WordPress SEO audit.

A website audit is not just my opinion of your site, it’s an objective and independent report from two of the most respected SEO apps – SEM Rush and ahrefs.

Seo experts use these apps daily to check sites and get reports about errors, issues and warnings on your website.

These audits check everything and report on what needs fixing and where the problems are.

The main benefit for you is that your site gets a score out of 100, so if it comes in at 50/100 and I do some work on it, you can see the improvements when we re-run the audit.

I am a big fan of the transparency this provides clients on the effectiveness of my work—there’s no hiding from it. You can see that you were 50/100, and I’ve done some work on your site, and you are now 97/100.

SEO tip – be wary of any SEO expert who does not invest in and use these tools – they are not cheap, but they demonstrate effective work to clients; every professional SEO company should use them.

I’ve never looked at your site before, so it helps me understand its current state.

You may have run audits on your site before, but I haven’t, so it’s an essential part of the process for me to understand your site.

There’s no charge for the initial audit I run, and I do take the time to explain the results – I don’t just send you a report.

I need to know how well your site has been built and how good your current technical and on-page SEO is; without this, I am simply guessing that you don’t have an objective benchmark for your site.

I will let you know what everything means and what needs to be done.

There are plenty of things that you can fix on your WordPress yourself without having to pay me to do them. When I report back on the audit, I will tell you about the stuff that I think you should do yourself and the stuff that you will need me to look at.

Common errors like missing ALT tags on images don’t require my time to fix—you can do them yourself if you have the time.

Experience has shown me that getting everything on your site in tip-top condition before you invest in any other SEO is time well spent.

Site audits are detailed reports about the technical aspects of your site.

Here’s an example from one of my sites (currently undergoing a rebuild).

• Example SIte Audit

This is a large site, but you will see in the example that the audit reports on all issues, explains what the issue is, and points you to the root of the problem so it can be fixed.

This site is a beta version of a pet project I am working on, so it has many errors, which we are currently fixing with a rebuild.

Here’s an explanation of what you are looking at here.

The audit crawls the site like search engine bots and finds errors, issues, and warnings.

• Errors: these need fixing ASAP. If the audit is experiencing these errors, so are the search engine bots.
• Warnings: ideally, these things should be fixed but with a lower priority than the errors.
• Notices: these are niggles, and some can often be ignored, but if you want 100%, you need to address these too.

The report starts by identifying the top issues on the site, giving us a starting point for urgent fixes.

One key thing to remember is that 1000 errors can often be fixed by tweaking one piece of code, so don’t have a breakdown when you see large numbers.

For example, this site has 16,220 issues with unminified JS and CSS files—that sort of problem can be fixed using a plugin like WP Rocket, which minifies everything correctly.

Common issues you can fix yourself.

• Too much title text: You can go through your page titles and rewrite them to the correct lengths
• Pages without an H1 heading: again, something you can do yourself by adding the H1 headings to the offending pages
• Temporary redirects (301): If these are old, you can remove them
• Broken links: Go to the page and fix the link. It’s simple!
• Duplicate content: Simply go and de-duplicate it

The above are good examples of things you can fix if you have time.

You will see in the report that SEM Rush identifies the issue, shows you where it is, and tells you how to fix it.

That depends on how much you want to do it yourself.

As previously mentioned, there are many things that you can do yourself to fix problems in an SEO audit.

The problem is that most small business owners already have too much to do, so it gets added to your to-do list and never gets done.

If you want me to fix the issues highlighted in the site audit, the time it takes will depend very much on what the errors are.

Once I have run the audit, I can give you a near-perfect estimate of how long things will take.

Most audits show issues; the starting point is to decide what needs to be fixed, what we can live with and what to ignore.

It is not always necessary to fix everything on your website. A site audit will show some issues you might want to ignore, as fixing them is impossible.

A typical example is the text-to-HTML ratio that some audits report on. This issue occurs when your page has more code than human-readable text.

This happens when your WordPress theme is spitting out tons of code to render your site and to fix it; you need to ensure that your readable copy is at least 10% or more of the total HTML.

This would mean writing more content for the page, which is not always possible; the last thing you want to do is pad out the content to meet this metric.

Part of my job is to help guide you through this process of what to fix and what to ignore. This can save you time and money as we’ll not waste budget fixing things that don’t need to be fixed.