Does Your Website Need an SEO Audit?
Website owners consider SEO auditing services when they aim at any of the following goals:
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- enhance their online users’ experience
- raise their brand awareness
- improve their topical authority
- sell their products or services
A thorough SEO audit is always the starting point of any existing SEO strategy. It comes before any on-site optimization service.
How to Identify Your Domain SEO Pain Points?
Even if you are unfamiliar with SEO best practices, you can check if your website needs technical SEO audit services.
To assess this, check if any of the issues below apply to your website:
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- you revamped your website (ex: new design, new CMS, hosting migration, etc.)
- your website is slow
- your traffic decreases (or you have no traffic at all)
- your webpages don’t show up on search engines for your target keywords
- you don’t have conversions (online leads or sales)
Those bottlenecks are perfect indicators that your domain requires a complete SEO audit. By analyzing each item on the checklist, you will build a plan to fix your ranking factors.
Why Should You Consider an SEO Audit?
SEO audits make your website compliant for reaching your business goals.
Many reasons justify considering an SEO audit:
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- clean your website from hacking or malware
- make your web architecture SEO-compliant
- rework your UI/UX (User Interface and User Experience)
- prepare your keyword research
- improve your on-page SEO
- increase your keyword rankings
- raise your organic traffic
- attract qualified visitors to your target web pages
- boost your visibility on search results
- fix your SEO issues
An SEO audit is like a health check-up of your domain. Based on this technical audit, web developers and digital marketers can fix individual web pages to improve their organic search positions.
How Viet Agency SEO Audit Services Help Your Website?
By working with Viet Agency SEO specialists, you benefit from professional SEO audit services.
We not only accumulate decades of Search Engine Optimization experience, but we also understand how SEO factors impact your website’s performance.
Understand What Impacts Your Webpage Rankings
Thanks to Viet Agency SEO audit services, you identify what affects your online visibility on search engine results pages.
Our comprehensive SEO audit covers the webpage rankings checkup:
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- HTML validation browser
- technical SEO elements
- on-page elements (title tags, schema markup, content audit, etc.)
- duplicate content
- keyword usage
- internal links and broken links
- off-page and backlink profile
This SEO analysis lists all factors impacting your website’s search engine performance.
Get a Technical Roadmap to Improve Your Website
This technical SEO audit allows us to craft an SEO performance improvement guideline. It usually comes in two parts:
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- SEO checklist review (PDF)
- URL database (XLS)
The PDF document reviews the entire SEO audit checklist with a pass-and-fail rules report. If a rule gets a pass, then you are all good. If there is a failure, the guideline explains the issue, why it is important to fix it, and how to do so.
The XLS file gathers all URLs of your website that fail the rules reported in the previous document. We categorize them with separate sheets. For example, all web pages failing the H1 uniqueness rule are listed in a sheet, the ones failing the meta description length rule appear in another sheet, etc.
Once you receive our detailed SEO audit, there are two options:
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- you implement the fixes yourself
- you ask Viet Agency to do it
Our expert SEO audit team can guide you to perform the required changes on your website. We communicate with your developers and marketers to ensure they understand our document.
When your team completes the fixes, Viet Agency performs another quick check to confirm their successful implementations. We support you until the full completion.
If you do not have the resources, you can trust our experts to improve your website. In this case, we need access to your code source and web hosting.
Make Your Web Content More Competitive
Viet Agency SEO audit service helps your web pages rank higher on search engines.
Ultimately, you want to publish your niche’s most useful and comprehensive content online. Thanks to our on-page audit, we pull your content to the top of the organic search.
Here is how we make your web content more visible:
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- competitor content benchmark
- keyword research
- web content audit
- web content edit
- off-page SEO
Your web pages will beat your competitors once your content satisfies search engine spiders and human people.
However, the work is not over yet. The search engines update their algorithms several times daily. Besides, your competitors may react to your SEO strategies. You must continue putting effort into Search Engine Optimization to maintain your top positions on search engines!
Boost Your Online Authoritativeness
Viet Agency SEO audit services aim at improving your E-E-A-T, which stands for:
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- Experience
- Expertise
- Authoritativeness
- Trustworthiness
The E-E-A-T framework is crucial to dominate your online market.
