SEO Audit

The first step in creating a successful SEO campaign is the perceptive compilation between organizational members as to what the goals and issues of the site are as well as how they feel the site is currently performing in respect to current SEO best practices. This also helps us to gain a better understanding of your site’s “mission”, how we can help and how to build a mutual understanding between us as to how we can work together effectively. Below, you will find the contents of our SEO Audit or for your convienance we offer a Printable SEO Audit.

Basic Information

In this area, you should describe the nature of your business and the overall goal of your web site. Tell the auditor what “makes you tick”, what you’re trying to achieve (leads/sales/traffic/branding) and a give them a brief history of the company and your domain name.

Be sure to list any items that describe your web site, its history, how the site was developed, and other information about how the site is and was created and how it got to the current form that it is in today. The history of the web site and the domain name can be important when completing the SEO Audit.

Search Engine Reputation

What is your opinion of the site:

- Overall search engine reputation?

- Current search engine rankings

- Keywords ranking in the top 10 in Google

- Keywords ranking in the top 10 in Yahoo!

- Keywords ranking in the top 10 in MSN

- Google PageRank

- How often Google caches the pages on the site

- Alexa Ranking

- Compete.com Rank

Search Engine Exposure (against other keyword competitors)

What is your opinion of the site:

- number of pages indexed

- How does this compare with other Web sites ranking in the top 10 for the keywords targeted?

- average number of new web pages being added

Web Site Structure

- Does the Web site have a search engine “friendly” structure?

- What is your opinion on the navigation being used?

- Is it text-based, image-based, flash- based?

- What is your opinion of the site’s URL structure?

- Are the URLs based on keywords or are the URLs dynamic?

- What is your opinion of the site’s Header Tag usage (H1, H2, H3, etc.)

- What is your opinion of the site’s use of textual content on the page

- What is your opinion of the site’s Sitemap

- What is your opinion of the site’s robots.txt file?

Link Popularity

What is your opinion of the site’s

- overall link popularity

- outgoing links and outgoing link strategy

- links from social bookmarking and social networking web sites

- link growth

- links from directories (Yahoo Directory, DMOZ, BOTW, Business.com, etc.)

- links from .edu web sites

- links from Wikipedia

- links from .gov sites

Internal Link Structure

What is your opinion of the site’s

- use of (or non-use of) nofollow tags

- use of internal navigation

- “crawlability” of site

Site Meta Data

- title tags

- meta description tags

- meta keywords tags

What is your opinion of the domain name?

- Age

- length of the domain

- keywords in the domain name

- other domains the

- canonical issues (use of www.domain.com versus domain.com)

- subdomains being used

- Redirects (from other domain names owned)

- Are there other domains that could be purchased?

Other Issues

What is your overall opinion of the web site’s search engine optimization efforts? Is there anything that you feel that was not included in this document that needs to be addressed?

Print the Search Engine Optimization Audit