How & Why You Should Perform An SEO Audit On Your Website

By Mike Tekula (c) 2009

What makes or break an SEO campaign is knowing where to start, what is important and what is simply not worth the time.

Resources are never infinite. If you're not careful you can spend them spinning wheels and tweaking things that will have no real effect on your search traffic. Plan effectively, and you'll achieve true growth and a positive return on your investment.

The difference lies in understanding how search engines work - how they crawl the web and how they use that data to rank web pages - and how your website does or doesn't meet these criteria.

The Technical Audit

The first order of action is the technical audit of your site. Tackle these issues first because this represents the foundation of your site. Some technical problems can render web pages invisible to search engines. Identifying and resolving these issues upfront is critical.

A technical audit should include: Code cleanliness / content visibility, File size / page load time, Navigation structure, URL structure, Title tag / headlines, Current index, Canonicalization issues.

Other problems are not quite as detrimental to SEO but still should get attention.

If your site navigation is generated by JavaScript and does not occur as standard HTML in your source code, it's likely that search engines aren't seeing it. This means they also aren't reading the words in your links - an important signal for page relevance. In the worst cases, they haven't indexed pages linked to this way at all. Rebuilding your navigation to be SEO-friendly can yield positive results without requiring significant costs.

The Content Audit
Some of the content aspects that are important: Keyword targeting, Link attraction, Readability.

The Trust Audit
Why do search engines rank some pages over others? The simple answer: they trust that the content will satisfy the user.

Google's algorithm has always been focused centrally on signals of trust. There is money in ranking well, and for this reason webmasters, bless our hearts, can't be trusted to be honest or objective about how much trust we deserve.

This is why Larry and Sergey (Google founders) decided to focus on links as a signal of trust and authority. The basic idea is that the more links that point to a page, the more authoritative and trustworthy the page. The other major search engines followed suit.

Over time, since links were "out of the bag" and link building schemes erupted across the web, search engines have honed their algorithms to use other signals to determine trust.

Still, links are the single most important aspect of trust - and, in almost every case, SEO as a whole. Even tiny sites with just a few, poorly-optimized pages can rank well for competitive keywords if they simply have a powerful enough inbound link profile.

What to look at in evaluating website trust: Inbound link profile, Site age, Outbound links.

Before you start researching keywords, creating content, building links or otherwise optimizing your website (or hire a professional to do so), you need to know where you stand and what to expect moving forward.

The answers aren't always pleasant, but if building the volume and relevance of your search engine traffic matters to you these answers matter too.