Having been in the SEO industry for several years, we’ve honed and refined our SEO auditing services so that we’re able to diagnose where your website currently stands for the targeted keyword phrases. What needs to be done to raise your position within Google, and how do your competitors stack up against your website?
When we investigate a website, we intend to find everything currently wrong with it and point you in the right direction of where it needs to head to dominate your niche. A website investigation will not fix the problems; it only shows you the path to success.
Our SEO Audit processes can be used for an SEO audit for businesses based in Auckland, Wellington, Hamilton or any town throughout New Zealand.
Checklist for a Website SEO Review
Below are highlights of our SEO Auditing process and the typical factors we look at when we conduct a website audit and the performance of a client’s website. We recommend obtaining a complete view of all the issues and then addressing them step by step, as each of these factors interplay.
Website Audit Set-up
Before starting the Audit on your website, we will need to ask a few questions to allow us to be able to set up everything we need to conduct the Audit:
- The main search terms for your niche
- Your competitors within your niche
- Your SEO issues and concerns
- Access to Search Console is required
- What KPIs have you been using for SEO tracking?
- Your Google Maps Properties
Technical SEO Audit
In this section, we look at the SEO foundation and technical aspects of SEO, and this is where an in-house developer can clean up several elements:
- Has the website been connected to all relevant Google properties (and Bing)?
- Is the website fast enough?
- Is good enough hosting?
- CDN used?
- Are there performance issues?
- Too many redirects?
- Correct HTTPS version?
- Is there Image bloat?
- Does the website pass the Google Page Speed experience?
- Does the website have indexing and crawlability issues?
- Are there orphaned pages?
On-Page Content Audit
When looking at on-page SEO, we need to ensure that your pages align with the search engines and the user intent with such factors:
- Correct Keyword Targeting?
- Is the URL structure suitable for the niche?
- Use of LSIs within headings and descriptions
- Internal anchor text ratios
- Content hubs
- Structured Data usage
- Image optimisation
- Do you have cannibalisation issues?
- Is old content dead and needs to be culled?
Local SEO Audit Checklist
Suppose your business has lots of physical locations throughout New Zealand. In that case, your business needs to make sure that you’re maintaining and controlling each of your GBP properties as best practice:
- Are you correctly targeting local Keywords with your GBP (Google Business Profile) and Website?
- We conduct a GAP analysis of your Google Maps Profile(s).
- Are key locally targeted pages on your website?
- Are you utilising every section within GBP?
- Correct landing page and correct GBP?
- Do you have posts on each profile?
- Are your GBPs all verified?
- Are they managed correctly?
Off-Page SEO Audit Checklist
When examining your off-page factors, we need to consider what your competitors are doing, if your backlink profile matches your competitors, and if they can be beaten.
- Have you built the main social properties?
- Built foundational links?
- Local websites have you listed?
- Have you got spammy links?
- Has negative SEO attacked your website?
- Have you got a list of targeted competitor links?
- Do you have enough Niche-Specific Links?
- Are your links over or under-optimised?
- Are your links Auckland or New Zealand specific?
What Website Auditing Options Are There?
For a website owner, there are three options for website audits from which a business in Auckland or a website owner can choose. They range from a free SEO audit, a particular facet of your website to be audited or a comprehensive SEO audit covering all aspects of your online property.
Free SEO Audits
What Do You Get from a Free Audit?
Although we do not offer a free website Audit, many companies offer a free version. They are handy for finding out if technical factors are wrong with your website, but most of the time, they need to be assessed and used by a developer or someone who knows their way around a website.
A Specific SEO Audit
A Specific SEO Audit - Targeting One SEO Factor
This type of website audit will examine a single facet of your website presence. Say, for instance, you want to find out if your on-page SEO performance is up to scratch and make sure you’re targeting the correct keywords or if anything can be improved. This is one aspect of SEO and will involve a human brain to find all the phrases through research and then find if they're used correctly on your website.
This can be handy if you’re concerned with a single aspect of your website’s presence for one part but still doesn’t provide an excellent overall picture.
Full SEO Audit
What Exactly is a Full SEO Audit?
The SEO Auditor needs holistically combine the information they gather from:
- What are the target KWs?
- Are they in a competitive niche?
- How is the website set up for the target KWs?
- Is the website technically correct?
- How are the backlinks to the website?
- Are there spammy or comparable to the niche leaders?
- Can they dominate?
The answers to these questions and many more will produce a complete SEO audit and provide a roadmap for the SEO within the niche, a timeframe and a budget required to obtain serious results.
Any serious SEO audit in New Zealand should be able to offer this level of SEO services in New Zealand.
