Good SEO starts with a an audit. Understanding what is right with your website and what is wring with it helps you to establish a baseline vs benchmark comparison. What is the baseline vs benchmark? It is the determination of the gap between where you are currently and where you need to be in order to capture the high ranking positions of those businesses who sit above you in the keyword rankings for those terms that are desirable to your business.

What does the Audit tell you?

A good SEO audit will inform you of the issues on your website. They will cover everything from the 3 pillars of SEO. The 3 pillars of SEO are the categories of major considerations that will affect your ability to rank.

Architecture – Site audits will tell you if you and of your title tags, your meta descriptions or your heading tags are either missing, duplicated or are of an incorrect length – too long or too short. Within the architecture category, a good site audit tool will also inform you of things like your page speed score, whether your website is mobile friendly and how strong is your usage of schema markup which is a crucial element for success in 2019.

Content – Site audits will tell you if you have content that is duplicated on your site, or whether the content is deemed too thin (not long enough to be considered to add value to the visitors search for information.

Links – Site audit tools will examine the profile of links that are pointing signals to and from (external) and within (internal) your website. They will tell you if the links are broken or if they are missing crucial information such as anchor text which is the words that are visible to search engines when they look at the link and make a presumption of the information and relevance of the connectivity between two different pages of information – whether they are both on your site or one is on your site and the other is on another site. To learn more about backlinks and site audits then visit SearchButlers Melbourne – an SEO agency that can teach you all you need to know about backlinks and site audits.

What does the audit tool not tell you?

Site audit tools are scraper robots that can only examine what is on your website and tell you if things are missing that should be there. It cannot tell you of the quality of any of the content as it is not a subjective exercise.

That is why it is so important to use the tool for the purposes that it is intended – as an assist to highlight weaknesses in your website because of errors or missing information. If you do not look into the quality of the information and make a personal and subjective assumption of its value then you will be likely hindered in your progress.