Comprehensive SEO Audit Services

SEO audits are the cornerstone of any successful organic marketing campaign. Without them, your site simply won’t rank – no matter how good your content is.

While it’s possible to complete an SEO audit on your own, a great deal of specialist knowledge and expertise is required to make sure it’s done right. Embryo’s team of SEO experts can carry out a full SEO audit of your website, saving you valuable time and resources and ensuring your site is optimised to the best it can be.

Read on to learn more about our comprehensive and innovative SEO audit service, or get in touch with the team by calling 0161 327 2635 or emailing [email protected].

What Is an SEO Audit and Why Is It Important?

An SEO audit is an in-depth evaluation of your website that tells you how well it is optimised for search engines. Carrying out regular SEO audits is important so that any issues with your website, be it lead gen, an eCommerce site, or any other type, can be identified and resolved, creating the best possible foundation for your campaign.

A technical SEO audit can also highlight positives as well as negatives, helping you to identify opportunities that might increase your site’s visibility.

Some of the key areas that a comprehensive audit will check and score include:
• Meta optimisation
• Schema optimisation
• Page speed and core web vitals
• Site structure and hierarchy
• Internal and external linking
• Crawlability and indexability
• Image optimisation
• Sitemap optimisation
• Duplication
• Security

It’s possible to carry out an SEO audit yourself if you have access to the relevant SEO tools and expertise. However, if you’re not entirely confident in your SEO abilities, it’s always best to get a team of SEO experts to do it for you.

Boosting Page Speed

Ensuring your website runs quickly is one of the most important parts of the audit process. Slow websites simply don’t perform well – not to mention the fact that Google has indicated that page speed is a significant ranking factor for its search algorithms.

You could have great content, which responds to all the signals that Google has introduced in recent updates, such as the Helpful Content Update, but if the page is clunky, you will lose the interest of users.

Users have very little patience when it comes to page speed. If they have to wait for your page to load, they’ll likely click off it and go to the next relevant link, which means you could end up losing conversions to your competitors.

For brands in congested industries that are aiming to dominate their local SEO, having a fast-loading site can prevent them from heading to a direct competitor.

If your website has slow load speeds, there is plenty we can do to improve it off the back of our SEO technical audit:
• Image optimisation: Including images on your pages is important to keep users engaged, but large images can slow down your website speed, especially on mobile devices. To fix this, we can compress the images on your site while maintaining their quality so that the file sizes are smaller and don’t take as long to load. As well as images, optimising videos is also essential.
• Javascript and CSS minification: Code (Javascript in particular) is notorious for slowing websites down, and can make your site difficult for Google to crawl. We can optimise your coding to massively improve your page loading speed.
• Reducing your redirects: Redirects are sometimes necessary, but having too many can lower your page speed. Your redirect chains can be cleared up and optimised in order to cut a few seconds off your site loading time.
• Browser caching: When a browser caches a website, it won’t need to reload the page from scratch when a user revisits your website, which can improve your page speed significantly.

Improving Internal Linking

Internal linking is a vital element of SEO and something we look at very carefully when carrying out our site audits. It tells search engines how the site is structured, how pages relate to one another, and which are the most important pages on the site.

However, many websites have a poor internal linking structure, failing to link to the correct pages or using incorrect anchor text that does not correctly signal to the user or Google what the linked-to page is about.

A proper link architecture is not only a fantastic white hat SEO technique but it is one of the easiest ways of optimising your site because you’re not relying on third parties.

Internal linking really comes into its own when you combine it with long-form content. By opting to write thousands of words you give yourself an opportunity to link to more internal pages and create an even greater web architecture.

With a large site, improving the internal linking can be an ongoing job, which we can split into two stages: an internal linking analysis and the internal linking improvements.

Internal linking analysis:
• Discover which pages need more internal links
• Find pages without internal links
• Find pages with bigger linking ‘juice’
• Find all improper anchor text

Internal linking improvements:
• Capitalise on everything we’ve found

Optimising Your Sitemap

When Google’s search crawlers come to your website and begin indexing content, they’ll use your sitemap to find their way around. The sitemap is essentially a list and map of all the pages on your website and is a hugely important part of technical SEO.

Having a well-optimised sitemap is key to ensuring that Google finds all of the most important pages on your site. Our SEO experts will make sure your sitemap is as organised as it possibly can be to ensure all of your pages are indexed correctly and help you achieve the best results.

Ensuring Security

Having a secure website is absolutely essential, which is why we will make sure your website has HTTPS as part of our auditing process. Proper site security helps to grow trust between your site and search engines. Trust makes up the ‘T’ in E-E-A-T which is an acronym that stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust. Developed by Google, these guidelines are used to determine how helpful content is on a website – the more of these signals that are displayed, the better your content will rank.

HTTPS is not only a known ranking signal for Google but is also a vital part of building trust with the user.

We may need to install SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer, on your server to ensure your website can be viewed using HTTPS and not HTTP. This means that all information and data transferred between the website and server (such as passwords, payment information, and personal details) is encrypted and secure.