Are you trying to decide if it is worth it to pay for a real SEO audit of your E-Commerce website? Let’s see if automated reports are good enough…
If you are serious about improving your digital marketing program and dealing with the issues that you have now, an automated website audit is not going to solve your problems.
This isn’t because automated reports have no value. We DO use automated software as a part of our e-commerce audit process, but these are just tools to provide info to our team while we are working through our SEO audit roadmap.
Why Aren’t Automated SEO Audits Good Enough?
Here are 3 of the biggest problems:
1. No Prioritization – Not all red flags are created equal in the SEO audit world. Something like an empty meta description is not an issue at all but this will be a red flag in some SEO software programs. On the other hand, broken links are usually one of the first things that we will investigate when we see those pop up on the list.
Broken links are also a great example of why we DO use automated software as part of the audit process. You would never want to have to check all of the links on a large e-commerce website manually. Using the software allows this to be done almost instantly.
2. Some Metrics NEED Interpretation – There are quite a few metrics that are provided which you need to understand in order for them to mean anything. For example, you might see “# of pages with canonical”. Whether this is a large or small number is not the point of the metric. The reason that this is provided is so that you can see if the metric is inline with the number that you expect to see there.
In order to know what is expected here, you need to know what a canonical tag is, what role it plays, where on your site you should expect or need to see them etc. Simply reading the description of each metric is not going to give you the level of understanding that you need in all cases.
3. No Real Recommendations – This is where real people, with real experience come in. SEO software might be able to find some technical issues which you can then go and fix, but there is no real roadmap that will turn the data into a real SEO strategy that is capable of beating strong competitors.
Don’t some software programs also make recommendations?
Yes, you can actually get some content recommendations from website audit software. This usually comes in the form of keyword research. This will tell you keywords that can be attacked which your competitor might rank for but you do not. However, this is data that you would use on a single page-level in order to try and rank for additional keywords. It is not something that you would use to blindly name a strategy for a team of 5+ content creators to follow.
Automated reports are missing the most valuable part of the process… The SEO Audit Roadmap. This includes some of the most valuable things that we can do for you.
Blog Content Recommendations & Strategies – Getting a detailed content marketing strategy is not possible with automated reports. In some industries this is where we can make some of our strongest recommendations. You won’t get this type of guidance from an automated website report in any way. You need a great team of marketers in order to create a great strategy roadmap.
Category Structures & Category Additions – This is another place where the recommendations tend to be the strongest and have the best ROI on your efforts. These recommendations also tend to be easy to implement. Keyword gap analysis can be used to help with these recommendations but you really need a thinking person who understands your industry to be at the helm for this.
How to Acquire Backlinks – Strategies for obtaining high quality, natural backlinks is something that should tie in to your content marketing strategy. The old days of paying for directory links and guest posting links are gone. Creating a holistic approach to creating amazing content, sharing it across your channels, and promoting it is how to increase your site’s authority in a way that wont’ come back to bite you later.
Reports are just a tool. The team that you put together is what matters!
Get in touch with us to find out what seo4anyone our SEO audit roadmap can do for your team. Contact us here.
