SEO Audit

Why do I need SEO Audit Services?

You have a website with eye-catching images, wonderful content, and great products and pricing! However, search engines don’t rank your site high enough (compared to inferior websites), and the visitors you do get don’t generate as many click-throughs, leads or sales, as they should. The answer may well lie in Technical SEO.

Simply put, your website needs to offer a high-quality experience to both your users, as well as to the search engine crawlers. Technical SEO ensures that your website foundation is strong; so, you benefit from higher rankings, and happier visitors!

If you think of your website as a Hotel, then Technical SEO ensures that:

  • The foundation is solid, and the structure is earthquake & fire resistant
  • There is adequate security for the guests, and their belongings
  • Guests can locate your hotel fast; and easily find areas like restaurants, lobby, rooms and other areas, without having to ask for directions.
  • People who visit your hotel for a short stay, or on small budget also have a great time (similar to providing a mobile friendly experience to visitors on a slow and small mobile screen).
  • Lighting, Plumbing, HVAC all work, throughout the hotel.
  • Functions like Reservations, Check-in, Checkout, Billing etc work smoothly
  • You pass all Health and Regulatory inspections from authorities (Google!), thereby getting recognized and promoted as a high-quality hotel by the powers that be!

Search engines have certain guidelines on technical aspects of a website in areas like Load Speeds, Security, Site Architecture, Mobile Friendliness and more.

Search Engines like Google, have two primary goals:
  • Surface the very best website for their visitors (Search Engines exist primarily to help their visitors, and not website owners!). Their idea of “best” may differ considerably from yours, or even that of your competitors!
  • Spend the least amount of time and computing power in understanding & classifying the zillions of web-pages that exist on the Internet.

Some of the Technical SEO issues are low hanging fruits, while others require considerable work.

We are constantly surprised to see client websites, with even easy-fixes like a SSL Certificate (Free, 5 minute fix!) lying un-addressed, costing them a large chunk of traffic and web visibility!

Our Process

We don’t have a cookie-cutter approach towards each client. Our process is to:

  • Understand business goals, with time and resource constraints for SEO activities.
  • Do a comprehensive software driven AND Human review, to understand all possible Technical SEO Issues
  • Present a tailored plan, with prioritized and actionable recommendations. We break down the recommendations in terms of effort, cost, and time; so as to be able to prioritize the Technical SEO activities.
  • Implementation Roadmap – We recommend what should be done right away, and what can be deferred in case of business constraints.
Technical SEO Audit Checklist

We analyze and benchmark your website against current best practices on the following checkpoints:

  • Crawl Analysis – Your website, as seen from the eyes of a search engine crawler
  • Crawl Errors – Is your site consistently generating server errors on certain pages?
  • XML Sitemap – Have you made it easy for search engines to understand the various areas and pages of your site?
  • Page Load Speeds – An extremely vital ranking and a usability factor. Slow websites = Low Rankings & Customers who don’t stick around long enough!
  • Mobile Friendliness & Performance – How well does your site displays and perform on mobile devices. This is a critical factor in the Mobile First indexing at Google.
  • Site Structure – Is your site arranged in a logical manner, making it easier for both visitors and search engines to navigate around?
  • Duplicate Content – This can seriously hurt your website in terms of penalty and lower rankings, be it in terms of duplicate URLs, content which repeats on your own site in multiple places, or even on other sites. Fortunately, there are quick fixes to ensure your website is not dragged down due to this.
  • HTTPS: As per a study, 7 out of the top 10 sites on the 1st page of google are the ones with HTTPS: prefix. Not having an SSL certificate drags down your site, demotes visitor trust, and generates prominent warnings in all major modern browsers. Not good!
  • Analysis of Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to surface additional Technical SEO issues, and marking them fixed.
  • Structured Data, Rich Snippets and Schema
  • Image Optimization

At Afterfirst, we understand that your priority is to focus on your business. At the same time, you need to be sure that your time and money is being invested wisely.

Unlike other agencies, we de-jargonize everything, and make sure you understand our recommendations; so, you get value both for the current website, and also for any future sites that you may commission.