Any enterprise SEO audit service should consider this from the beginning. E-E-A-T are ranking factors that impact how search engines serve your content.
It implies quality, insights, first-hand topic knowledge, and no Artificial Intelligence-written copies. When Viet Agency performs a technical SEO audit, we guarantee online visibility and topical authority.
Benefit from Proven SEO Experts
As one of the leading SEO agencies, Viet Agency SEO audit services enjoy a proven track of successful cases. Most of our clients who benefit from our SEO services never turn back.
Here is how we can describe Viet Agency SEO audit services, in figures (up to the end of Q1 2024):
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- 94% client retention rate
- 24 industries covered
- 337 websites SEO audited
- 30,330 major technical issues reported
- 68 years of cumulated SEO audit experience
Businesses from all niches and all sizes can trust Viet Agency is enterprise SEO audit. Our SEO services cover simple landing pages up to complex e-commerce websites.
Ask for an SEO report to evaluate our value by yourself!
What Does Viet Agency SEO Audit Include?
Viet Agency knows what is important to satisfy online users and search engines. Thanks to our enterprise SEO audit, we cover the following aspects:
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- technical SEO audit
- on-page SEO audit
- off-page SEO audit
- SEO strategy recommendations
We will break down them in the next section.
Technical SEO Audit
A technical SEO audit focuses on what prevents a website from getting indexed.
While the next sections cover the content of individual web pages or the outreach work, this phase comes before, as we hardly rank a website with poor core web vitals.
There are hundreds of SEO issues to oversee. Let’s list a few of the most crucial ones below.
Website Architecture
Developers build their websites following a wireframe. This wireframe defines the domain architecture.
The most important web page is the homepage because it has the highest authority and passes value to all other web pages across the domain.
What happens when the web architecture is broken? If the category segmentation does not make sense? If there are orphan pages? If it is hard to navigate smoothly?
The website architecture must be functional and intuitive. The technical SEO audit checks this as a priority.
HTML/CSS/JavaScript Code Review
Before optimizing your web content, you must review your language structure and technologies, including:
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- HTML (HyperText Markup Language)
- CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
- JavaScript
This audit ensures that your front end properly renders the content, styles, colors, and animations.
Content rendering is crucial for web visitors. HTML, CSS, or JavaScript errors can create major issues that make online customers flee.
Page Speed Loading Times
The longer a web page takes to load, the less likely it converts.
As a rule of thumb, an online page should take no more than two seconds to load fully. However, the quicker the better, especially if competitors do great.
Loading times are important for all websites, even more for e-commerce. No one wants to wait for ages to load a product page.
Check this free SEO tool from Google to check your core web vitals.
301 Redirect Check
In the SEO industry, a 301 is a permanent redirect from one URL to another address.
They guide online users to the correct destination page when something changes in your website structure.
Say you update the URL of your blog. If this article received backlinks from valuable sources, someone clicking on the old link may land on a 404 page. A 301 redirect solves this problem. It ensures that the user will automatically find the most updated web page.
Wrong 301 settings are a cause of domain value loss. Better check them twice!
Robots.txt File
The robots.txt is a simple text file that informs web crawlers which sections of a domain they are allowed to visit.
Those instructions guide search engines on which web pages to crawl or not. It saves not only time but also their crawling budget.
Besides, robots.txt is useful for blocking web crawlers from accessing specific pages (for example, a login section).
Canonicalization
When a domain grows, it often duplicates its web pages.
Adding canonical tags to the most representative URLs of similar pages is a good SEO practice. Missing them can confuse the search engines which may serve a wrong variation in search results.
Viet Agency technical audits cover canonicalization to ensure the best SEO services for its clients.
On-Page SEO Audit
An on-page review analyzes the content rendered across web pages. Following the checklist, there are many SEO ranking factors to audit, as we will describe below.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is one of the main causes of poor organic search appearance. Having too many similar web pages confuses web crawlers and dilutes organic traffic.
While it is easy to spot duplicate content, fixing it requires great SEO experience. Depending on the case, there are many ways to solve such problems:
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- revamp the web page content
- implementing a 301 redirection
- adding a canonical tag
- deleting the URL
- merging several individual web pages
- etc.
