Thinking About Hiring SEO Audit Consultant? First to Read This

Start your high-ranking roadmap with just a single step—an SEO audit.

It reveals every issue with the website’s health and locates an expert solution through extensive research and top-notch expertise. All you need is an expert hand to do all that; an SEO audit consultant comes into play there.

As a result, we’ve compiled some key details about what an SEO auditor and SEO consultant are, their differences, and why you should hire them, and then provided a thorough overview of the SEO audit checklist.

What is an SEO auditor?

An SEO auditor is an expert who carefully examines your website, looking for errors that prevent you from ranking in the SERPS. They identify opportunities that might help you increase your online presence.

As you know, Google frequently modifies its algorithm in response to emerging technologies and search trends. So basically, an SEO auditor helps you analyze your current SEO status, technical, on-page, and off-page errors, and the competition in the market.

What is an SEO consultant?

An SEO consultant provides expert advice through their extensive knowledge and years of experience in the digital marketing industry. Business owners can generate more qualified search engine traffic with their advice, doable tasks, and recommendations.

Moreover, SEO is primarily concerned with planning, strategy, and, finally, implementation. 

By this time, an SEO consultant can be your all-in-one solution. You not only identify your website’s health here, but you also get advice on how to fix it, and they even sometimes do it for you.

Difference Between SEO Specialist and SEO Audit Consultant

SEO is the root of digital marketing. As a result, the levels of expertise between an SEO specialist and an SEO audit consultant differ. We want to highlight the differences between them in order to prevent you from assuming that they are equivalent.

Let’s move in!

SEO Specialist	SEO Audit Consultant
An SEO specialist researches and analyzes search engine trends to improve SERPs and achieve maximum ROI.	An SEO audit consultant analyzes a website’s performance and provides recommendations for improvement.
Examines and implements some SEO recommendations.	Detects and resolves on-page, off-page, content, and technical SEO issues.
Creates and executes backlinks, and content marketing strategy and changes website structure to improve SEO positions.	Consults with and create the overall SEO strategies to increase the company’s search engine rankings position.
Monitors daily performance metrics with tools to understand the strategy’s performances.	Track overall SEO metrics to measure the strength of SEO efforts and make corrections based on data.
Collaborate with editorial, marketing teams, website developers, and website designers.	Suggests an SEO specialist for following the recommendations.

Why Should You Hire an SEO Audit Consultant for Your Website?

We all mostly believe that SEO is as simple as aligning the content with the user’s search intent, adding a few strategically placed keywords, and checking the content’s quality. But no! There is more to SEO than just good content. 

Though it is a very complex and complicated term, the expertise of an SEO audit consultant will allow you to not only optimize your content and link building but also use analytics to track the SEO campaign’s success. 

This is because their world revolves around Google and other search engines. So, they know how to rank higher, produce more leads, or boost your visibility. They can even help you identify your ideal target market and develop solid strategies based on competitive analysis, intent-focused keyword research, and other technical areas. 

There are more reasons to hire them.

• Every business considers time as a luxury and requires many hours to research, optimize and maintain. However, SEO consultants are the best at what they do and free you up to concentrate on other business tasks. 

• An SEO audit strategist has a proper knowledge of SEO tools.

• It takes a lot of time and effort to examine every SEO factor on the audit reports thoroughly. They carefully conduct and analyze it to set goals accordingly. 

• They know the most SEO strategies and tricks to generate organic traffic and boost sales and revenue, which brings more potential customers to your website. 

• Website maintenance is an ongoing process. They frequently control and observe the growth hindrance, then properly evaluate and adopt the next beneficial actions.

• An SEO audit consultant prevents you from falling into the trap and keeps your business safe.

• They are experts in their field and have in-depth knowledge of how to handle specific problems, keeping you on top of market demands and trends.

What Should You Consider Before Hiring an SEO Audit Consultant?

Every business website needs an SEO audit. It keeps your SEO strategy updated. It examines the on-page, off-page, and technical elements that improve the search engine’s visibility, usability, and conversion. 

So, before hiring an SEO consultant, make sure you consider these factors, which are given below: 

SEO Audit Portfolio

An SEO audit portfolio shows consultants’ skills, previous work, level of feedback, and the outcomes they attained in an organized way. 

