SEO Site Audit Service: What It Is & Why It’s Beneficial

Let’s face it—your website could be doing better. When 88% of site visitors are unlikely to come back after a bad experience, site performance isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s a must-have.

It’s time to level up your online game with an SEO site audit service. Learn what a site audit entails and how it can best serve your business’s online visibility and experience. 

What Is a Site Audit?

A site audit evaluates your website’s performance. This in-depth analysis identifies strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities to improve organic search visibility and user experience.

What Are the Benefits of Site Audits?

Here’s the down-low on why you need a site audit. A site audit helps you:

• Rank higher in search engines by fixing technical issues and optimizing content.
• Improve user experience with faster load times and better mobile performance.
• Increase organic traffic by targeting relevant keywords and creating high-quality content.
• Boost conversions by optimizing calls to action and website forms.
• Save money on paid marketing by leveraging organic SEO.

Gain more insights into the areas site audits cover by exploring this 16-point site health checklist. 

What Are the Main Types of Site Audits?

To cater to the diverse range of businesses out there, there are four main types of audits: 

1. Enterprise: An enterprise site audit examines larger websites with hundreds or thousands of pages. It often covers a variety of tasks, such as large-scale content audits and technical SEO elements. 
2. eCommerce: An eCommerce site audit analyzes an online store’s online performance and health from the site architecture to its indexability/crawlability.
3. Small or local business: A small business audit evaluates a site’s performance and local relevance, focused on improving a brand’s online presence and attracting more potential customers.
4. Mobile: Given that 96.2% of users visit sites on their phones, mobile site audits are essential to any brand’s digital marketing mix. These audits dive into responsive design, page speed, and more to ensure your mobile site is user-optimized. 

Professional Site Audit vs. DIY: The Pros & Cons

While the DIY route is an option, leaning on professional site audit services from folks like Big Leap gives you access to an expert team that can truly help you elevate your online potential. 

Let’s break it down.

DIY SEO Site Audit

The Pros:

• Free: There are no upfront costs, as you’re your own boss.
• Control: You’re in the driver’s seat.

The Cons:

• Time-consuming: If you haven’t done a site audit before, the technical knowledge and effort required can take some time to catch up to.
• Limited insights: Without an expert by your side, you might miss out on critical issues.
• Cost: You will need to invest in site audit tools, which can be costly if there is a lot of trial and error in the DIY journey. 

Professional SEO Site Audit:

The Pros:

• Expert analysis: You get in-depth insights from SEO professionals, ensuring you’ve got all your bases covered.
• Comprehensive report: You’ll receive detailed findings and actionable recommendations.
• Less work: Professionals handle the technical aspects for you.
• Objective assessment: You get an unbiased evaluation of your website’s performance.

The Cons:

• Cost: A professional site audit does require some monetary investment.
• Partnership may require time: It might take time to find the right site audit team that not only can work well with your team but also has the expertise to address your business’s unique needs. 

Big Leap’s Site Audit vs. Automated Site Audits

While automated site audits (which tech companies are known to provide) offer a quick overview of technical issues plaguing your site, they often lack the depth and nuance of a comprehensive, human-led audit. 

Here’s why a human-led audit conducted by experts like Big Leap offers a significant advantage:

• Customized analysis: Human auditors can tailor the audit to your specific website’s needs and goals, identifying issues automated tools may miss.
• In-depth insights: An automated audit simply spits out a report after you type in your domain. Our experts delve deeper into your website’s performance, analyzing factors like content quality, user experience, and SEO best practices. 
• Actionable and strategic recommendations: We provide clear, actionable recommendations tailored to your business objectives, helping you prioritize improvements and measure results. Our team can offer strategic advice on optimizing your website for long-term success.

By combining the power of human expertise with advanced tools, we can deliver comprehensive site audits that drive real results.

Site Audit Examples

A site audit led by professional digital marketers serves as a firm foundation for an excellent online strategy. Here’s how a couple of examples where a professional site audit helped businesses reap significant rewards.

Auto Care Bolsters Online Performance

Automotive care company Auto Care approached our professional SEO site auditors with the intention of growing its traffic, rankings, and sales. 

Areas of focus in the site audit included: 

• Optimizing metadata and heading tags
• Fixing broken pages and links
• Recommending a new site theme to enhance UX or functionality
• Optimizing images
• Speeding up pages

Implementing these recommendations laid a successful foundation for Auto Care’s site health, which manifested in: 

• 105% increase in traffic
• 77% increase in goal conversions
• 24% decrease in bounce rates 

Dr. Harvey’s Takes Full Advantage of a Professional Technical SEO Site Audit

Great products, but no one knows about them? That’s a common problem when you miss out on site audits. Dr. Harvey’s, a brand offering premium pet food, faced this challenge.

The Big Leap team helped elevate Dr. Harvey’s connections with pet parents with a strategy that included a technical SEO site audit. Because the client’s site was custom-coded, this required technical improvements to optimize the site’s performance.

These changes ultimately contributed to massive wins for Dr. Harvey’s that included: 

• 580% ROI
• 481% increase in users 
• 29% organic revenue growth

Explore more of our case studies. 

Site Audit Report Example

So what does a site audit report look like, exactly? The right marketing agency will have a solidified site audit process. 

For instance, Big Leap executes a 163-point site audit checklist (this is regularly updated) that covers three main phases: 

• SEO Core Fundamentals: Looks at SEO factors, such as content, canonicalization, and site architecture
• Technical Details: Evaluate technical aspects of the site, such as site speed, semantic markup, and mobile elements
• Additional Improvements: Analyzes other site components that may help with UX or site performance, such as images and videos, along with multilingual sites

SEO Site Audit Cost

The cost of an SEO site audit can vary significantly based on several factors, including:

• Website size and complexity: Larger, more complex websites typically require more in-depth analysis and, therefore, cost more to audit.  
• Scope of the audit: A basic audit may cover only essential technical and on-page factors, while a comprehensive audit may include a deeper dive into technical SEO, content analysis, and competitor analysis.  
• Experience and reputation of agency or consultant: More experienced and reputable professionals often charge higher rates.

Start with a Free Mini Site Audit with Big Leap

While we’re talking costs, we’ll toot our horn a bit—Big Leap offers a mini free site audit for new prospective clients looking to enhance their online visibility. This mini audit covers the general SEO health of your site along with a competitive analysis. 

Contact the team to learn more about this opportunity or to chat with us about getting an in-depth, 163-point site audit.