SEO audits are an essential part of any SEO analysis. At the base minimum, they help keep your clients’ websites afloat in a sea of competition. If their websites aren’t consistently optimized for SERPs, they will be missing out on important organic traffic that can bring in results.
No content is an island. Content must be vouched for virtually, interconnected, and supported by a framework of articles. SEO is like building a house: it needs strong foundations to stand a chance at scraping the skies–aka ranking.
Ignoring critical SEO issues is like letting water damage weaken that foundation, which can bring your client’s entire SEO strategy crumbling to the ground. That’s why it’s critical for marketing agencies to deliver their content strategies around SEO, and continually check their clients’ web vitals. So how often should agencies be checking in with a site audit?
Read on as we answer:
How often should you be performing SEO audits to keep your clients competitive?
How to get faster indexing on your clients’ websites
Site audit tools that help your agency scale
Using an SEO audit for client acquisition
Let’s get right to how often you should be performing site audits.
How Often Should Your Agency Perform SEO Audits?
Doing an SEO checkup for each of your clients is like spring cleaning. You don’t need to do it every day, but if you avoid it, you start to notice things piling up in places where they shouldn’t.
How often you need to complete an SEO audit will depend on a few factors, such as:
The size of your client’s website: a larger website typically requires more frequent audits.
The industry benchmarks within that niche: if the competition is keeping on top of their SEO health, your client must as well
The current state of their SEO health: a site with a lower SEO health score will usually need more frequent audits until they reach a minimum threshold
The importance of web traffic and conversion to the client’s bottom line: if your client relies heavily on online-driven revenue, SEO issues need to be addressed far more quickly
For example, depending on the size of your client’s website, if your client is a small, local business, you may find that doing a complete SEO audit every 6 months is plenty.
However, a larger eCommerce site with more moving parts and a regular content marketing schedule usually require weekly audits to catch and correct errors as they appear.
We get it. Performing technical site audits can be a tedious thing. But they are a critical part of making sure that your client’s SEO strategy isn’t derailed by small technical errors that can go unnoticed.
You should also consider performing an audit when there is a significant change to the website or the ranking algorithm, or if you see a significant drop in organic traffic.
Why You Need to Perform Regular SEO Audits For Your Clients
You may think that once you’ve built or updated your client’s website that things will stay consistently clean from an SEO perspective, but that’s not always true. The internet is an imperfect space. Images or links can break, a small tweak to one page can have unexpected implications on another, or SEO benchmarks and algorithms can shift on you when you least expect it.
Just like routine visits to the dentist, a website needs frequent health checks to be deemed healthy. A good website has a good site health score. It very likely will never be at 100%, but the important thing is to ensure that the homepage, as well as pages where visitors are making important decisions like purchases, are running smoothly.
Easily keep track of your client’s SEO score with our built-in SEO auditor. Try it free for 14 days!
Anything below 90% indicates that there are some issues that need to be addressed. Anything below 70% is a clear sign that there are significant problems that could be impacting your client’s ability to rank for important, high-value keywords.
Plus, the more competitive your client’s niche is, the higher score you will require to make sure they are competitive in that space.
This is where regular client SEO reporting can save you: by looking at performance indicators in your website audits, you’ll quickly know how their site’s SEO is doing without having to pull out the big guns. Some red flag metrics that will quickly tell you what needs optimization are:
A low site health score
A large number of broken links
Images without Alt Tags (which are also important for accessibility)
Duplicate content
Duplicate metadata
And many more…
Your typical SEO audit will dig into over 40 common site issues that can have a negative impact on your client's SEO performance if left unchecked.
A thorough site audit also takes a look at the value of UX, which key to getting website visitors to do what you intend them to do. If they don’t get what they came for, your clients have lost another customer. If your clients’ website isn’t fast enough, it will miss out on clients and impact revenue. The ideal page load time is under two seconds. Any longer and boom, you’ve probably lost a customer.
Other factors to look at when conducting a complete site audit include:
Bounce rate, which typically indicates that the user isn’t finding the content relevant to their search
Exit pages, which will highlight drop points in the customer funnel
Increases in shopping cart abandonment rates
A lower-than-average user session time
Conversion rates, including micro conversions such as form fills, downloads, or signups
Without regular site audits, your clients’ digital marketing engines can start to run dry. This is why it’s important to do regular audits on your clients’ sites and make it a part of your agency’s routine services.
