What is a "Technical SEO Audit" and why should I care?

SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from a search engine’s via search results. A number of marketing firms now offer services to help you drive more traffic to your website under this moniker as well as Search Engine Marketing (SEM). However, marketing may not cover all your needs. Consider this example:

Jane spent thousands of dollars creating a website and then thousands more with a marketing firm to promote her site. She went with a mix of traditional marketing methods as well as Search Engine Marketing (SEM). The marketing company spent a lot of time working with Jane on her keywords as well as in Social Media and Pay-per-click advertising. She watched as her traffic increased, but was very disappointed that her rankings in the Search Engine Results pages (SERPs) were not as high as she would have liked.

So what is the problem? Marketing firms are great at understanding how users are searching for and using your content. What they probably don’t understand is how Search Engines use software (called "bots") to crawl your web pages, save what it finds in a database (indexing), and return what it indexes as Search Engine Results pages. That’s where a Technical SEO Audit comes in. We are talking technology, not marketing. In simple terms, you have to develop your site to be Search Engine friendly before you actually expect the search engines to be friendly back.

While participating in SearchFest09 last week, I was watching a panel pick apart a few sites in a "Hot Seat Review" in order to help the site owners understand what they need to do to improve their rankings. Over 80% of the suggestions they came up with were related to technology SEO, not marketing strategies:

"You don’t have an XML sitemap"… "The majority of your pages are not being indexed"… "Your robots file is blocking pages to the bots"… "You have multiple domains pointing to the same content"… "You should be using the canonical tag on this page"… "You should change your JavaScript to CSS"… "Your server is responding with a 200, but you are getting a 404 page"…

And the list goes on. To correct these issues, you need a web developer, not a marketer. Why go spend thousands on a marketing firm before you are ready? Before you can drive users to your site with keywords, you must be sure the search engines can index and rank your site.

That’s where we can help. Swipht will do a technical SEO audit of your site. We will:

• identify your goals
• benchmark your rankings
• review your hardware architecture
• assess any roadblocks
• recommend onsite, content-specific optimization techniques
• provide a detailed cost estimate for the work involved to fix any problems discover

For a detailed list, check out my post: What does our technical seo audit include?

Also, if you use Swipht to implement the proposed solutions, we will credit the cost of the audit back to the project.