Trust experts to solve your duplicate content matters.
Meta Tags
Meta tags are pieces of HTML code that tell search engines about the nature of the web page content. For example, they inform web crawlers if the text is a title or a meta description.
Those title tags also help search engines understand how to display this content to online users.
Optimizing them maximizes your SEO efficiency.
H1 Tags
The H1 meta tags are the most important indicators describing the web page content. They are different from the page title tags.
Many websites lack H1 tags. It makes it difficult for search engines to understand what their web pages are about.
Under the H1s, we find other tags like the H2s, H3s, and so on until the H6s. They structure the content by importance and categories. Many SEO issues come from a wrong meta tag hierarchy.
Word Count
At Viet Agency, we never say that the longer the content the better. Overall, quality primes over quantity.
However, we must also consider that long-form content naturally covers more insights into a given topic. If you write a 300-word blog article while the top competitors publish 3,000-word copies, you will struggle to win the keyword rankings game.
Our enterprise SEO audit checks the thin content of your website. We must address this issue for the most important web pages.
Broken Links
Broken links often imply huge opportunity loss.
Links connect web pages. They allow web crawlers to visit the internet content. The referring page sends some value to the destination page. If the link is broken, such “juice” cannot be transferred.
Thanks to our SEO audit tools, we analyze all links to your website. We list the broken ones to decide what to do with them and retrieve the SEO value if possible.
Internal Linking
Internal linking differs from backlinks, which we will describe in the next section.
Internal links are connections between the web pages inside your domain. For example, your homepage can feature a button redirecting online users to your shop.
Of course, those internal links must not be broken (see the previous section). Besides, we must ensure that the website connects contextually relevant web pages. It helps search engines better understand and index the content.
Off-Page SEO Audit
Off-page SEO efforts usually come last in the entire SEO campaign.
It includes outreach, networking, and backlinking activities. The goal is to receive “votes” for the published content.
It is better to perform off-page once the SEO technical and on-page work is completed. For example, we should avoid investing time in earning backlinks to a poor web page.
Google Search Console Review
An excellent way to get started with off-page SEO is to analyze the existing backlink profile.
We can do this thanks to various tools, like paid ones (Ahrefs or Semrush). The Google Search Console (GSC) is a great free alternative.
As for content, off-page SEO is more about quality than quantity. The purpose is not to acquire as many backlinks as possible but to receive quotes from valuable sources. Here are the four most important criteria for backlinking:
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- referring domain relevance
- referring domain quality (authoritativeness, trend)
- anchor text
- organic (non-paid)
Use the GSC to understand which web pages currently attract the most backlinks.
Search Console Crawl Errors
The GSC also flags crawl issues on your web pages. If search engines cannot visit your website, they won’t index its content. Non-indexed web pages cannot appear on Google search result pages.
Web pages can face crawling errors for many reasons. Few can be on purpose, for example, if you no-index specific pages.
Pay attention to web pages that you want to rank but appear in this report. You certainly want to fix this issue as soon as possible!
Algorithmic Penalties
Search engines like Google can penalize websites violating the rules.
The algorithmic penalties happen when a website doesn’t comply with algorithm updates like:
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- Panda
- Penguin
- RankBrain
- Medic
- Bert
- etc.
In this case, the search engine may de-index the domain from its database. It prevents the website from appearing in the search results. Online users cannot find it through a search anymore.
Manual Actions
Manual actions depend on the search engine employees. When they notice something shady, they can downrank or completely delist your web pages.
If you see red notifications, you better consider them urgently. The most common reasons causing manual actions are:
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- paid backlinks
- keyword overoptimization (or keyword stuffing)
- AI-generated content
- poor content quality
The best way to avoid manual actions is to follow white-hat SEO practices.
Link Profile Health Check
We must assess the current backlink profile to define a link-building strategy for any domain.
Many SEO tools analyze this. For example, check this Ahrefs referring domains report:
It shows the evolution of the number of websites sending backlinks to www.Vietagency.net Besides the quantity, you also want to check other link profile factors like the ones listed earlier.
If you notice too many bad-quality backlinks pointing at your website, you should address this issue. The SEO audit tool allows you to spot those problems and build an action plan.
