Does your website rank on the first page of search engine queries for most search phrases in your niche? How easy is it for first-time PC or mobile users to navigate and find what they’re looking for? Does your content satisfy most visitors’ search intents? These are only a few of the many vital questions that an SEO audit should answer. Regular, planned audits make it a lot easier for companies to understand how prospective customers interact with their website and make continuous improvements.
More businesses now seem to grasp the opportunities that an optimally performing website can generate. Those who feel like they’ve arrived a bit late to the party would want to have their sites audited and optimized in the shortest period. Whether it be to decide if an audit is worth investing in or pure fascination, businesses often ask, “How long does an SEO audit take?”. It doesn’t help issues that different SEO companies and freelancers promise results in as short as a few hours to as long as 6 months. You can find software that can pop out a questionable audit in a couple of minutes. However, even if it may look professional, such an audit is typically confusing and off the mark.
On average, a manual SEO audit that generates an easy-to-read report that meshes well with your overall business objectives takes about one week to complete. For smaller websites with less than 10 pages seeking to start off on the right foot, an audit should only take a couple of days.
Before we delve deeper into how long it takes to complete an SEO audit, let’s take a look at what the process entails. On-page SEO consists of elements within your website that you can control and optimize. A large part of on-page SEO has to do with your content and how easy it is for search engines to find. It’s not all about stuffing keywords and hoping that something sticks — your content should answer users’ search queries with few to no unnatural keywords. An SEO audit also looks into how the internal link structure helps users and search engine crawlers to find pages.
Off-page SEO looks into aspects outside of your website that you can, however, try to influence. Perhaps the most important off-page SEO element is the number and quality of backlinks. An SEO audit checks the number of authoritative websites linking to your own, compared to competing sites. A technical SEO audit takes a microscope and goes under your website’s hood. We’re talking about how quickly the website loads, how well it translates to different mobile device screens, and how secure the site is.
If you own a small website in a narrow, non-competitive niche, your SEO audit can be completed a lot sooner. While there’s the temptation to go for the quickest solution, sometimes you have to sit it out and get the best possible results. For a larger website, a week’s wait doesn’t seem too long, especially when you’re getting value for your time. If you’re keen on getting quick results, you can always forego a full audit and go for a keyword or technical SEO audit.
"Just recently, I was able to take a pretty competitive keyword from #12 (page 2), up to #5 on page 1 in 14 or 15 days."
