Technical SEO Audits
Diagnose issues with an SEO Audit and take the first steps toward growing your traffic and revenue
What is a Technical SEO Audit?
At its most basic, a technical SEO audit will review key aspects of your website’s functionality, crawlability and indexability that directly impact your site’s ability to rank in Google. Using these findings, a report with actionable, prioritized insights will tell you what’s not working with your site.
Unfortunately, what an SEO audit is and what it should be aren’t always the same. Other agencies may offer an inexpensive report or a free, unsolicited instant SEO audit as a marketing gimmick, but we believe you get what you pay for. Instead of a generic, jargon-heavy auto-generated report full of content spit out by a third-party tool, Transistor offers a comprehensive, actionable SEO audit report that examines all the factors that affect your site’s competitiveness, written by humans for humans. Our SEO audits identify problems and offer solutions you can implement to improve your site right away and plan for the future in a language everyone can understand.
Why Is an SEO Audit Important?
An SEO audit plays a crucial role in establishing a strong foundation and strategy for long-term success. It serves as an essential evaluation of the website’s overall performance, covering various vital aspects such as content, technical SEO, and the foundation on which the site is built based on the CMS. A professional SEO audit provides businesses with valuable insights into potential issues that may be hindering their website’s crawlability, indexability and more. This comprehensive assessment helps identify major gaps alongside actionable plans to improve performance,
Our custom approach to Technical SEO audits
At Transistor, we believe a custom, detailed technical SEO audit is the most effective way to uncover issues that might hinder the effectiveness of ongoing SEO work. That’s why we start nearly all our retainers with one. Completing an SEO audit with Transistor will help you decide whether you need ongoing SEO help or short-term advisory work. We take both a macro and micro view, digging into the details of your website’s technical performance, page performance and analyzing how your site stacks up to your competitors’.
We pride ourselves on the quality of our reports. We prioritize what to fix and explain what’s broken and HOW to fix it. We have a deep understanding of how content management systems (CMS) work and create technical suggestions and implementation plans based on your system and set up. Common platforms we work on include:
How Do We Do Technical Audits?
We think taking a holistic approach is the best way to discover issues with any site, so we recommend a comprehensive site audit. But we can tailor your audit to focus on any aspect or a combination of factors listed below, depending on your business’s needs: technical, on-page, off-page, competitive analysis and keywords. No matter which SEO audit service you choose, we’ll create a detailed report that clearly describes the issues we uncover along with solutions you can implement now and down the road to remedy them.
Components of Our SEO Audit Services
Technical SEO Audit
A technical SEO audit is the foundation of our comprehensive audit. We analyze more than 200 technical criteria to determine how well your site functions, how search engines read the site, how usable it is, and how it performs. To do that, we focus on these key areas:
- Infrastructure. How is your site structured? How is the navigation communicating to your users and bots? Is the infrastructure working at its best to enable search engines to find and view your content?
- Indexation. What is indexed? What can be indexed? What should be indexed? The answers to these questions are rarely the same.
- Duplicate content. Does your site have duplicate content? Are there multiple versions of your site that are being indexed? Too much overlap can hinder your site’s performance in search.
- Structured data and markup. Are there issues with existing Schema markup? We’ll discover these key signals, analyze them and identify high-level opportunities to improve.
- Speed Performance/Mobile Friendliness . Is your site too slow? Does it struggle to render on a mobile phone? We can lead you to improve site performance for search engines and user conversion.
- International targeting. Does your site use multiple websites or offer language options or regions within a single site?
Every site should look at these technical SEO aspects regularly. They are necessary for getting a wholistic view at your site’s performance along with how it’s being crawled and indexed by search engines. Without having an understanding of these things, you’ll likely be missing some key areas of improvement.
On-Page SEO Audit
Our on-page SEO audits take a careful look at your site’s content and on-page meta data (content for search engines). We focus on user experience, internal linking and keyword targeting to determine opportunities for improvement. The audit will give you direction on opportunities to improve on page elements of the site. A long-term SEO retainer would provide you with specific optimizations and keyword targets for pages/sections of the site.
Off-Page SEO Audit
Here we focus on existing performance and any quick opportunities for improvement. While we will note any clear signs of penalty or evidence of activities that could lead to one, we will *never* come back with some auto-generated report saying you need to disavow domains. This is at best a scare tactic by other SEOs and at worst, serious malpractice.
SEO Competitor Audit
Staying ahead of your competition is a moving target. Our competitive analysis reviews major performance gaps between you and your competitors and helps identify ways you can gain the advantage. We will look at both provided competitors (we ask for a list of your key competition) and online competitors. These insights will help us drive a long-term SEO strategy and will provide you with an understanding of where you site within the organic market.
Organic Growth & Keyword Gap Analysis
Our keyword analysis analyzes the best opportunities to increase your site’s visibility in search. This comprehensive review will highlight key areas of focus for SEO efforts and if an SEO investment will provide the needed return.
What should I expect of Transistor’s SEO Audit Service?
Our main goal is simple: to get the foundation of your site in a healthy stable place. Everything after the SEO audit is building on the work that we start during this audit phase.
The supplemental goal is to provide you with clear, actionable priorities that can help guide your SEO strategy today and improve your traffic in the future. We’ll uncover the problems but won’t leave you hanging. Instead, we’ll advise you on how to fix what’s not working, not just hand you an auto-generated report with a list of issues, no context, and no solutions.
We’ll give you a PowerPoint outlining key issues we’ve uncovered along with the opportunities for improvement we’ve identified. We’ll also provide a spreadsheet “to-do list” with supporting documentation (e.g., pages with specific code changes). But we won’t just hand off these documents and leave you to decipher them on your own. As part of our service, we’ll present the audit’s findings with you in real time so that you can ask us any questions you have.
FAQ about Audits
How long will my SEO audit take?
Our audits typically take 3–4 weeks. It’s not as fast as an auto-generated report but will provide a clear path forward that you can use to improve right away and in the future.
How much does it cost?
Prices vary based on a site’s complexity, but the average is $2,000.
How is the audit structured?
- Checklist of things good and bad about the current site element
- In depth explanation of the major concerns
- Description SEO impacts and prioritization
- The known fixes for the major concern
- Links to all supportive data to make the fixes
- Final review of all items to be addressed and in what order
Want to learn how Transistor can help?
Talk to Lindsie.
Lindsie Nelson | Co-Founder
Vice-President – Head of SEO