We all rush to doctors to get our monthly check-ups done. Similarly, it’s important to ensure that your website is not sick, has an overload of junk links, and is clogged with Error pages.

Just like our body needs treatment to heal, our website needs a few audits and tweaks to perform better and skyrocket its efficiency.

The process of reviewing your website to evaluate how well it performs on search engines is known as an SEO audit.

SEO audits are a wonderful method to outperform your competitors, identify opportunities inside your website, find and resolve exit points, and improve client experiences.

Technical SEO audits, on-page SEO audits, and off-page SEO audits should all be done on a regular basis.

You’ll discover areas where you may improve or optimize your website’s performance to boost performance and keep site visitors pleased as you move through your audit.

You won’t be able to repair every issue at once, but you will be able to find out what’s wrong and devise a strategy to correct it.

Martin Splitt of Google shares tips on how to improve SEO audits so that they are more valuable to site owners.

In the second episode of Google’s SEO & Devs web series on YouTube, which is dedicated to the topic of SEO audits, a number of pieces of advice are offered.

Bartosz Goralewicz, CEO of Onely, joins Splitt to offer advice on what works best, based on his team’s and clients’ first-hand experience.

This is an episode worth listening to in its entirety since you’ll undoubtedly learn something that will help you better your working relationship with developers and stakeholders.

PDF reports are no good

Splitt suggests that PDF reports be replaced with more effective forms of communication.

The problem with providing SEO audits in the form of a PDF report is that they frequently explain what’s wrong with a site without specifying what has to be done to solve it.

Another issue with these reports is that they aren’t always in line with the website’s objectives.

Splitt elaborates on this with an example from his days of working as a developer:

“I remember being a developer. I had so many different things on my plate already and then, out of the blue, in the middle of a sprint, someone from the SEO department descended upon me and said: ‘Martin, here is a PDF with all the things that are wrong. Bye!’

And then they flew off and I’m like — uh okay it says we are using JavaScript, which is very accurate because what we are actually building right now is a VR application that runs on your phone in the browser. You will have to use JavaScript to do that.

So the recommendation is to not use JavaScript, but that’s not really a thing we can do because then we don’t have VR capabilities. And because then that’s our product we kind of have to build our product to have our product with the technologies that enable the features of our product.

A lot of these things are so unhelpful and so not reflective of the circumstances that I, as a developer, work in.”

Later they also suggested and shed light on how you can improve your SEO audits.

Boost SEO ROI with Better Communication

Bartosz says the key to delivering better SEO audits is to communicate more thoroughly with stakeholders and developers.

“Usually we start with stakeholders… we talk to the stakeholders, we hop on a call before creating any offers or anything. We hop on a call and talk about what’s the KPI, what’s the problem, what are the challenges, why are we even doing that.

Why is this so important? Why do you want to fix that? Because if traffic is the only metric we still will work with them, but we know how this might go. So we’re going to start with that.“

He further added:

My team looks at a client’s website only after understanding what their goals are.

“Then, after the call, we look into their website and we create a statement of work. So we tell them — OK this is what we’re going to do. This is the list of problems we’re seeing with your website, this is how we want to fix it.

Prioritize, so the first month we solve all of the most terrible aspects like internal 404s or, I don’t know, 10 seconds to load the page, whatever.

And with that it’s extremely transparent because we tell them this project is going to take four months, we’re going to hop into a PM (project manager) like Jira or Trello with your dev team, and we’re going to make it happen.”

Here’s a link to the complete video

Why do we need to talk about audits?

No matter which industry you are in, strategic  SEO and regular SEO auditing are two important aspects. But before auditing, you need to know the goals and communicate better with the team to ensure you can maximize your SEO ROI.