Lord Justice Tops once said “An auditor is a watchdog, not a bloodhound”, and those who perform regular audits in their organizations could never agree more!
But is it all about the manual audits on the accounts? How technical activities can be audited? Or is there a different audit process that exists to verify digital marketing techniques? The answer to all of these questions is “YES” and the term that is used for this process is known as “Technical SEO audit”.
While working in the digital marketing field, I spent half of my life performing SEO audit on different websites. What I believe is that the process has evolved and is now commonly performed by many organizations on a regular basis. As you know in the beginning everything was about the new shiny things but as time changed folks have started to pay attention to things that are important for the success of an organization.
So, let’s get started with the technical SEO audit…
The Battle Between Needs vs. Tools
When it comes to audits, many people directly link it with the tools and data that will drive the entire audit process they are conducting in the first place. If you ask me that is sort of backward.
You need to have an idea about the needs of the websites before you make your move to the tools and data-sets parts.
Understanding about the business
Now is the time to establish the needs of the organization. Through all these years what I have learned is that people come to you for auditing in two cases:
First: They want to have professionals to keep an eye on their ongoing market strategies are they are too busy running their businesses.
Second: They are looking for a solution or seeking answers to the problems they are currently facing with their SEO strategies.
In between these two choices they forget the actual purpose and goal of SEO audit. There can be several purposes behind conducting the SEO audit depending on the website as it can be for:
- The locally focused site
- International brand
- National brand
- Lead generation
- Risk assessment
Get your goal or purpose of running an audit.
When we perform the technical audit we strive to understand the actual need of the audit. That is the basic step- the next step is the process to find out the purpose. The process can include;
The right set of questions
- Collecting data from the previous SEO strategies
- Get the concern of primary individuals
Although it may look like a lot of work for you the ultimate success that will come with this process will make your day. So, don’t skip the details.
Diving deeper into the auditing
Another important thing you need to consider while performing the Technical SEO audit is the type of audit you are performing. The prime types include:
Comprehensive site audit
A comprehensive site audit is an in-depth audit that focuses on all the elements of the organization. This type of audit is actually more expensive and can be described in dozens of pages and far more in data sets. This type of audit includes all the activities right from the small, medium and long term activities.
Limited website audit
The limited site audit is the budget-conscious audit that consists of the overview type report that will identify the elements organizations need to pay special attention to. This type of audit is often known as “40000” feet- view.
A limited site audit is good if you have already conducted a comprehensive audit in advance.
What other types of SEO audits are there?
Apart from these two, there are other types of audits including;
- Content audit
- UX audit
- Forensic traffic audit
But as you know in this blog, we are only discussing the technical SEO audit. The reason why I mentioned other audits is to give you possible options. But believe me, SEO audit makes more sense than anything else because it is always the situations where you need the full flown audit sometime less is also fine.
Let’s end this blog today, we will further continue this blog with the next post where we will describe the elements of technical SEO audit. Until then, you can check out the digital marketing packages at ProICT LLP.