Linking Anchor Text
An anchor text is the visible content under a link that redirects online users to another web page. It is often underlined or highlighted with a different color.
Anchor texts are best used when they describe the destination page. Like a preview, they inform people about what they will find if they click this link.
There are many good SEO practices for anchor texts, including:
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- text as short as possible
- descriptive
- with keywords (without overdoing it)
It is not recommended to receive backlinks from various sources having the same anchor text. Such practice looks suspicious.
A common mistake is to put a link under generic anchor text like “click here” or “visit this website.” Such anchors do not satisfy the descriptive requirement.
SEO Strategy Recommendations
Our SEO strategy recommendations depend on the kind of audit that you choose. There are two options:
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- one-off
- audit for running an SEO campaign
Businesses requiring a one-off SEO audit service from Viet Agency will receive a complete roadmap. It includes the audit report, the guidelines, and the data. Thanks to those documents, they are responsible for the proper implementation of the SEO technicals, on-page, and off-page.
If the business trusts Viet Agency to run the SEO campaign, then our team will send the SEO audit for approval. We can discuss any unclear item. Once everything is okay, Viet Agency will operate all the implementations before activating the organic campaign.
Our SEO experts are ready to educate you on good practices anytime. Several options may be available depending on your business objectives. Viet Agency recommends the best SEO strategies to achieve your goals.
Viet Agency SEO Audit Process
Search Engine Optimization requires a bulletproof process. To audit websites, Viet Agency follows a 5-step technique that works with every business.
Viet Agency is SEO audit process includes, in order:
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- goals
- set up
- auditing
- reporting
- reiterating
We will detail each phase below.
1- Goals
Before starting the work, we must understand your expectations. Viet Agency will assess your business needs and website’s objectives.
We identify:
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- your main target pages
- your products and services
- your web pages that must be hidden
- your web touchpoints
Based on this analysis, Viet Agency will recommend the most suitable SEO audit service.
2- Set Up
Depending on the audit package, we will request access to specific site properties.
By default, most websites use Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console. However, you may be using other kinds of tools. In this case, Viet Agency must require an account.
We use an extensive SEO checklist when performing web audits. A few rules may not be relevant depending on your website’s nature. For example, we should remove the e-commerce items from the list if your website sells no products.
From then, it will be time to activate the SEO audit.
3- Auditing
We follow an SEO audit checklist including hundreds of rules. Based on the previous setup phase, we do not check all of them for each website.
Viet Agency SEO audit service fully covers the following categories:
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- indexing
- web access
- web architecture
- links (internal, inbound, outbound)
- on-page
- content
- keywords
- e-commerce
- local SEO
- mobile SEO
- schema markup
The auditing phase takes under five working days. Bigger websites (50,000+ web pages) may take two weeks or more.
4- Reporting
Once the auditing work is completed, we compile the information into a comprehensive report.
As explained before, we deliver an audit guideline (PDF) and a database document (XLS). Sometimes, we also share text files (DOC), for example, to help implement a new schema markup.
The SEO audit report covers the entire website. We may not need to fix everything. To guarantee SEO performance, Viet Agency prioritizes the sections and target pages that impact the website’s ability to rank.
We ensure that you understand this report. If you decide to work on the implementations yourself, Viet Agency will guide you until the job is done.
5- Reiterating
When the SEO technical implementations are completed, we audit the website again to confirm the fixes. This process goes quicker because we don’t recheck every item from the checklist.
After that, websites should consider performing a new SEO audit every three months. This follow-up ensures that no new issues pop up. Besides, we must review if the optimizations provide results.
Best SEO Tools to Audit Your Website
Like keyword research, we need tools to audit a website. Viet Agency lists the most useful ones below:
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- Google Page Speed Insight
- Screaming Frog
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Ahrefs
- Semrush
- other SEO audit software
When auditing a site, SEO experts use tools suitable for all kinds of issues. An audit checklist covers hundreds of items. However, you can find the most important ones thanks to this shortlist.
Google Page Speed Insight
The Page Speed Insight from Google is a staple free SEO audit tool. We should always give it a run by default.
It works as follows: input the website URL on the tool and wait a few seconds to get a report.
This report shares core web vitals metrics, as Google sees them for this website. Besides, it provides recommendations for technical fixes.
