Matt Chernay of IT Visions, Inc., recommends starting with a third-party service. His current favorite? Semrush.com, which offers a variety of subscription plans. “Basically, this service sends a crawler—or a robot—to every single page on your website,” he says. “It checks a series of things that have to do with SEO. Maybe you have some missing page descriptions or broken links. These can drastically reduce your ability to rank well and need to be addressed.”
Chernay says that clients want SEO audits for a variety of different reasons. “Sometime, a business owner just wants to make sure that they are following best SEO practices,” he says. “Or sometimes people realize something is not working right, but they need to figure out what needs to be fixed.”
Chernay sites the example of technical company that approached him. “Six months ago this company developed a new website. But they’ve gotten no leads from it. Nada. So that’s why I was hired. I did a big audit and now I’m on a monthly retainer evaluating and fixing things as a I go. Now, they’re starting to make some progress.”