A search engine audit is the process by which a company makes sure that the various activities it is doing, for increasing the visibility of its website on the internet, are meeting the desired results. Search engine optimization is basically the process of enhancing the quantity and quality of site traffic to a specific website or a webpage from search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. SEO targets free traffic as opposed to paid or direct traffic. It aims at improving visibility and popularity of websites in certain keyword or key phrases, or any combination thereof.
Nowadays, many companies undertake an SEO audit to find out whether the current SEO practices are meeting their objectives, such as increasing the number of site visits or web visitors. Other objectives might be decreasing costs, increasing conversion rates, reducing marketing costs and increasing revenue. Sometimes, even changing the approach, altering the URL structure or doing some upgrades can cause issues, because the procedures and techniques used in the old SEO method do not work any more. Also, there could be some ethical issues involved, for example using methods like Black hat or spamming to get higher ranking. There are several other areas which could cause issues in the next steps of the audit.
The objective of the audit process should be to identify and eliminate the cause of SEO audit problems and increase the effectiveness of the current SEO practices. Sometimes, for example, the problem might be as simple as wrong implementation of Meta tags, or the contents of the website might not have been optimized for the specific purpose, which means that the user experience will not be satisfactory. In these cases, it is best to wait until the next SEO audit cycle, conducted by someone who has thorough knowledge about the processes and techniques being used by the company. The third type of SEO audit, which is mostly undertaken by small SEO firms with no real expertise in the field, is made of the purpose of enhancing the internal linking and overall user experience. These audits usually cover the areas of link building techniques, web content optimization, site navigation and usability, but rarely do we see real objectives set out in the audit reports.