Handling an in-depth SEO audit is a significant deal. Including, as an SEO consultant, there are a few sweeter words than, “Your audit looks great! When can we bring you onboard?” Even if you have not been actively looking for a new enlightenment, knowing your SEO audit held it is a colossal pride boost.

What is an SEO Audit?

An SEO audit is a process for estimating the search engine friendliness of a website in many areas. The SEO auditor will check the site against a checklist and come up with the guidance of what needs to be fixed and what requires to change so that the performance of the website in search engines is developed.

While there are numerous tools you can utilize to SEO audit a website, the best way is to either do the audit working a guide or hire an SEO Auditor to do the site auditing work for you.

So, the price is reasonable, and the support of a manual audit is particular to your website and are not generic like those presented using a tool.

When Should You Do an SEO Audit?

After a possible client sends you an email proving interested in working together and they answer your survey, You need to set-up an intro call (Google Hangouts or Skype is preferred). Before the call, You need to do your own mini quick SEO audit based on their survey answers to become intimate with their market landscape. It’s like dating someone you have never met. You are going to talk them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and all other channels that are public.

Here is the example of what the report looks like:

Here are some essential questions you will need to ask the client during the first meeting:

• Who is your target audience?
• Do you have any other business partnerships?
• What are your general business goals? What are your channel goals (social, PR, etc.)?
• How often is the site updated? Do you have a web developer team or an IT department?
• Have you ever worked with an SEO consultant before? Or, hold any other SEO work done before?

After the call, if you feel comfortable with the project. You need to send your formal proposal and contract.

Initially, you need to offer your clients the first month as a trial period to make sure together sensation. This also gives both the client and you a possibility to become friends first before the assertion. During this month, you just take time to conduct an in-depth SEO audit. These SEO audits can bring you anywhere from 40 hours to 60 hours based on the size of the website. These audits are compiled into three separate parts and done with Google Slides.

• Technical: Indexing, Crawl errors, hosting, etc.
• Content: Competitor analysis, keyword research, content maps, metadata, etc.
• Links: Growth tactics, Backlink profile analysis, etc.

After that first month, if the client likes your work, you can begin implementing the suggestions from the SEO audit. And going forward, you need to do a mini-audit monthly and an in-depth audit quarterly.

To recap, you should do an SEO audit for your clients:

• First month
• Monthly (mini-audit)
• Quarterly (in-depth audit)

What You require from a Client Before an SEO Audit

When you and a client started working together, you can share a Google doc with them requesting a list of passwords and sellers.

This also includes:

• Google and Bing Ads
• Webmaster tools
• Social media accounts
• Website backend access
• List of vendors
• Google Analytics access and any third-party analytics tools
• List of internal team members (including any work they outsource)

How to do and perform a technical SEO audit

1. Check indexing
2. Review your sitemap
3. Make sure that all critical resources are crawlable
4. Audit internal links
5. Amplify crawl budget
6. Test and increase page speed
7. Check Your HTTPS content
8. Request Search Engines to re-crawl your site
9. Get Mobile Friendlier

I have given the main aspects of technical SEO audit that will assist you to maximize usability, indexing, search engine crawling, and ultimately rankings. Let us look into the aspects with more detail 

1. Check indexing

Let’s move on to your website’s pages that are indexed by search engines. To check this instantly, go to the WebSite Auditor, and create a project for your website and takes to domain strength.

2. Review your sitemap

Make sure that you must know how important your sitemap is. It also narrates the search engines about your website structure and allows them to find fresh content. (If you did not have a sitemap, you should go and create one immediately. Besides, you can do it in WebSite Auditor by merely starting a project for your website. You just go to the Page dashboard, and click the Sitemap button.)

3. Make sure that all critical resources are crawlable

You might be influenced to merely look by robots.txt to make sure your the essential pages are crawlable. Despite in the fact that, your robots.txt file is only one of the methods to restrict pages from indexing. What about the no index meta tag, X-Robots-Tag, or orphan pages that are not linked to within? What about your CSS and JavaScript files that could be important to your page’s rendering? To run a complete crawlability check, you will need to utilize an SEO crawler.

4. Audit internal links

A simple and logical site structure is important for users and search engine bots; Moreover, internal linking helps spread ranking power among your web pages more efficiently.

5. Amplify crawl budget

Crawl budget is the number of a website’s pages that search engines crawl while in a given period. Crawl budget is not a ranking factor by Google, but it defines how often the essential pages of your website are in crawl. You can take an idea of what your daily crawl budget is in Google Search Console by going to Crawl > Crawl Stats.

6. Test and increase page speed

Accordingly, Google expects that web pages to load in two seconds or less, and they have officially affirmed that loading speed is a ranking signal. The speed also has a huge impact on UX. The slower web pages have higher bounce rates and lower conversion rates.

To verify if your web pages pass Google’s speed test, open your WebSite Auditor project and go to the Content Analysis. Then click Add page, define the URL you would like to test, and enter your target keywords. In the meantime, your web page will be analyzed regarding the on-page optimization and technical SEO.

7. Check Your HTTPS content

In 2014, Google was started using HTTPS as a ranking signal; since then, the HTTPS migrations have become frequently common. Now, over 50% of page 1 Google search results utilize HTTPS.

8. Request Search Engines to re-crawl your site

Once you have fixed and solved all of the issues, you can explicitly request Google to re-crawl your web pages to make sure the changes are brought into the account directly.

To ask Google to re-crawl your site, you need to log in the Google Search Console. Then go to Crawl > Fetch as Google. Then give the URL of the web page you need a re-crawl and click Fetch.

9. Get Mobile Friendlier

Often, Google has been exploring with mobile-first indexing, and they are launched recently. A ‘mobile-first index’ indicates that Google will index the mobile versions of websites rather than their desktop version. This implies that the mobile version of your web pages will resolve how they should rank in both desktop and mobile search results.

Conclusion

These are the top technical SEO audit tips for 2018. I hope this article will be helpful to you. If I you are thinking any other techniques of SEO audit, let me know in the comments.