SaaS SEO Audits
A SaaS SEO audit evaluates several keyword, technical and content-related factors to reveal how well your site is optimised to perform well on search engines.
If you’re looking for information on what goes into an audit, or want to conduct one yourself then you’re in the right place. We’ve prepared a 10-step guide for you to follow.
By the end, you’ll have a complete understanding of if you’re doing a good enough job to put your site in front of your target audience on search engines.
If you’ve developed a Software as a Service, then you know a lot of effort has been put into developing a viable product that your target market will love.Like all other products, you want to start generating brand awareness, leads and ultimately customers. On the SEO-front, an audit of your site is your starting point on this journey. A SaaS SEO Audit is a document containing a detailed overview of the health status, on-site, technical, off-site and competitive status of your website. By conducting an audit, you will also uncover quick-win opportunities and will begin to develop a preliminary SaaS SEO strategy, which will form the foundations of your SEO campaign. In this comprehensive guide, we take you through everything you need to know about SaaS SEO audits, including the complete process, tools you can use to assist you, and what kind of costs you can expect. Here’s a full breakdown of what we plan on discussing:
What is a SaaS SEO Audit?
A SaaS SEO Audit provides a detailed overview of the on-site, technical and off-site elements of your website. From there, you can make informed decisions and actions to increase your competitive position in Google’s SERPS. SEO is an ever-evolving landscape. Ultimately, Google wants website owners to provide their visitors with the best possible user experience. While that in itself is quite a broad area, there are many updates that Google makes to its algorithm over the course of a year in the spirit of achieving this goal. For example, there were 10 algorithm updates in 2023 alone with 4 of those being core updates. By conducting a SaaS SEO audit, you’re making a concerted effort to stay on top of Google’s many algorithm updates. In doing so, you are ensuring that you’re helping Google achieve their ultimate goal – providing Googlers with the best possible user experience – for which you will be rewarded (with improved search rankings)
Why are SEO Audits Important?
There are several reasons as to why SEO audits are important. One of the initial reasons is that they help identify technical issues with your website. For example, crawl issues, slow page speeds, broken links, and more. Beyond that, an SEO audit provides you with a complete understanding of where your website is at right now, including from a technical perspective, how your website is structured and what kind of content you have created, as well as within the competitive landscape. Below, we’ve summarised a complete set of reasons which highlight the importance of SEO audits. They are as follows:
- Identifying issues: Like we mentioned above, SEO audits bring technical and website health issues to your attention.
- Performance optimization: In addition to technical and health issues, an audit reveals which areas of your (or individual pages) you need to improve like title and meta tags, your content’s structure, as well as the general user experience; all of which help you perform in search.
- Competitive analysis: On the note of performing in search, an SEO audit will tell you exactly how you’re positioned against other SaaS competitors.
- Content evaluation: As you should know, content is king when it comes to SEO. Therefore, you should be aware of both the quality and relevance of your content to the search terms that you’re trying to rank for. An SEO audit will reveal just that.
- Measuring success: With an SEO audit, you will have a benchmark of where your website is at, and against which you can measure future results and therefore success.
- Strategic planning: Finally, an SEO audit helps you plan for the future, including for keyword targeting, content development, as well as how SEO will fit into your broader marketing plan.
How Long Does it Take to Audit a SaaS Website?
How long’s a piece of string? In general, an SEO audit of a SaaS website should take between 20 and 40 working hours. With that said, it could be longer (or shorter) depending on the size of the website. Also, in giving our answer, we have assumed that you would like to audit your entire website. Though, if you’re looking to solve a particular issue then this could be far shorter. For example, perhaps you are suspecting that there is a case of keyword cannibalization going on throughout your site. Testing for this issue will be far shorter than conducting a full-scale SEO audit.
What is the SaaS SEO Audit Process?
SEO Audits of SaaS websites (particularly B2B) are different to audits of say e-commerce or Local SEO websites. This is due to the nature of both the websites themselves as well as that typical target markets behave.
For example, while an e-commerce website audit may typically be more focused on technical SEO aspects, an audit of a SaaS website may typically be more focused on content.