What is An SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is designed to help you, as the website owner, find out everything you can about your website, from on-page factors, off-page links, competitor website comparisons and technical issues.
The very definition of an Audit examines an entity as a third party and is generally associated with auditing the financial accounts of a business by an accountant. However, in the context of SEO website auditing, we examine how a website is performing, testing it against current best practices and then guiding where the website can grow and expand.
Our SEO audits are designed to get to the bottom of anything wrong with a website and provide guidance on fixing or realigning the issues.
Ultimately, after a website review, it will be the building block for all of our SEO campaigns. We provide quotes for long-term SEO retainers only once the SEO audit has been conducted.
Professional SEO Website Auditing Services
When trawling the SERPs, we often come across snippets claiming that they will offer a ‘Free SEO Audit’, and we struggle to understand why an expert will do something that, when done correctly, will be done for free.
Would you expect a lawyer to work for free on something that may take two weeks to fully conclude their investigations? No, you would not. So why would an ‘expert’ at SEO feel it a good idea to give away something for free?
Here’s a clue – have you had anything for free that’s any good?
99% of the time, a free audit would be where the ‘consultant’ hasn’t actively done anything more than plugging your website into website software, such as SEMRush, Ahrefs, Sitebulb, or other SEO platforms pressed enter, and the software spits out an automated report. (Most SEO consultants in Auckland will have access to these tools)
That’s not an audit.
All our SEO Audits are built from scratch; nothing is automated here; everything is bespoke to a client’s website.
Once we’ve presented our findings from our Audits, we want our clients to know that they’re 100% behind our investigative workings and understand what we are talking about. Hopefully, they will be onboard why our SEO Audits will not be free.
The main reason you see a ‘Free SEO Audit’ advertised is that they usually come with a catch, or the sales tactic will hook you into a full SEO campaign.
Would you use a low-cost mechanic to look after your Porsche?
Auditing websites is one of our SEO services Auckland that we offer throughout New Zealand.
Frequently Asked Questions for SEO Audits
Most local businesses in New Zealand will be small to medium-sized companies that only require a basic SEO audit. Medium to large businesses with websites with more than 500 pages of content will require a more advanced SEO audit that dives deeper into the examination. We will advise on the type of Audit needed; ultimately, it depends on the niche and competitive nature of the business.
A Comprehensive SEO Audit
This is the best option for a serious website owner – this will find out everything about your website and then provide a guide on improving your website presence across the search engines.
We break down the data within Search Console, your on-page structure, off-page signals, technical issues, and Google Maps Listings. Then compare the findings with your competitors.
Our detailed SEO audits can take anywhere between 1 week and a month, depending upon the size and complexity of the website involved. Each Audit will therefore have a different estimated delivery timeframe. Something to bear in mind is that the SEO audit will be a third-party assessment of your website's issues and create a list of priorities of recommendations that we will need to implement in-house or as part of our SEO services.
Depending on the size of your website, our recommendations can take anywhere between 2-6 months to implement fully.
An SEO Audit is an opportunity for a business to take stock of its online presence, establish a game plan, and route for more traffic from the search engines.
At a minimum, an SEO audit should be conducted periodically on a website, depending on the website's size and how often it is updated and enhanced.
The SEO audit is fundamental to all SEO campaigns; we do not start any SEO campaign without first conducting an SEO audit. Our Audit will give our clients and us an oversight into the issues and potential areas where gains can be made with their websites and a snapshot of what the competitors are doing at the time of taking the Audit.
There are many tools available that a website owner can use to conduct a website audit; many are paid tools, while the most overlooked instrument is a free one that Google provides – Google Search Console. Some tools are great at finding technical issues with a website, but they cannot replace a human brain that can think about what phrases and words should be targeted and why those words are essential.
We provide snapshots from our SEO auditing tools within the Audit and present them as part of an overall picture of where things are with your website and its properties.
Without conducting a complete SEO Audit across your website, Google Business Profile, and your external backlinks and then comparing them to what your competitors are doing – how will you know where your website stands from Google’s perspective?
You cannot; you need a solid SEO Audit to grasp what is required to bring your website to the best position within search engines.
The SEO Audit will highlight where things are wrong with your website, where you can make grounds to increase traffic, and what your competitors are doing.
Remember, an SEO Audit is an opportunity to grow.
The cost will depend upon the size and complexity of the required Audit and your SEO goals. As a guide price for an SEO audit, expect to pay upwards of $1,500 for a small business website and for a large business website (greater than 500 pages), expect to pay above $7,500 depending on the number of factors involved.
As each website we Audit will be a bespoke, timely exercise, then each Audit is usually priced on application (POA) as there is no one-size-fits-all option.