Auditing for Success in SEO: Find Your Website’s Next Great Opportunity

As businesses are investing more in SEO, the expectation to see results is increasing. A recent survey from Search Engine Journal shows that 22% of clients want to see traffic increase as a result of SEO work. That puts a lot of pressure on marketers to deliver.

So how can SEO professionals optimise and get results faster?

Brainlabs has developed a website audit framework to help solve this problem. This audit reviews the current status of a website to find key areas of opportunity for growth within the search landscape. It uncovers short-term and long-term opportunities and information needed to build out a solid search strategy.

Maturity Audit in 6 Steps

The audit framework comprises 6 areas, which are detailed below or click the banner to hear more in our webinar:

1. Technical Compliance

Following the technical guidelines of search engines is essential to make sure the content and most important pages are shown to the target audience. Similar to many SEO tech audits, it checks key areas like ranking blockers, indexation, and site speed. The results from this section help understand issues that are preventing the website from being indexable and visible within the SERPs.y through third party cookies (these cookies are now deleted on major browsers such as Safari and Firefox and will be removed from Chrome in 2023). These cookies are used to attribute conversions across multiple ad interactions and enable targeting of these customers across the web.

2. SEO Tracking

Not only does effective tracking help report on how well a site is performing, it helps us spot issues and predict future performance. Using this framework, we check current website tracking and pose some important questions:
Are we tracking all pages across the site in Google Analytics?
Are we tracking conversions in an effective way?
Do we have plans to evolve our tracking over time?

The answers to these questions help inform whether our data gathering is useful as well as new or missed opportunities that we can track and report.

3. Competitors

Benchmarking performance against competitors helps to understand the size of the opportunity and whether we’re under threat. The framework looks at how popular our brand is compared to top market competitors within the search landscape. It also compares non-branded rankings with search competitors, which may differ from market competitor brands. The findings can help you create a strong strategy to compete within the search landscape.

4. Link Profile

While relevance to a search is key, weak link profiles can hinder performance. It’s particularly important to know if a website might be penalised for link spam. This section analyses the number of links pointing to the site and the strength of those links. It compares link profiles with main competitors to scope out linking opportunities. Lastly, the audit checks for “spammy” links to determine if the site is at risk for penalty.

5. On-site Content

The only way we can get traffic and results is by producing targeted content. Once we know we’re targeting the right search intents, we need to make sure we’re creating content to fulfil those searches. This section looks at how often new content is posted on the site. It determines where traffic and conversions are coming from, whether it’s different pieces of content or if we’re heavily reliant on a small number of pages. This further helps determine future content strategy and internal linking.

6. Search Opportunity

It’s important to have a process for identifying opportunities so you can proactively grow the website. This section helps determine and prioritise searches you want to target. We investigate keyword targeting and mapping, as well as conversion paths to measure current success. From there, we can determine potential opportunities based on searches we think we should appear for.

Building a Search Strategy with your Results

The results from this audit can reveal key opportunities and help inform a solid search strategy. It prioritises actions and timelines depending on how each of the six sections currently performs. You can use the data and insights to support planned actions and set you up for success.