Finding an experienced SEO consultant is made easier with the help of proof of results, which show the quality of the work and prior successes. 

Previous Successful Working Experience

Having work experience means they know how to thrive in this industry. The more work experience they have, the faster they can find website errors and suggest good SEO strategies.

Because they not only gained work experience but also built a network and sharpened their skills over time. Therefore, hiring them based on their prior success might be fruitful for your future business decisions. 

Related Niche Website Audit Experience

Every business has a unique approach, business model, targeted audience, and goals. Choose an expert based on your business niches. It will ease your findings. Because finding an expert in your field is advantageous and helps in identifying a competent person. 

This knowledge accelerates the growth of your website. On this account, explaining the workflow to them takes less time.

Reviews From Clients

Customers’ opinions on a product or service as well as their overall experience with a consultant are very important in determining their credibility. 

You’ll feel much more comfortable hiring someone if you can see their references, client testimonials, and awards or certificates of excellence.  So they’ll give you the stability you need to stay one step ahead of the competition if they’re truly dependable, credible, and insightful.

Years of Activity in the SEO Industry

A comprehensive strategy and expert execution are necessary for modern SEO. Therefore, the obvious solution is to employ SEO industry experts. They are the leaders, and they are aware of the connections between all the SEO paths.

The longer they have been active in the SEO industry, the more tricks and techniques they are familiar with in this competitive market. Even though it costs a lot to hire them, it has a big impact when you are able to generate huge revenue in just a year.

Error Fixing & Service Provider

Finding an error-fixing quality in them shows their transparency about their industry and provides evidence that they are truly knowledgeable in it. Even as depicted, they have excellent observations on identifying problems and having an SEO specialist fix their issue with their in-depth knowledge and SEO strategies.

What Is the Role of an SEO Audit Consultant? SEO Consultants Audit Checklist

An SEO consultant plans, implements, and manages SEO campaigns. Typically, they handle a wide range of responsibilities, including digital marketing, website technicalities, content strategy, link building, and other search engine strategies.

We’ve put together the following SEO audit consultant checklist:

# SEO basics Audits

# Technical SEO Audit Consultancy

# On-Page SEO Audit Consultancy

# Content Audits & Consultancy

# Keyword Research Consultancy

# Off-Page SEO Audits Consultancy

SEO Basics Audits

Organic traffic- They analyze the source of website traffic whether it is from direct search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, referral source, or social media sites.

Total Backlinks- They determine how many backlinks your website has overall and whether any of them are broken or missing, so fix them. Quality backlink improves your domain authority. 

Internal Link- If you click on the internal link, it shows the page doesn’t exist or is deleted; sometimes a typo or pointing to the wrong page can frustrate users, negatively impact SEO, and even cause a loss of traffic. So they can assist you in locating and repairing them as soon as possible.

Website Performance- Website performance defines the website’s usability, interactivity, and reliability. If visitors encounter slow page loading, a difficult user interface, or low-quality blurry images, their satisfaction may suffer. So they figure out those issues and recommend some steps to work on them.

Manual Actions- If your website violates any of  Webmaster Quality guidelines, the rankings will decline and even you won’t rank as highly as you did in the past. Any rule violations are discovered, and they quickly make up for them. 

Page Speed- If a website takes a long time to load, the user experience is negatively affected, and the bounce rate rises. They consider the page speed metrics, such as speed index, time to interact, and total blocking time for repairing it. 

Indexed URLs- All of your SEO efforts could be null if you experience indexing problems. In this way, they give information on how many pages are indexed as well as whether any crucial pages are missing from the database or if only unimportant pages are added.

robots.txt file checkup- If your robot.txt file is broken or missing, it can cause the search engine crawler to index those pages that you don’t want. They check those files and rectify this problem by making new rules for uploading to the root directory.

Versions of the site (www)- The website has different versions: non-www and www. An SEO audit consultant checks which versions of your website are.

Mobile-Friendliness- If your webpages do not have a responsive mobile design, dynamic serving, and a fast-loaded webpage, that might suffer the visitor’s experience and cause a loss of traffic. With the help of an SEO audit consultant properly identifies the issues and suggests the best-ever solution.

