SEO audit: the importance of a good seo analysis

We analyze an extensive set of factors that include things such as your domain name, page indexing, 404 errors (= broken links), page structure, breadcrumb trail, internal linking, inbound and outbound links, site content, site structure, title tags and meta descriptions, images (weight, quality, relevance), local SEO, pagination etc.

This list is non-exhaustive since we also take time to understand your company, your ambitions, your goals and your industry. If other elements seem important to us with regard to your issues, we include them in the audit.

The SEO audit is a very important document in which an SEO specialist will go through many factors to analyze the health of your website, the actions that have been taken previously and their positive or negative consequences. Depending on the site being studied, this analysis will take between 15 and 25 hours (yes, it’s long).

We have had several cases of customers who wanted us to start working on their site without first doing an SEO analysis or who wanted us to rely on an SEO audit that was done previously by another SEO expert. This situation can be problematic.

In many cases, the SEO audit was carried out more than 6 months ago, recommendations have already been made and some optimizations have been implemented. The point is that we cannot guarantee the SEO optimizations that have been implemented and assume that the work has been done well. Moreover, companies often decide to switch SEO experts because the work did not have the desired results.

An SEO audit focuses on the status of your site at some point before certain recommendations have been implemented, much like a snapshot of your online presence at some point in time. If actions are subsequently taken, the snapshot is no longer up-to-date and therefore has to be retaken.

This is why if another expert takes over the project, they will have to do their own SEO analysis to find out exactly what actions have been taken and whether they comply with Google’s rules (unfortunately some SEO experts still have practices that are not recommended by Google and can penalize you). In addition, when the SEO audit was done several months prior, there may have been major changes in the algorithms that could make some factors less applicable. When the SEO analysis has already been performed by another specialist, the analysis may also not be complete or the quality standards may differ (this is often the case).

Yes, some robots do a quick SEO analysis of your site that you can get for free or almost free in a few minutes. These robots analyze measurable site data such as site loading time, number of characters in title tags, number of characters in meta description tags, links to your site, etc.

They can also check if your site is mobile-friendly or not. In a way, they do a quantitative analysis of your site. However, Google and other search engines focus on quality: content quality, user experience quality, site structure quality, etc.

Robots are unable to determine if your title tag is optimized and compelling, if your service page is optimized for the right keyword, if it would be better to split your single service page into 4 different pages to optimize the content on 4 different keywords.

Robots also cannot see if your content is properly organized or if it brings added value to Internet users. A robot operates according to strict rules and is not capable of using common sense. It always takes a human to interpret the data and decipher it to draw reliable conclusions.

Each agency has its own method of performing SEO audits and it is difficult to know in advance the quality of the SEO audit you will receive. At My Little Big Web, we are not in the business of disparaging the work of other web agencies because we know that there are other agencies that perform excellent SEO audits. We are not going to tell you that our SEO audits are the best on the market because we have no idea. On the other hand, we can say that the SEO audits performed by My Little Big Web have a standard of quality and level of detail that none of our clients have found disappointing.

The key point is that the SEO audit we carry out for your website will provide the roadmap that will guide us towards achieving the goals we have set (increased Google rankings). The deeper/more precise the analysis, the clearer we will be able to see how to outperform your competitors.