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Why Do an SEO Audit, Especially With an External Partner

Written by Susan Connelly | September 17, 2020

Why Do an SEO Audit?

An SEO audit uncovers everything about your site: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

This can range from analyzing technical SEO, to duplicate content, to usability. You may want to learn more about site speed, meta description prevalence, or broken links.

Everything comes together to offer a better user experience, leading to better site visibility and better search engine rankings.

You need to evaluate your website to uncover any potential problems that weaken the overall user experience, but you can also discover valuable opportunities with a website audit, too.

Conducting regular site audits is a proactive step in digital marketing to ensure that your site remains healthy and functional — and there are some great tools on the market that allow you to run the audit yourself.

But it’s also important to have external site audits.

Just as you would visit a Financial Advisor and analyze specific goals you want to achieve, and the best path to achieve those goals, the same is true of SEO consultants.

The Benefit for Companies to Have External Site Audits

External site audits give teams an impartial, fresh set of eyes in their site evaluation. Complete objectivity is ensured when reporting findings.

An outside party auditing your site should know all of the best practices, and so will check in on progress and make sure the company’s SEO team is on track for meeting their goals and timelines.

Site audits give you a fresh look at:

  • Competitors
  • Content
  • Backlinks
  • Usability
  • Optimization efforts
  • Site Health
  • Opportunities
  • And more

Besides having the external audit generate a website performance report card for your site, it can help with other specific use cases.

An external auditor is experienced in looking at how SEO and SEM channels can align to better improve growth, for example.

In one case, an in-depth analysis revealed to one company that 50% of keywords that the company was bidding on did not have a positive impact on their ROI. The company was able to shift their strategy and approach after learning such information.

Plus, SEO consultants can review items in aggregate to see insights and opportunities that may apply to your business.

A successful audit not only reinforces the message that your team is trying to promote internally, it can also be used to provide educational opportunities to the team.

How Often Should You Audit Your Site?

In order to ensure that your site’s team is on pace to reach their objectives, an SEO audit should be performed quarterly, or at the very least every six months.

Priorities change, and you want to make sure your team is alerted to new opportunities or changes in the search landscape. (Often, teams are working toward completing items that may have shifted in priority.)

Regular check-ins on progress also let teams know that their goals are on track (or if they need to shift their goals) to meet KPI goals. You may not want to wait until the end of the year to understand impact.

Naturally, companies that would like more aggressive returns need a more aggressive plan of action.

Why Invest in SEO Audits?

SEO audits are crucial for growing your business and KPIs. You should invest in the right SEO software to conduct your audits, as well as an external auditor.

Our clients see on average 30-60% increase in organic traffic when an audit is performed in tandem with our seoClarity platform. The key to those results is taking the information and applying it to you quarterly roadmap and then reviewing the progress every quarter.

seoClarity Jumpstarts

Our Professional Services team is one team that can run your external site audits. All platform clients have access to our Jumpstarts included in their package.

Our Jumpstarts are designed to review your website’s performance, uncover opportunities in review of competitive sites, and assist your team in creating an executional roadmap designed to meet your KPI goals.

We utilize our analysis based on our tried and true methods of success across 500+ clients. Clients who utilize the jumpstart see an average of 30-60%+ year over year organic growth.

(Clients without it still see growth with just the platform, but the numbers grow exponentially when aligned with the roadmap plan.)

Recommended Reading: 3 Success Metrics Professional Services Brings to SEO Teams

Specialized Audits from seoClarity

In addition to the Jumpstarts that identify specific action items to take to bolster your growth, seoClarity’s Professional Services also offers specialized site audits.

Technical audits, content audits, and backlink audits can all be used to benchmark and report on progress over a course of time.

All of this analysis is done with the seoClarity platform, which has helped thousands of enterprise brands overcome their digital marketing challenges.

Conclusion

External site audits offer an in-depth, unbiased look into your site and its performance. Although these reviews should take place every quarter, your business goals may require a more robust audit schedule.

Talk to an Account Executive to learn more about the seoClarity Jumpstarts and our Professional Services team.