Forensic SEO Audits
ANATOMY OF A FORENSIC SEO AUDIT & ANALYSIS
Every audit performed is custom tailored to your specific situation. Generally speaking though, an SEO website audit should include, but not necessarily be limited to:
- Top Keyword Phrase Analysis – Evaluation and assessment of top phrases
- Deep Content Analysis – Content depth and seeding review, cross-page SEO relationship review
- Code Level Analysis – Under the hood examination of SEO factors
- Inbound Link Analysis – Review & analysis of your site’s inbound link profile
- Related Site Analysis – Review of top performing sites in your market
- Social Media Landscape – Review social media landscape in your market
( For more information read Alan’s article on the anatomy of an SEO Audit part 1 / part 2 / part 3 / part 4)
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Forensic Audits
A Professional SEO audit involves a forensic analysis of your existing web site inside and out. The primary benefits of an SEO Audit include helping you understand where your site falls short from a search engine indexing and ranking perspective. They unlock the keys to prospering through people finding your site when they conduct a search at Google, Bing and other search engines and web directories.
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SEO Action Plans
While most SEO audits will list many, if not all of the things wrong with your site from a search engine optimization perspective, our audits also include a full industry best practices action plan tailored to your unique situation and market focus. Every problem area we list and describe in our audits is followed by a tasking recommendation – actionable information that becomes the road map to achieving high rankings in Google and other search engines.
It’s one thing to spit out typical things most sites lack in regard to SEO. It’s another matter altogether to be handed the step by step, prioritized tasks necessary for you to truly achieve long lasting results. Every audit we write includes an action plan based on SEO best practices, tailored to your specific circumstance. With prioritization to every action item in the plan, this allows you to move forward on the most important tasks first.
This is critical to most business owners and site managers because implementing an entire audit’s action plan can quite often require more time, resources and expense than you might otherwise be able to afford. Perhaps it’s due to overall financial reality, or departmental budgetary constraints. Whatever the cause or reason, with one of our audits, you can be sure you’ll have the ability to tackle what you can today, and what to focus on as time and financial resources permit.
IMPLEMENTING TASKS
Once the audit is completed, we would be happy to discuss the implementation process with you. Quite often, clients have the ability and resources to implement at least some of the action plan tasking, and in those situations, this would be more of a collaborative process. If needed, if scheduling allows, my team and I may be able to perform those services for you. Alternately, we are also available to train your staff in many aspects of optimizing content, seeking and obtaining inbound links, and more.
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SEO Consulting Service
If you choose to perform action plan recommendations in-house, or work with a 3rd party company or consultant to implement the plan contained in one of my audits, I am available to provide ongoing consulting services in order to help facilitate that implementation. Given my experience in project management, site coding, and content writing you can be sure that we have the capacity to communicate with everyone participating in the process in ways each person understands.
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Audit Pricing
So how much does a truly comprehensive industry best practices SEO website audit cost? Well, that depends on several factors. Do you already have a web site, or are you just now about to launch one? What is your market focus? How deep is the competitive landscape? How big is your site? How important is social media to your business or to your competition?
All of these factors go into determining the cost of an audit, which might take as few as 10 hours and as many as 50, or more. Generally speaking, audit pricing starts at $3,500.00 and can go up from there. Major sites in highly competitive markets or big brand sites with hundreds of thousands or millions of pages can expect to pay a minimum of $7,500.00, or as much as $10,000.00 for an audit.
FREE SEO AUDITS
But what about all those companies offering a free SEO site audit?
Ah yes – some companies, even some reputable companies, offer free audits. We no longer do so for several reasons. First, we’re not just going to do a cursory review of your site in less than an hour. It’s going to take at least ten hours to fifteen hours of our time. Would YOU expend fifteen hours of your work week with the end goal of handing someone the step by step comprehensive road map to their ultimate success in business?
And since this is both an audit and a road map to improved results, you’re free to take your implementation business elsewhere. Because we believe in the notion that you shouldn’t be locked in to some long term high rate contract just because you feel like you’ve got no choice.
The only question left, then, is, are you ready to achieve the goals you hope to online?
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Note About Implementation Results:
Even when you implement every recommendation we suggest, we still cannot guarantee specific results. Unfortunately, this is the nature of SEO and the fact that search engines retain strictly private control over their exact ranking methods and algorithms. However, we believe our experience based process, combined with our deep understanding of the concepts within SEO as related to user experience seen through search engine lenses, allows us to provide clients with the best chances for improvements.
