One of the most popular services we offer here at Big Fin SEO is a website audit. A site audit is usually a technical assessment of your website, focusing on optimization to help you appear in search results. Although other assets, like your Google Business Profile, can have a significant positive impact on search engine traffic, getting your website to appear at the top of organic search results is paramount.

Site Audit

So what’s included in a site audit? There are many factors you should be looking for in a site audit. Big Fin reviews more than 60 critical factors in our website audits. That said here are the most important as you think about what areas to focus on.

1. Is your website accessible? If your site can’t be crawled by search engines, you’re in trouble. We recently completed a full site audit for a client but quickly learn that the www. version of their URL was inaccessible. As a result, Google was unable to crawl the site. Make sure that everything redirects to a single domain. Whether that has www. at the beginning or not doesn’t matter. What’s more important is that your site can be crawled. A good way to check for this is by setting up your Google Search Console account. Upload your sitemap and make sure it’s being crawled. You can also look at the indexing tab to see which pages are being crawled.
2. Are your Core Web Vitals up to speed? A while back, Google actually simplified SEO from a technical perspective. Under the Page Experience Update, Google made it clear that sites must meet minimum thresholds around “experience”.  Sounds simple enough, but getting there can be a challenge. Google is focused on a few key metrics: LCP, FID, and CLS. Largest Contentful Paint or LCP measures website loading performance. To provide a good user experience, Google recommends that you have LCP occur within the first 2.5 seconds of the page loading. First Input Delay (FID) measures interactivity. How quickly can someone actually interact with your web pages? To provide a good user experience, strive to have an FID of less than 100 milliseconds. And finally, Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience,  Google says your CLS should be less than 0.1.
3. Are On-page Factors Being Met? In addition to your website being accessible and meeting the page experience thresholds, your site audit should also look at on-page factors. This includes things like meta titles, meta descriptions, alt-image tags, H1 headings, and more. These are easy things you can do on your website pages to make them more accessible to search engines and help them understand what your content is all about.  Since on-page factors are in your control, I strongly recommend you cross the t’s and dot the i’s.

Site Audit Tools

The good news here is that software is available to help with your site audit. Keep in mind that free tools, and even paid site audit tools are only as good as the information you provide. Some tools simply need a URL and they do the rest. Others benefit by connecting with your Google Analytics account or search console. And some even ask for competitors and target keywords. Even if you’re able to generate a list of technical improvements, it’s always recommended to have an SEO expert review the results and interpret them for you. This is a worthwhile investment because it allows you to focus on the changes that can have the greatest impact on search results.

Big Fin Site Audit

If you’re looking for a professional SEO site audit that can enhance your organic search results, contact us to learn more about our comprehensive site audit and optimization solutions.