Free SEO audits – do they make sense?

An SEO audit is a technical analysis of a website against search engine requirements. In Poland, the dominant search engine, with almost 96% market coverage, is of course Google. So in our country, websites are analyzed mainly in terms of its requirements, the list of which is really long.

Google presents its requirements for websites in its Guidelines for Webmasters, which are intended to be a guidepost for optimizing and creating websites that are user-friendly, and therefore highly visible in organic search results.

Is it possible to conduct a free SEO audit?

Free SEO audit, of course, it is possible to conduct, although its results always raise a lot of different doubts, especially for people who have not been familiar with SEO before. In the following part of the article we will talk about the advantages and disadvantages of free SEO audits, what risks they involve, how they can be helpful and how they differ from professional analysis performed by experienced specialists.

Is a free SEO audit always automatic?

Free SEO audit is not necessarily always automatic, although in most cases it is. Usually it is the automation that allows you to offer such solutions for free, the lack of participation of a specialist in such an analysis is simply the absence of additional costs.

Once created, the page analysis tool is used an infinite number of times. At the same time, the cost it took to produce it can be considered the cost of promoting a particular company. Such an automatic audit, which shows even very basic data, can serve as a reason to establish a sales conversation, regarding the activities on a given website.

However, there are free audits, or in fact “intros” of them, included in SEO offers, which were conducted by a specialist. They are usually aimed at pointing out the first errors visible on the site at a glance, so as to make the potential client aware that the site realistically needs to be optimized.

They are also designed to help the client understand that the site is in need of optimization.

What does a free SEO audit usually include?

Free SEO audits usually contain very basic data that can be “extracted” from a site using a fairly simple to build crawler (a computer program that automatically accesses the site to extract specific information from it). Among such basic data are usually such information as:

• whether the site has a completed meta title and description
• what H-headers appear on the site
• quantity of content
• preliminary keyword analysis
• page loading time
• mobile versions
• software versions
• size of service
• social media connections
• links to sitemap.xml or robots.txt files

Of course, what data is provided by free SEO auditing tools will vary between them, but the above list includes the most common ones.

Different data may also appear in free audits that were conducted by specialists rather than automatically.  In this case, usually what kind of information it will be depends on the purpose for which the audit was conducted.

Whether a free SEO audit is enough to position a site?

A free SEO audit is definitely not enough to carry out effective optimization of a website, and thus will not be a solid base for SEO. This is primarily due to the fact that it does not give a complete picture of the technical state of the site, it only indicates that adaptation to Google’s guidelines is the direction to go if you want to achieve organic results.

What are the risks of relying only on a free SEO audit?

The biggest problem with an automated/free SEO audit is the lack of context in which the information we receive about the state of the site should be embedded. Very often, as a result of such an audit, we receive, in post, a series of information without additional commentary, which, first – for a person who has had no exposure to SEO can mean little, and second – information that is the result of an analysis that does not take into account, individual solutions applied to a particular site.

First of all, it is the templateness of this type of solution, which can be the biggest pitfall, if we would like to consider it as the only basis for optimizing our site.

When a free SEO audit can be a helpful tool?

However, it is not that a free/automated SEO audit is a completely unnecessary and useless tool. It is a good starting point when we are considering whether to start the process of SEO and optimization of our website at all.

If the ratings from the automatic audit of our site are bad, regardless of which tool we used, we will have a clear answer that we need to lean into the technical side of our site, in terms of search engine requirements. Then, the next step should be a professional SEO audit.

What is the difference between a free SEO audit and a professional one?

The main differences between a free/automated SEO audit and a professional one are its scope and duration. In the case of a professional audit conducted by an SEO specialist, there is a comprehensive very broad analysis of the state of the site, in the context of Google’s requirements, but also hooked on topics such as UX, content writing, traffic analysis, link profile or search engine visibility.

The audit is not only a free/automated SEO audit, but also a professional one.

Additionally, the professional SEO audit includes comments on the various elements analyzed, as well as specific optimization guidelines, the implementation of which will result in the repair of existing errors and increase the visibility of the site in Google.

We can guess, then, that such a detailed analysis requires time, but it is worth devoting it to receive a set of optimization solutions dedicated specifically to our site, taking into account any side elements that may affect it.

Why is it better to use a professional SEO audit before starting SEO activities?

If we start SEO activities, such as link building or content writing, relying only on optimization performed on the basis of an automated SEO audit, it may simply be too little to achieve satisfactory results.

Today, the requirements that Google places on Webmasters are so high that deep, well-executed optimization of a site is an absolute necessity if we are to succeed in beating the competition in organic search results.

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