How a Quick SEO Audit Can Help You With Future Clients

Working on a website’s on-page SEO can be tiresome and sometimes a never-ending daunting task, and business owners know this.  There are hundreds of different factors that Google uses to rank each site and the typical business owner may not even know what needs to be done. This is their chance to dazzle them with their thorough in-depth knowledge of what might be holding their site back from generating traffic in the search engines. All with an SEO site analysis that takes only a few minutes to complete.

An SEO site audit will get you started off right when talking to potential clients as business owners understand that to optimize their site to the fullest, you need to have a strong understanding of what’s working and what’s not. This is where you fly in and save the day. Rather than going through and running manual tests that take hours, sometimes days, you can run a complete website audit and see immediate results. Website audits will automatically tell you exactly what’s wrong with a website, and sometimes even how to fix it, in a matter of minutes, not days. You just need the URL.

When you enter the URL into a website audit, you’ll receive a report that breaks down the traffic, keywords, backlinks, critical site errors, SEO errors, site speed and more. These reports show you exactly where their website is doing well and more importantly, what things need some help. The best thing about the report is that it’s generated in just a few minutes. Let’s walk through typical audit sections to get a better understanding of what the report does and why their potential clients will be impressed, giving you the leg up

1. Audit overview

In the overview of their SEO site audit, you’ll receive an overall score. This score combines all of their tactics and gives you a number out of 100 – the higher their number, the better their score. Some reports also show their search traffic per month, how many keywords their site is currently ranking for, and an overview of their current backlinks.

The great thing about an audit is that you can find out more details about everything. By clicking on each respective score/number, you’ll find a full report that individually breaks down pages, changes over time, issues and even includes recommendations. You can see what their top performing pages are, and which pages need help.

If you want to gain more backlinks, do some digging to see what sites have linked to certain pages and aim to create similar content.

2. Health overview

Following the audit overview section, you’ll notice something unique. You’ll see their overall site health in terms of errors, broken or redirected links, warnings, and even recommendations for improvement. Using the site health analytics, you can suggest fixes for any errors or broken links which can lead to substantially increase their potential client’s overall rankings.

Suggest fixing any and all critical errors that are shown. These will have the biggest impact on rankings and will give their users a better overall experience right from the start. Then you can move on to warnings, which are usually less impactful, but still important. If the SEO audit gives you any recommendations, consider taking them. They might not directly improve their rankings, but they are still important.

Using this section will help you find the individual pages that have errors and will then prompt you to fix them. This is much more streamlined than doing things manually, especially if their website has thousands of pages already indexed. Sometimes the problems are easily fixable and other times they’ll be more time consuming. Regardless of what comes up, the best thing you can do is to take things one at a time and get everything in the best condition possible. Some auditing tools even tell you how to fix the problem, which is great if you’re not an experienced web developer.

Start with the problems that have the highest impact and work their way down the list. An audit will prioritize the problems for you to make things easier.

3. Loading times

One of the most important SEO factors is loading times and overall site speed. The faster it is, the better you’ll rank. An audit will tell you exactly how many seconds their website and respective pages take to load on both a desktop and mobile device.

While speed does tend to vary depending on user connection and device, you’ll understand their average load speed and develop a good starting point. Remember, if a site takes longer than three seconds to load, you’ll lose a little under half of their prospective visitors.

Luckily, the audit makes it easy to see what is slowing down their loading time. If you aren’t sure how to fix it, check out the helpful audit resources that are included in their report. Site speed is an important factor in user experience and shouldn’t be ignored.

4. General SEO issues

Finally, an audit will show you any destructive SEO problems their site is experiencing. It will primarily focus on the most important errors; the ones that will make the most impact on their ranking. Suggest starting with those and work their way down the list. Again, it’s important to get everything fixed if you want to make the biggest impact on rankings. Some SEO issues are easy, such as title tag problems, while some may be more difficult. Remind potential clients that they don’t have to fix everything in one day. As long as they continually improve, they’ll see a noticeable rise in their overall rankings and thus, website traffic.

If you’re in marketing or web development and want to dazzle potential clients, using an SEO audit is the best way to do it. In a matter of minutes, you’ll have an overview of their site, what’s working, and what needs help. Find a site audit tool that works for you and is easy to manage then start incorporating it when talking with potential clients. Suggest the changes and fixes and more importantly, let them know that you are able to help as well, should they end up hiring you.