Regardless, the SaaS SEO Audit Process can be divided into 10 broad steps. They are as follows:
- Keyword Strategy Review
- Content Quality & Relevance
- Technical SEO Assessment
- Website Structure
- On-Page Analysis
- User Experience
- Backlink Profile Analysis
- Analytics & Data Assessment
- Reporting & Recommendations
Below, we’ve provided more detail on each step in the process.
10-Step SaaS SEO Audit Framework
Understand your current SEO performance and unlock growth opportunities with a structured audit process.
Preliminary Health Check
This presents the first step in your SaaS SEO audit. During this stage, you check the status of basic items like whether your website is indexable, if any crucial status codes are being reported, whether your site is responsive, and how quickly it’s loading.
Read the full guide on preliminary health checks here.
Keyword Strategy Review
The second step of your SaaS SEO audit is to see which keywords your website is ranking for and how well. By doing this, you’ll be able to get an understanding of whether or not the keywords you’re currently ranking for are relevant to your business and target market. In addition, you can take note of some low-hanging fruits.
Read up on performing a keyword strategy review here.
Content Quality & Relevance
The quality & relevance of your content to your target market has a direct impact on their user experience. If your content they find doesn’t address their pain points or search intent then it needs to be improved.
Technical SEO Assessment
Some of the main items you will review during an audit of a SaaS website include your sitemaps file, URL structure, canonicalization, indexing and server response codes.
Website Structure
Ensuring your website structure provides a sound navigational experience for both website visitors and Google is an important contributor to the user experience and SEO success. Your website structure should be logical, navigating to related pages should be easy, and internal linking should be used frequently to promote ease of navigation.
On-Page Analysis
In on-page SEO, it’s equally important that you satisfy search engines and your website visitors. This includes through elements like title tags, meta tags, internal linking, page speed and more.
User Experience
The overall user experience that your website provides to visitor is paramount to both positive search engine rankings and customer conversions. An SEO audit in this area will make sure you’re addressing areas like:
Does your content address the searcher’s intent and provide ultimate value?
Have you provided an optimised and logical content layout?
Does your webpage load quickly?
Is your content mobile-friendly and responsive to all devices?
Backlink Profile Analysis
We’re sure that you know that backlinks are an important part of SEO. But how can you tell whether the backlinks your website currently has are providing the best ROI?
An audit of your backlink profile will reveal not just the quantity, but the quality and relevance of the links pointing to your website as well.
Analytics & Data Assessment
It’s important to gain an understanding of how users are behaving on your website. This includes knowing which pages they hang around on most, which pages draw the most visitors and which pages are underperforming. With this info, you can make informed decisions and prioritise them based on their importance.
Our article on performing analytics and data assessments tell you everything you need to know.
Reporting & Recommendations
Finally, it’s time to put it all together in an easy-to-digest report that your team will understand. In summary, your report should contain the results of all of the areas we’v
What are the Best SEO Audit Tools?
Meta SEO Inspector
This is a browser extension (commonly installed on Google Chrome) which provides an overview of the metadata on any given page on your website.
It’s ideal for checking SEO basics on both your own and competitor websites. Some key features include analysing meta tags, headings and alt-text.
Pros
- Easy to install and use
- Provides a real-time analysis of any given webpage
Cons
- Provides a limited on-page analysis (so it’s good just for an overview)
This tool is completely free.
SEMRush
SEMRush is a comprehensive SEO tool with far wider capabilities than just auditing, though it can be quite useful for conducting an SEO audit as well.
In the context of an SEO audit, SEMRush automatically crawls your website and identifies technical SEO issues. In addition, SEMRush can evaluate your backlink profile, and also provides actionable recommendations for on-page improvements.
Overall, it’s a great all-round SEO tool with solid auditing capabilities. ool that you may choose to look at is Ahrefs.
Pros
- Real-time comprehensive SEO audit
- Provides actionable insights for improving on-page SEO
- Viable tool for backlink auditing
Cons
- Can be costly for small businesses
As at the time of writing, SEMRush pricing starts at 117.33 USD per month.