Track All Your Clients’ Critical SEO KPIs In One Dashboard
Start Your Free Trial Today!What Is Analyzed in an SEO Audit?
Our SEO audit tool finds over 40 on-page technical SEO issues. For simplicity’s sake, there are three main categories for an SEO audit:
1. A technical SEO audit that looks for bigger-picture elements on their web pages like:
URL structure
Site speed
Page speed
Crawlability
Duplicate content
And more.
2. On-page audits that look at the content itself to analyze page SEO like:
Site content structure
Keyword research
Metadata
User experience
Broken links
And more.
3. Server log audits that look at aspects that help search engines want to spend time on your site:
User agent analysis
Crawl budget analysis (crawl rate limit and crawl demand)
There are also 3 levels of severity, so your agency can prioritize and manage its time fixing the errors that cannot be ignored. Critical errors (red) should be addressed immediately, which is why running a weekly audit–even if it’s just to assure your clients that their website is alive and well–is an important part of an agency’s SEO strategy.
Automate all your clients’ site audits in minutes with our SEO Audit tool. Try it free for 14 days!
The Right SEO Audit Tool for Your Agency
The full SEO audit process–from identifying to fixing the SEO issues–can take a couple of days to over 6 weeks to complete. This can take up a lot of time for agencies–especially with multiple clients. The right SEO audit tool should free up your agency’s time as much as possible and keep a finger on the pulse by automating the SEO auditing & reporting process.
You don’t need to be an SEO expert to perform regular site audits. AgencyAnalytics’ SEO Audit Tool prioritizes issues for you and highlights your agency’s improvements, making your agency look like it’s working night and day crawling sites.
Automate your technical SEO reports with the scheduling option, so your clients’ latest data gets sent to them periodically without your agency ever having to worry about another deadline.
You can also choose to perform weekly or monthly site audits to include in your client reporting.
Even if there aren’t a lot of errors to be fixed, constantly reinforcing that your maintaining your client’s SEO health at 95% or better is a great way of showcasing what you provide to your clients.
Focus more on the tasks that will improve your clients’ search engine rankings. Automating your SEO reporting using templates gives your agency real-time info on website or content issues and identifies optimization opportunities–so you know exactly what needs to be done.
Preview our SEO report template. Want to see it with your own data? Try AgencyAnalytics free for 14 days.
With the right audit checklist, SEO strategy, and SEO software, even tedious site audits become a part of scaling your agency by delivering easy wins to your clients.
Agency Tip: It can take weeks for search engines to index pages. You can use IndexNow to make it easier to instantly inform search engines about your latest content change on your clients’ websites.
Show the Full Picture With Live SEO Dashboards
To get a full picture of your client’s website performance, build an SEO dashboard and combine SEO metrics from various sources to monitor every relevant SEO KPI. Manually doing this takes time and communicating your clients’ full website metrics can be difficult–unless you have a live dashboard that combines all this real-time for you under one roof.
With over 60 native integrations (including SEMrush, Moz, Ahrefs, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics) plus our own white labeled SEO tools, your agency can customize these dashboards with easy drag-and-drop features to show everything from your clients’ top landing pages, site audit score, and conversions from SEO to quickly demonstrate your SEO strategy’s success.
Try out this SEO dashboard template with your free 14-day trial.
How To Land New Clients Using an SEO Audit Tool
Including an SEO audit along with writing your SEO proposal for prospective clients can actually be an excellent return on investment. With our SEO proposal template, your agency has everything it needs to save time to give an instant SEO audit and identify actionable changes you plan to make to meet their business goals.
An SEO audit provides your prospects with immediate value while demonstrating your agency’s expertise. Do this 12-step SEO audit for prospective clients and you might just land them before your free trial expires!
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Written by
Melody is a marketing manager, writer, and startup consultant with a background in behavioural neuroscience. Through a data-driven approach and a passion for product-led strategies, she helps businesses achieve growth in today's competitive digital landscape.
Read more posts by Melody Sinclair-Brooks ›