Overall Website structure (new sites only)- The home page, categories, subcategories, and specific posts and pages make up the website’s structure. They check whether your site structure is perfectly aligned or not, and if not, they carefully correct them.

Technical SEO Audit Consultancy

• Google Search Console and Other Webmaster Tools- They are knowledgeable in the use of webmaster tools and google search console for finding detailed information about a website’s functionality, security, and error detection. 

• Indexation issue- When your web page doesn’t appear by searching, it is not properly indexed so they allow your site to be appropriately updated and fix these issues quickly.

• Crawlability- Crawlability is the accessibility for the search bots, If search engineer crawlers can’t easily access all of a site’s content by following links between pages that hamper your website to rank higher. So they have the capacity to fix the meta tags, robot.txt file, and internal broken links by following some of their tactics.

• XML sitemaps- XML sitemaps are the path of search engine crawlers. If you find a list of invalid URLs, an HTML formatting error, don’t declare a page and its alternate version, or have a larger sitemap for different sections, crawling will be hampered, which will negatively impact ranking. They detect and ensure the faults repairing them accurately.

• Robots meta tags- Robot meta tags control how information from that page is indexed, crawled, and displayed in search results. If the crawlers index the valuable pages that cause a huge loss and harm to safety. With their expertise, they can easily detect and block indexing of non-HTML resources, including PDF files, video files, image files, and sensitive resources.

• Canonical tags- If there are any duplicate content or URLs so it causes indexation issues. They use canonical tags to manage duplicate URLs or content.

• HTTP, HTTPS, SSL, and HTTP/2- HTTP and HTTPS refer to whether the protocol is safe or not. HTTP is not secure, so they consult and help you get an SSL certificate by considering HTTP/2(a faster version than HTTP/1) to make your website secure. 

• Structured Data- Structured data is a type of code that you must add to your website so that search engines can understand certain types of data on it. Sometimes, it’s called ‘Schema markup’ or ‘Rich snippets. If there is no structured data precisely implemented, that impacts SEO rank and crawling. So they identify its issues and securely fix them.

• Image Issue- If the image file is too large, broken, or missing alt text, that creates a technical image issue, and so the site’s ranking, traffic, and accessibility suffer. They will help you to fix it accurately.

• Broken pages-  They find broken website pages that don’t work due to URL errors or server problems. 

• Site’s Page Experience- They demonstrate all the site page experience metrics based on web design, UI and UX, version of the site, and mobile usability.

• Talk about Error- (3XX, 4XX, 5XX)- 3XX for redirection, 4XX for client error, and 5XX for server error, for search engine crawlers and users. The consultant modifies the HTTPS status codes based on the issues.

• Hreflang setup- Hreflang specifies the geographic targeting and language of a web page. When a website is opened outside of your country, this tag assists in translating to their language. The audit consultant identifies the incorrect language codes, sometimes missing canonical tags, X-default, or different language encoding, and fix them.  

• SEO plugin Settings- They install and configure SEO plugins for more diverse features and suggest which settings can improve your performances.

On-Page SEO Audit Consultancy

• Optimizing Heading tags, meta descriptions, and SEO Title- Are the heading tags, meta descriptions, and SEO titles accurate representations of the content’s meaning? Are the keywords placed correctly?  They report the accuracy of these factors.

• Image Alt Text- They check whether the image alt text placed in the web images is correct or not. 

• Post URL structure- URL is the unique address of any webpage. So the URL needs to be concise, user-friendly, and search-engine friendly. Are there any typos in the URLs or are the keywords not correctly integrated? They identify and make a correction to it.

• Content optimization-They check to see if the content you post is completely optimized with the right keyword, is readable and matches the searcher’s intent or not. 

• Internal linking structure- Internal links help visitors and search engine crawlers move around your website from one page to another. No internal links in any page harm rank or are not indexed by search engines. So they audit which issues impact mostly and correct them.

• Find out Error Page (Internal Links)- A broken internal link refers to a page on your website that does not exist, resulting in an error page when browsing. They identify the issue and address it quickly to prevent losing important traffic.

