Custom Site Audits
Want Better SEO Traffic?
What’s Holding Your Site Back?
At Storyteller Media, we know SEO. Our comprehensive, 200-point site audit diagnoses problems with your site.
If you’re ready to grow organic traffic, improve customer experience, and increase revenue, we can help.
Struggling to Understand Google?
Search engines constantly move the goalpost for small businesses. What worked years ago no longer produces the same results. It can be confusing to sort out what search engines require for ranking now.
And SEO is becoming increasingly technical. If you’re having trouble sorting out terms like robots.txt, canonical, and cumulative layout shift, you aren’t alone.
Do these challenges sound familiar?
Google seems to ignore your well-written, helpful content. But your competitors still rank on page 1.
Site speed, sitemaps, and security all affect your site’s rankability. Add in canonical, no-indexed content, and soft 404 errors and it can feel overwhelming.
Pages and sections that used to do well are now almost invisible.
These factors hurt conversion rates and revenue numbers.
An SEO audit is the first step to correct these common problems. Jump to our audit packages and pricing.
Why Trust Bryan & Dena?
Dena and I run several large authority brands, reaching tech, travel, and outdoor communities. Our content is seen by millions of readers every year.
We’ve been doing SEO since our first online business in 2007. I also covered online business and SEO for a New York Times property for four years. And we’ve managed content and SEO for numerous companies – from local businesses to international brands.
Here’s more about us.
When to Order an SEO Audit: 5 Reasons
When is an audit useful? Fluctuating search rankings directly affect the bottom line. A thorough SEO audit can identify problems even before they affect traffic and earnings.
Here are five reasons to order an SEO audit.
A drastic drop in organic search traffic likely means you’ve been affected by a recent Google update. An SEO audit can discover technical, on-page, and off-page issues affecting your ranking.
A slow decline in ranking indicates it’s time to audit your site. Sites don’t decline without reason, and an in-depth SEO audit can help uncover what’s really happening.
If you are evaluating the purchase of a new web property, an SEO audit should be part of your due diligence. Are there PBNs, malware, spammy links, or other serious flaws on the site?
We audit our sites annually and recommend that you do too. A well-optimized site can degrade over time. New plugins, WordPress updates, and other changes can cause fail points on your site. It’s best to find them before they affect ranking and user experience.
Before beginning the next growth phase, it’s a good idea to have a site checkup.
Finding weak areas will maximize site growth and prevent replicating problems across the new site content.
A custom website audit can help diagnose traffic losses and growth inhibitors.
- If you feel that your growth has hit a ceiling, an audit can find what’s limiting you.
- If you were hit by a recent Google algorithm update, an audit is the only way to determine points of failure.
Now, on to what an SEO audit can do for you.
Here’s how much an audit will cost.
Two Types of SEO Site Audits
We offer two types of audits: technical and content. Our Complete Site Audit includes both technical and content audits for a full picture of your site health.
Here’s what they each cover.
What Your Technical Audit Uncovers (Price)
- Crawlability: Analyze the robots.txt file to ensure the search engines can read everything you want them to. We’ll check for crawling conflicts, errors, and incorrect 404s and redirects.
- Indexability: We’ll check indexing problems, redirect chains, and XML sitemaps. We’ll also review canonicals, 4XX and 5XX errors, soft 404s, and JavaScript redirects.
- Google Search Console: We’ll troubleshoot and optimize features inside of GSC. These enhancements include Breadcrumbs, FAQ, How-to, Profile page, Review snippets, Sitelinks search box, Unparsable structured data, videos, Discover, Google News, Manual Actions, and Security Issues.
- Internal linking: We’ll check for broken internal and external links, anchor texts, click depth, URL structure, site navigation, and more.
- Security: We’ll check for page security, valid <head> tags, malware, and mixed content.
- Site Speed: We’ll check for correct caching, image compression, and sizing. We’ll also measure Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, FID metrics) and identify areas of improvement.
- Best Practices: We’ll review the overall health of your site against current best practices. While some details are minor, others have a direct influence on how users and search engines access and consume your content.
What Your Content Audit Uncovers (Price)
- Content Helpfulness: We’ll review the actual quality (helpfulness) of your content. We follow the learnings from Google’s recent Helpful Content Updates. Does it satisfy the search intent? How does it compare to similar sites ranking above it?
- Topical Authority: How thoroughly has your site covered a topic category, and is it positioned to rank that type of information? We’ll identify content gaps and growth areas and look for content sections that might do better on another site.
- E-EAT: To help your content rank, we’ll evaluate it for trustworthiness. The factors include experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. These trust factors are presented in About pages, author bios, and other on-page credentials. These factors help establish your writers as Subject-Matter Experts (SME).
- Content Quality: Different from what you say (helpfulness), this looks at how you say it. Technical quality (spelling, grammar, word count) affects how search engines and users view your content.
- Keyword Performance: We’ll audit your content to determine what is working and what is underperforming. We use Ahrefs and Google Search Console to take a pulse on your content’s performance and identify areas of improvement and growth.
- Crawlable and Indexable: While we’ll go into more depth on this in the technical audit, determining if search engines can find and index your individual pages is critical.
- Page Structure and Navigation: How easy is it for readers and customers to discover your content, once they are on your site?
SEO Audit Packages: 3 Options
*Prices are in Canadian dollars (CAD). Canadian clients are subject to sales tax.
What About a Free SEO Audit?
I’m sure you’ve seen SEO agencies that offer a “free SEO audit.”
Are these any good? Not really. If your site is your business, you’ll want to skip these services.
Here’s why: Free audits are usually auto-generated with a tool. As you might expect, a superficial scan will produce superficial results. These tools cannot interpret the results. Not every finding applies equally to every site.
About Our SEO Audits
To help diagnose and correct issues with your site and search ranking, we offer three site audits:
- Technical SEO Audit
- Content Audit
- Complete Audit (Content & Technical)
We Invest Time in Your Audit
Every audit takes 15 to 50 hours. We generate data using a variety of free and paid tools.
We spend many hours sifting that data to identify problems, issues, and glitches.
This process is manual and hands-on as we look for relationships and data trends.
200+ Point Checklist
Our proprietary systems check the following areas of site health.
- Crawlability
- Indexability
- Google Search Console
- Internal linking
- Security
- Site speed
- E-EAT
- Best practices
Audit Findings
On an average site audit, we generate from 12 to 20+ findings. These range from minor to critical importance.
We offer specific recommendations for correcting each issue on your site.
About Us
We are experienced site owners and technical SEOs.
This means that we are qualified to gather and interpret your site’s SEO data and make specific recommendations for improvements.
Because of our experience as both SEOs and publishers, we understand how to interpret the findings. Not all findings impact rankings or user experience.
We’ll guide you to the areas that will move the needle on your site.
Order Your SEO Audit with Storyteller Media
We cover 200+ factors when auditing your website.
You’ll expand your reach, authority, and influence with SEO-optimized content.
Better SEO means more revenue.
The organic search landscape has never been more competitive. An annual SEO audit is an important step to keeping your properties optimized for search.
SEO Audit Deliverables
As part of every audit, we provide a Google Sheets summary of our findings, organized by priority.
This includes reference links and suggestions to correct each item.
We’ll also include spreadsheet tabs, screenshots, and other findings as required.
Once the audit is delivered, we’ll schedule a 30-minute Zoom call.
Bryan will review the results with you and discuss specifics of how to implement the suggestions. Depending on availability, we may be able to help you make the required changes.
Learn more about our SEO consulting.
