Conduct an SEO audit of your strategy

The SEO audit is an opportunity to take stock of your natural referencing strategy, to know where you are, and to find areas for improvement to gain positions in the search results of Google (and other search engines).

A common mistake is to think that a SEO audit is only necessary when you have problems, a loss of organic traffic, or when your site is no longer as efficient as before. So, we've listed a few reasons why you should do a SEO audit.

Analyzing the strategy of competitors

It may seem paradoxical, but auditing your competitors' websites will give you a detailed understanding of their SEO strategy, and how do they generate traffic. Knowing what they do and what they don't do, analyzing the technical performance of their site will help you Define an effective strategy, in line with the market.

Identifying the keywords they're ranking for and the type of content they're posting will help you determine your own content strategy. If they have high performing web pages that generate clicks, it will be mandatory to do just as well, and even better to hope to stand out in Google. On the other hand, if they are not present on keywords that are key for you, it means that the place is yours.

Preparing your SEO strategy

Information collected during a SEO audit are used to develop a strategy for natural referencing personalized and unique, which, in the end, will allow you to search for available positions very quickly.

The opportunities revealed by a comprehensive audit will be useful to improve the structure of the website, optimize performance and in particular the Core Web Vitals, but especially the creation of content to meet the requests of Internet users.

Get a keyword list

Being well referenced on certain keywords is the objective! But if these keywords don't generate natural traffic, it's useless. This notion of monthly volume, and the number of people who type a keyword into the search engine is a crucial point in building a natural referencing strategy.

It is not a surprise to say that the keywords are the key to good SEO since it is these words in question that will be the gateway to your website.

LThe analytical audit provides you with a direct and concrete answer on keywords. You'll know exactly what keywords your competitors are using, and which ones provide the most value. The objective is twofold: Understand your market and optimize your efforts.

The easiest tool to use will be the Google Search Console. With this tool provided by Google, you will get data on the keywords and pages on your site that generate clicks. It's also the best way to see content that's not performing well. A quick win that is sometimes very simple, and to rework existing content in order to provide fresh content.

Optimize performance

Les performance scores have more and more impact on the positioning of websites, and that is quite logical. Users are looking for ever faster and more accurate information, so Google will always prefer a site that is displayed in less than a second rather than a site where you have to wait 10 seconds before consulting it.

That said, we know that your presence on the first page is clearly influenced by technical performances of your site. THESEO audit will allow you to identify possible problems or weaknesses, points that require optimizations, and it will allow you to prioritize the work to be done through a priority system.

The natural referencing relies on two complementary bases : semantics and technique. The audit consists of carefully examining several specific points in order to understand what is missing to be classified as a “good site” by search engines.

The objective is to identify all the factors that influence its positioning (positively or negatively) in the results (SERP). To achieve this result, it is necessary to analyze the elements relating to technical aspects And to editorial aspects.

Technical part

The first essential step to start a natural referencing strategy, theSEO technical audit is the guarantor of your ability to be able to claim to appear on the 1st page on Google. It is this deliverable that will give a clear idea of the health of your site, and whether you are in a position to do better.

To carry out this audit, more than one Hundreds of criteria are taken into account. Among them, we find: the sitemap in XML format, indexing, URL depth, URL depth, content duplication, security, security, the robots.txt file, broken images, loading times too long, 404 pages, Core Web Vitals, Core Web Vitals, short meta description tags, short meta description tags, short meta description tags, short description tags, queries per page, queries per page, text and code ratio, respect for Hn tags, backlinks (incoming links) and much more.

Since 2021, Google has also taken into account in its criteria the Core Web Vitals. It is a combination of three data related to theThe user experience on the page: loading speed, interactivity, visual stability.

Semantic part

An equally essential step, but which sometimes arrives later in the order of SEO priorities, and that mostly depends on budgets most of the time. This is the analysis of SEO market to understand how to position yourself permanently in the engines.

Needless to say that the quality of your content is a key success factor for your positioning. Content is not just a question of keywords, number of words or even internal/external links. To be efficient, it must be relevant and unique, but above all to respond to research intentions of users.

To carry out this audit on the semantic part, it is necessary to analyze the market, analyze the quality of the site's pages, analyze blog posts (if you have one), analyze keywords and understand what is missing in your strategy to do better.

Thus, a thorough analysis of all of these elements allows you to obtain visibility on the elements that could hinder your SERP growth, and organize future weeks to improve your performance.

In addition to carrying out audits, we support our customers over the long term with SEO strategies that perform. As part of these missions, we carry out a technical audit every month, and a semantic audit every 3 to 6 months depending on the market.

Despite what you may think, the How search engines work can be opaque, and apart from a few details, you can suffer heavy SEO losses in a very short time. Your site must be very well maintained to perform, so you must monitor it at least once a month to avoid any surprises.

Here are some examples of situations in which it would be wise to carry out an SEO audit in order to make the right technical and editorial choices:

Creation of a new site

You can start with a solid foundation when you do the audit right from the start. So, you start with an excellent knowledge of your market in order to write the marketing strategy for the next 12 months, and you know exactly what remains to be done on your site to acquire visitors.

Redesign your site

When you already have a site, the work is different since we must take into consideration the existing one so as not to lose qualified traffic. Therefore, the analysis goes further on how to migrate to a new site, what to keep, what was useless in the old site, but above all, not to reproduce the same errors. The two audits will provide answers so that this redesign project is a success a few weeks after the launch.

Decrease in traffic

‍Your SEO traffic is in turmoil, and you don't really know why. Don't worry, it's normal if you're not an expert in the field. The framework is a bit different for a service of this type, and we adapt. If you only want to solve this problem, we can focus on losing position, and if you want to go further, we can do the SEO audit in its entirety.

Validate your SEO strategy

It is common for us to meet clients who have been developing their own SEO strategy from the start. It's a challenge that we really love. This is an opportunity to provide additional knowledge on points, to shed light in the right place sometimes, but above all to support the SEO teams of these companies, a positive collaboration.

This audit being done manually by our SEO expert, the 2nd factor that will affect its duration is the size of your site. Indeed, an e-commerce site of 100,000 pages will take longer to analyze than a SaaS with only 500 pages.

Here is an overview of the duration between a signature and a complete deliverable at Angular:

1. A technical audit (1 to 2 weeks)
2. A semantic audit (2 to 3 weeks)
3. A technical and semantic audit (2 to 4 weeks)

When there is a time constraint such as a significant loss of traffic or a total downgrade of the site, we can carry out a technical audit in 48 hours. We only rush our calendars for emergencies, otherwise the deadlines are standard.

Like deadlines, the audit budget varies according to the need, the size of your site, and the mission as a whole. We are flexible, and adapt our packages to your expectations.

The minimum audit budget corresponds to one working day, or 750 euros. This includes auditing, talking, explaining, going back and forth, and the workspace in Notion. For audit more complex sites, it is sometimes necessary to allow 3 to 5 days of work.

It is important to remember that this budget does not contain the implementation of the recommendations given in the deliverable. On the other hand, you get a detailed audit report what to do to improve your growth in the SERPs, and recommendations that can be actionable the next day on your site, allowing you to position your site in the top positions of Google.