A strong SEO audit is important for catching hidden issues that could be interfering with SEO performance. By assessing performance and functionality, we can identify any issues and allocate resources to the most urgent issues. The problem is that traditional audits just aren’t getting the job done. It’s rare to find an SEO audit that will give you a complete picture of your website performance, and a lot of automated audits won’t be able to distinguish critical issues from an issue that doesn’t actually affect SEO performance.
If you want to get a better picture, you should find an audit that involves human intervention from an SEO expert. Here at Demandwell, we feel there’s a better way to prepare a powerful SEO audit, and it starts by covering all three of the main SEO components: infrastructure, content, and endorsements—also known as I.C.E.
We start with infrastructure because it’s the bedrock of your site and your overall SEO strategy. This category covers all the technical elements of your company’s online presence. This would include the behind-the-scenes factors like page-load times, code bugs, SSL certificates, dead links, and more. Your SEO audit report must cover these issues because Google ranks your site based on its functionality and navigability to users. Google wants to make sure that its users can find answers to their questions quickly and easily, which is why a solid infrastructure can help your site to be more successful with SEO.
Here at Demandwell, one of our key focus areas is how content can be a powerful tool to improve your ranking and drive more organic traffic to your site. This section is mostly about staying organized with the way you are publishing new content. Check to see if you have proper title tags and meta descriptions, correctly format H1s and H2s, and identify “thin content”. It’s easy to make mistakes when scaling content production for SEO, so monitoring the health of your content can ensure your efforts don’t get wasted by sloppy publishing.
An SEO endorsement audit provides an in-depth analysis of your current external linking strategy. It covers the links on other websites that link back to your site. A truly insightful audit will look at the performance of your paid links, as well as the quality and quantity of the links on your site. Having strong backlinks on other sites demonstrates your authority in this space, and it signals to Google that people trust your content and find it relevant. Monitoring how many endorsements you have, the quality of your endorsements, and preventing toxic links from endorsing your website will take a mature SEO program and push it to the next level.
These are the three main pillars of SEO — infrastructure, content, and endorsements. Demandwell offers an automated auditing feature called the SEO Health Scorecard that covers all three of these main pillars and provides you with dynamic recommendations from real SEO experts on where you can take your SEO program to the next level.
