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 user-friendly, highly visible websites in organic search results.

Is it possible to conduct a free SEO audit?

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

Is a free SEO audit always automatic?

Free SEO audits are not necessarily always automatic, although in most cases, they are. 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 infinite times. At the same time, the cost of producing 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, conducted by specialists. They are usually aimed at pointing out the first errors visible on the site at a glance, making 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, the data 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 conducted by specialists rather than automatically. In this case, the kind of information provided usually depends on the purpose of the audit.

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

A free SEO audit is definitely not enough to carry out effective website optimization and, thus, will not be a solid base for SEO. This is primarily because it does not give a complete picture of the site’s technical state; 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 the 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, the templates of this type of solution can be the biggest pitfall if we consider them the only basis for optimizing our site.

When a free SEO audit can be a helpful tool?

However, a free/automated SEO audit is not 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 our site’s automatic audit ratings are bad, regardless of which tool we use, we will have a clear answer that we need to look at the technical side of our site in terms of search engine requirements. 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 site’s state in the context of Google’s requirements, but also 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 and specific optimization guidelines. Implementing these will repair existing errors and increase the site’s visibility in Google.

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

Why is using a professional SEO audit before starting SEO activities is better?

Suppose we start SEO activities, such as link building or content writing, relying only on optimization performed based on an automated SEO audit. In that case, the effort may be insufficient to achieve satisfactory results.

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

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