Five mistakes teams make with SEO audits
This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit SEO audits.
Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.
Warning signs
- Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
- Assuming someone else already owns it
- An audit is only useful if it ends in a prioritised list
- Fix crawlability before chasing keywords
- Never checking whether the fix actually worked
Most sites have a handful of issues doing most of the damage. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
A reasonable first step
What this looks like day to day
Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Three things worth confirming about SEO audits before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Most sites have a handful of issues doing most of the damage — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.