SEO audits for small teams

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. Most advice about SEO audits assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

What to keep

An audit is only useful if it ends in a prioritised list. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens.

Where to start

Most sites have a handful of issues doing most of the damage. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

What this looks like day to day

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. 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

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.