performing best for your competitors.

You will need to use a tool to gauge the relevancy and effectiveness of your keywords. The easiest way is to determine the page authority (PA) and domain authority (DA) of a keyword in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Visit the Moz page or download the Moz toolbar for assistance in keyword analysis.

3. Keyword Analysis

Do you have the right set of target keywords? Sometimes, one of the biggest reasons why your marketing campaigns aren’t giving the results you want is that you are not targeting “money” keywords. Focusing your efforts on keywords that will actually bring conversions will give the results you’re looking for.

So how do you target the right keyword? If you happen to have a long list of keywords, narrow it down to 20-30 keywords, possibly merging similar words to form long tail keywords. Remember to keep it specific, measurable (its impact on link acquisition), and attainable (with the use of data).

There are different sets of analyses that will break down the cause and effects of every marketing strategy for a particular business website. In our next post, we’ll cover the next 3 important factors in a site audit. By the time we’re done, you will have a clear and comprehensive guide to achieving your goals.

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