• Check Redirects- Redirects send users or search engines from one page to another via multiple redirects. So they quickly fix this problem if the redirect chain is broken.

Content Audits Consultancy

• Find Duplicate Content Issues- Duplicate content is when you have the same or extremely similar content on multiple web pages on your website. It is detrimental to SEO, and your search engine ranking will suffer.  So they find out which pages suffer your rank and fix it by following some technicalities.

• Identify Thin Content Pages- Google will penalize your site if the content is automatically generated, copied from a low-quality or irrelevant guest blog, or does not accurately represent the main content but forces visitors to navigate to another page to find it. They demonstrate to the editorial teams how and where to correct this content. 

• Find and Fix Issues with Orphan Pages- When the pages don’t have a single link that points toward other pages, they are orphan pages. They identify and fix the issues so Google can crawl them and index them in the SERPs.

• Check content gaps- When you neglect to include crucial subtopics in your content, there will be content gaps. They explicitly help you to find out the content gap to stay competitive.

• Suggest the best Content Strategy- The goals, priorities, and level of efficiency are all improved by using a content strategy. They build a good foundation of content strategy and fix all the content issues precisely.

Keyword Research Consultancy

• Map keyword strategy- keywords are the foundation of SEO success if you know who your audience is and what they focus on to make searches, they map your strategy accordingly.

• Find Targeted Keywords– They find and analyze if the targeted keyword perfectly matches the searcher’s intent or not.

• Find long tail keyword- Long tail keyword accurately illustrates a specific situation from the searcher’s intent. So they know how to place this keyword and check if the keywords are perfectly placed into the content or not. If not give a suggestion to improvise it.

• Keyword Difficulty- The lower the keyword difficulty, the faster you rank this keyword. They essentially base their keyword strategy on keyword difficulty. If they don’t, their goal of ranking higher will never come true.

• Keyword Cannibalization- The same targeted keyword is used across multiple contents, which is known as keyword cannibalization. It confuses Google as to which page to rank for that keyword. They specify which contents are susceptible to keyword cannibalization and offer advice on how to avoid it.

Off-Page SEO Audits Consultancy

• Backlink Audits- Backlinks increase the website’s domain authority. By doing these audits, a link audit consultant examines the backlinks metrics including the domain strength, linking root domains, anchor text, and number of links, page strength, and relevancy of links that make sure to maintain a good ROI and organic traffic.

• Identify Backlink Variation- They can tell if a webpage contains links that are spammy, unnatural, toxic, or otherwise bad for organic traffic performance.

• Suggest the best Backlink Strategy- Link building is one of the highly effective techniques that will boost your brand’s awareness and traffic. While Google demonstrates your backlink, they know how to consider its quantity and quality. They proactively find the areas of concern and suggest a ground-breaking strategy so that you never face any loss.

Where to get the best SEO audit consulting services?

SEO audit consulting services demonstrate the strategy, plan, and execution of the SEO campaign and fix all the issues that prevent achieving your goals.

However, sometimes, the difficult part is choosing who to work with, who to trust, and who will deliver on their promises, especially if you don’t have an SEO background. Go on to the SEO audit consultancy. When you hire an SEO company, you get advice from experts who have years of experience, specializing in SEO, and are more knowledgeable than you.

RankUpper, a digital marketing agency, can be your one-size-fits-all digital solution. Our professional team has years of experience and everyone expert in their field. They have several niche working capacities that make them versatile in this digital industry. 

We can provide a wide variety of services, including-

• Make an in-depth SEO audit report
• Create a tested on-page strategy
• Write high-quality optimized content
• Fix technical issues
• Provide off-page SEO services
• Build backlinks
• Manage and implement SEO campaigns

Depending on your needs, we may coordinate with your internal marketing team and provide suggestions.

FAQs

Conclusion 

Making an SEO roadmap with the assistance of an SEO audit helps you stay competitive in this vast search engine world. Therefore, your best business move to date would be to hire an SEO audit consultant. 

However, remember not to rush when hiring them. First, thoroughly research who to choose for your SEO audit tasks. Because an SEO audit is a lengthy process, take your time and carefully consider your options before selecting the best SEO audit consultancy company.

If you have any inquiries or need assistance with SEO audit-related tasks, please contact us.