Ask your web developers to use the Google Page Speed Insight tool. It identifies the main website bottlenecks and guides to solve them.
Screaming Frog
Like the PSI tool, Viet Agency cannot consider auditing a website without using Screaming Frog. It is arguably the best web crawler available in the market.
Screaming Frog crawls your web URLs to analyze them. It provides plenty of valuable information like:
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- URL health check
- website structure
- indexability
- response codes (200s, 404s, etc.)
- metadata info (page titles, subheadings, etc.)
- images info
- canonical
- pagination
- hreflang tags
- and more
This tool is perfect for spotting the main SEO issues of any website.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics 4 is another free tool from Alphabet. Most people use it to monitor their website’s performance. It is useful to conduct SEO audits too.
This tool reports web data categorized as follows:
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- audience profile
- audience behavior
- audience engagement
- monetization
GA4 helps understand how online users interact with the web content. It is a powerful tool for comprehensive web audits.
Google Search Console
The mighty and free GSC is an excellent tool for keyword research, but it also shines with its crawling, indexing, and core web vitals analyzing features.
When you connect this tool to your website, you can check how well your URLs perform. The GSC is one of the first tools to use when checking a website’s health.
Ahrefs
Unlike GA4 and GSC, Ahrefs is a third-party web audit tool. The data may not be as accurate as Google’s, but this software gives many useful insights.
Ahrefs is best known for its link features. It also includes a useful website health check system to audit your domain.
The crawler analyzes your URLs to report technical issues. It covers all the following categories:
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- internal pages
- indexability
- links
- redirects
- content
- social tags
- localization
- usability and performance
- images
- CSS
- sitemaps
- others (ex: referring domains drop)
You can export this data to a .csv file and complement your SEO audit report.
Semrush
Semrush does a similar job with Ahrefs. The main differences come from the database and the fact that Semrush is visually more appealing.
Semrush allows you to “create a project” and connect data sources like the Search Console for web audit purposes.
This SEO audit reports over 130+ items related to on-page and technical SEO. You can filter the top issues ordered by priority (according to Semrush).
Other SEO Audit Software
New SEO audit tools are created every month. Viet Agency recommendation is to test them and stick to one or two. You don’t want to get swamped with too many reports that overlap.
Here is a short list of additional audit tools that may be useful for your SEO web check-ups:
Give them a try and bookmark the most useful ones for your needs.
How Much Does an SEO Audit Cost?
In SEO, we get what we pay for. SEO audit services are no exception to this rule.
To break down the SEO audit costs, we will first explain what you can do for free. Then, we will detail what it means to consider a complete (and paid) web audit service.
Free SEO Audit
Some SEO audit work can be done for free.
You can get started with an SEO audit checklist. Many experts share such material for free across the internet.
If you know how to use the free audit tools we listed in this article, you can generate a decent report of your domain health check.
Those materials are the foundations of any good SEO audit service. However, you also need knowledge. Without SEO strategy skills or audit experience, it is challenging to enjoy an SEO audit at no cost.
Viet Agency understands this. Contact us to enjoy a free SEO consultation with an industry expert. We are glad to help you with a quick SEO audit.
SEO Audit Tools Cost
To reach the next level, we need minimum investment.
A free check may be enough to spot the most obvious issues, which are usually the most critical too. However, free tools are limited. For example, they may only check the first 500 URLs of your website. If you manage a 20,000-page e-commerce platform, that is quite restrictive.
Prices change over time. We recommend checking directly the pricing plans. Here is a list of Prodima’s go-to paid tools for SEO audit services:
Don’t forget to combine free with paid tools for your SEO audits. Especially, the free Google tools listed previously should be used by default.
Professional SEO Audit Cost
If the do-it-yourself is not your thing, work with SEO experts to perform a professional SEO audit.
Viet Agency guarantees we will carefully check your website following our checklist and 5-step process. We audit all kinds of websites (size, industry, goal).
A full SEO audit from Viet Agency costs 35,000,000 VND. There is 8% VAT on this. This pricing is indicative and may be considered on a case-by-case basis for huge or complex websites.
Ask for an SEO audit quote and don’t forget to share your domain URL!
