CHAPTER TEN

Auditing and Troubleshooting

Even if you have a mature SEO program, new challenges and/or opportunities can still arise. The reasons for this are many, including:

  • The technology you use to implement your site requires you to work around its limitations to properly support SEO.

  • Many (or most) of the people in your organization don’t understand how SEO works, or worse, don’t value SEO, leading to mistakes being made.

  • Google algorithm changes can create new opportunities or issues to address.

  • Your competition may invest heavily in SEO, resulting in new challenges to your organic search market share.

As a result, knowing how to conduct an SEO audit and being able to troubleshoot SEO problems are essential skills for any professional SEO.

SEO Auditing

There are many reasons why you may need to conduct an SEO audit. Perhaps you plan to perform one every quarter, or every six months. Perhaps a Google algorithm update impacted your site traffic. Or maybe you saw a drop in your organic search traffic in your analytics data. It could also be that you are proactively trying to find ways to better optimize your site in order to increase organic traffic market share.

Regardless of how you think of why you’re doing the audit, the underlying purpose of performing it comes down to finding ways to improve the SEO of your site and therefore increase the organic search traffic to the site. It’s good to keep that in mind throughout the entire process and to remind all impacted ...

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