SEO Audits

An SEO audit involves a comprehensive review of both the front-end and back-end of your website. This includes checking for duplicate content, evaluating title tags, assessing the crawl budget, analysing page speed, and much more. The goal is to identify any technical issues that could be affecting your website's performance in search engine results pages (SERPs). Our SEO audit services are all-encompassing and include an on-page audit, technical audit, off-page audit, and full report. We also provide additional services based on your specific needs.

Regular website audits can help uncover minor issues before they become major problems. By identifying and fixing these issues, you can improve your website's performance in search results, increase organic traffic, and enhance your SEO success.

It's recommended to conduct regular SEO audits to ensure your website remains optimised for search engines. The frequency can depend on various factors, but generally, an SEO audit should be conducted every 6-12 months. Regular audits can help maintain your site's performance and keep up with changes in search engine algorithms.

We use various wesbsite audit tools to crawl all the URLs on your site and uncover technical issues. One such tool is Screaming Frog, which can identify issues like broken links, redirect chains, orphaned pages, etc. We also use CopyScape, Silterliner, Moz, Link Assistant and our own AI tools, as well as Google Analytics and Google Search Console. However, it takes a trained eye to properly diagnose these issues and recommend the appropriate fixes. In the case of backlink penalties, we use auditing software to assess backlinks, we choose to do things manually and only use tools where they add to our process. We evaluate everything ourselves manually before reporting back to you.

The length of an SEO audit can depend on the size and complexity of your website. Generally, SEO and website audits take between 4-6 weeks to complete. This time is necessary to ensure a thorough review of your website and to not miss any potential issues.

A technical SEO audit is a detailed analysis of the technical aspects of a website that can impact its visibility in search engines. This includes factors like site speed, crawlability, mobile usability, internal and external links, and more. A technical SEO audit aims to identify and fix any technical issues that could be hindering your website's performance. This includes checking the .htaccess file, robots.txt, sitemap, HTTP headers, 404 error pages, and page speed. We provide solutions to fix any identified issues.

An on-page SEO audit involves analysing factors on your website that can be optimised for search engines, such as title tags, meta descriptions, keyword usage, and content quality. An off-page SEO audit, on the other hand, looks at factors outside your website that can affect its ranking, such as backlinks and social signals. This includes evaluating the quality of backlinks, anchor text, placement, relevancy, and quantity. We'll provide recommendations for attracting relevant links from trustworthy sites in your industry.

A backlink checker is a tool used in SEO auditing to analyse the backlinks pointing to your website. Backlinks are important for SEO as they can significantly impact your website's search engine rankings and domain authority. A backlink checker can help you understand your link profile, identify any harmful links, anchor text issues, and strategies for link building.

Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics introduced by Google to measure user experience on a website. Included in most website audit services, these web vitals include popular metrics such as LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift). In an SEO audit, the vitals are checked to ensure your website provides a good user experience, which is a crucial factor in SEO performance, page load times and website speed.

An SEO strategy is a plan designed to improve your website's visibility in search engines. It takes into consideration your business, your market, your goals, your competitors, and your existing marketing strategies. Whilst related to our SEO audit service and the other SEO services we provide, an SEO strategy is different and can be provided as an additional service if requested.

Black hat SEO refers to the use of aggressive SEO strategies, techniques, and tactics that focus only on search engines and not a human audience. These techniques usually do not obey search engine guidelines.

Common causes of an SEO penalty include poor quality content, spammy or automated link building, buying links, black hat web design and SEO techniques, changes to the search algorithm, unnatural inbound links, creating poor quality backlinks, manual actions, hiding content, spinning content, keyword stuffing, cloaking, and knowingly breaking the rules.

Tactics such as the above can be seen as an attempt to manipulate rankings and can negatively impact your website's SEO performance.

For more information, please refer to https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials.

Our approach is to map your Google Analytics and Search Console and traffic data to the known timeline of algorithms to understand if any website traffic changes correlate to the algorithm updates.

Google Analytics showing a loss in traffic due to a Google penalty

If the issues are backlink related, we go through each URL in your backlink profile and flag any that may be negatively affecting your website’s search rankings. If the issues are content related, we audit your site content on a page-by-page basis using various tools to identify issues such as thin or duplicate content.

Link audit and removal involves evaluating the links pointing to your site and discussing the best approach for improving your website’s SEO. This usually involves manual link removal in the case of backlink penalties.

Manual actions and unnatural links warning in Google Webmaster Tools

Manual link removal is the process of contacting other webmasters to politely ask them to remove your link from their websites. The disavow tool is a Google tool that allows you to ask Google not to take certain links into account when assessing your site's ranking. If a webmaster doesn’t remove the link manually after a number of polite requests, we can use the disavow tool.

Audit implementation involves fixing the SEO issues identified during the audit. You can choose to fix these issues in-house or leverage our team to implement the recommendations for you as part of a one-off exercise or ongoing managed SEO project. We can also provide SEO training and consultancy to assist your team if you choose to implement the SEO recommendations in-house.

If you are aware of potential SEO issues but don't believe you have been penalised, or you are concerned that your current SEO isn't working, we recommend that you get an SEO audit for peace of mind. If you've always focused on your users, only ever undertaken natural marketing and your website is well-written and unique, you should be fine. However, it's always better to be proactive in maintaining your website's SEO health.

Audit implementation involves fixing the SEO issues identified during the audit. You can choose to fix these issues in-house or leverage our team to implement the recommendations for you as part of a one-off exercise or ongoing managed SEO project. We can also provide SEO training and consultancy to assist your team if you choose to implement the SEO recommendations in-house.

This depends mainly on the complexity of the audit and your requirements. A basic interactive report can be completed in around 1 day (£550 plus VAT).

An interactive report showing website audit factors

More complex bespoke SEO audits can take several days (generally between £950 and £1,800 plus VAT).

In the case of backlink penalties, these can add a number of days to the project depending on the amount of backlinks that need analysing.