SEO Audits
In layman’s terms, an SEO Audit is a technical health check for an entire website or a particular web page.
The objective of the SEO Audit is to analyze how well the website or page stacks up to the stated best practices of the search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
The search engines dictate specific parameters that a website or a web page must meet to be indexed and then ranked. These parameters are classified as Ranking Factors.
An SEO Audit reveals the Ranking Factors you are meeting, as well as the ones you are falling short.
It is important to note that ranking factors are dynamic; they are subject to change/adjustment. Some of these changes are labeled as Algorithm updates.
Gaming The Search Engines
Such changes are (typically) made after the search engines realize that people discovered loopholes and have been gaming their ranking factors en masse.
Some examples of gaming the system would be keyword stuffing, spammy article marketing, spammy outbound footer links, link farms, and mass spamming worthless backlinks.
Google answers those loopholes and other search engine issues with Algorithm updates: Caffeine, Panda, Penguin, Payday Loan, HTTPS/SSL, Possum, Hummingbird, Mobile-friendly, Farmer, Brackets, Pigeon, RankBrain, Mobile-First Index Roll-out, BERT, and Google Glitch.
Some of those Algorithm updates were designed to thwart the individuals gaming the SERPs Search Engine Results Pages. This is another reason why SEO Audits are so critical; they confirm that you are not being perceived by the search engines as gaming the system.
SEO Audits are the foundation of all successful search engine optimization and pay per click campaigns. There are three types of SEO Audits:
On-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO
Reverse Engineering
Are Free SEO Audits Different Than Paid?
When companies advertise free SEO Audits, sometimes referred to as free SEO Analysis, SEO checker, or free SEO score, they are only offering minimal Ranking Factors audits. Typically, this fundamental analysis only includes the bare minimum because it is strategically designed to get you to sign up for the company’s paid SEO services.
At Blue Duck Digital, we only offer paid SEO Audits because our analysis covers the entire gamut of SEO.