An alternative t
SEMRush
SEMRush is a comprehensive SEO tool with far wider capabilities than just auditing, though it can be quite useful for conducting an SEO audit as well.
In the context of an SEO audit, SEMRush automatically crawls your website and identifies technical SEO issues. In addition, SEMRush can evaluate your backlink profile, and also provides actionable recommendations for on-page improvements.
Overall, it’s a great all-round SEO tool with solid auditing capabilities. ool that you may choose to look at is Ahrefs.
Pros
- Real-time comprehensive SEO audit
- Provides actionable insights for improving on-page SEO
- Viable tool for backlink auditing
Cons
- Can be costly for small businesses
As at the time of writing, SEMRush pricing starts at 117.33 USD per month.
An alternative t
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a desktop-based SEO auditing tool that will provide you with deep-level insights of the technical and on-site status of your website.
It’s able to provide you with granular information on all technical and technical information on a page-by-page level. In addition, you can identify broken links, poor redirects and improper canonicalization practices using Screaming Frog. Finally, the tool allows for custom data extraction based on your specific needs.
Overall, this is our favourite tool for SEO auditing.
Pros
- Provides granular information about a wide range of aspects across your entire website
- Completely free if you’re crawling 500 pages or less (great for smaller websites)
- Frequent updates
Cons
- Steep learning curve for beginner SEO practitioners
As we’ve written above, SEMRush is free if you’re crawling up to 500 pages per website. This is great for small website owners.
For the paid version of Screaming Frog, pricing starts at £199 per licence, per year as at the time of writing. In our opinion, this is still quite affordable.
An alternative product you could look to in this space is Deepcrawl.
Pagespeed Insights
A completely free tool developed by Google, Pagespeed Insights analyses webpage performance metrics such as page loading speed and as well as the overall user experience.
Alongside its analysis, Pagespeed Insights also provides insights on how to make improvements to both of the aforementioned areas.
Some key features include providing performance scores for metrics such as loading times across both desktop and mobile devices.
Overall, this is a great tool for some basic insights on your page speed.
Pros
- Pagespeed Insights provides easy-to-understand, actionable insights
- Its directly integrated in Google, so you can expect that the advice you receive is in line with Google’s best practices
Cons
- The tool has a very limited scope for SEO auditing purposes, focusing mainly on speed and the user experience.
- The data is rather simplistic
Google’s Pagespeed Insights is completely free to use.
If you’re looking for an alternative that will provide deeper level insights in the area of website speed then you may want to consider GTMetrix.
Google Search Console (GSC)
If you’ve dipped your toes into SEO at all then Google Search Console would be one of the first tools that you’ve heard of.
This is a great tool (the best when it comes to the Google search engine) when it comes to monitoring your website’s presence in Google’s search results.
Here you can see basic information like clicks, average keyword positioning, impressions and click through rates. In addition, Google Search Console provides valuable information on webpage indexing and crawl errors, both of which are invaluable pieces of information to website owners.
As you surely know, this is a must-have tool for all website owners, regardless of if you plan on conducting an SEO audit or not.
Pros
- Google Search Console provides a wealth of data at absolutely no cost
- The insights that you receive are directly from Google
- The user interface is very user friendly and intuitive
Cons
- GSC is limited to Google’s search engine only, which actually makes sense
The tool is completely free and there are no paid features.
If you’re looking for any alternatives, then they would have to be for different search engines. For example, Bing Webmaster Tools for the Bing search engine.
Need a Complete Audit of Your Saas Website? Contact Platypus!
That’s a wrap, we’ve provided you with a complete guide on what an SEO audit is, as well as how you can conduct your own. For deeper level information, follow one of the individual blog posts that we’ve linked to directly from within this article. With all that we’ve said, conducting an in-depth SEO can still be quite a time-consuming task in which it’s quite easy to get lost in all the detail. Our approach to conducting any SEO audit, is to help set the direction of any future SEO campaign that you may have. With that in mind, feel free to contact our team should you have questions regarding SEO audits or if you’d like for someone
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