When is an SEO Audit Necessary?

An SEO audit aims to analyze all errors and issues on your website and recommend and implement steps to improve and solve these major problems. According to Statista, Google is the most used search engine in Brazil, with a 95.16% market share.

The digital world has never been so commercially important. People use their smartphones to search for places to visit, eat, buy household items, electronics, or even as a GPS. These searches result in websites. If your site is penalized or has serious SEO issues, people won’t be able to find you.

SEO Audit

All websites developed in Brazil take into account a set of rules and algorithms from Google. However, sometimes the website was not created following Google’s guidelines. In these cases, the site needs more than just a typical SEO consultation, which we call “consultancy,” but rather an audit.

An SEO audit is necessary when the issues go beyond a simple analysis and result in Google penalties, which can remove your site from search pages, rankings, and impose other penalties. These practices, known as “black hat,” harm SEO results.

Difference Between SEO Consultancy and SEO Audit

We have a page that specifies all the services related to SEO consultancy, to make it easier for you to find what you’re looking for. The SEO audit is somewhat different from the consultancy. Although both focus on traffic analysis, improvements, and SEO resolutions, the audit deals with deeper and more harmful issues for your website.

Every website will undergo modifications due to changes in SEO, which is why consultancy is essential to keep everything in order and enhance your results. On the other hand, the audit focuses entirely on major problems and penalties that your website may have, aiming to mitigate and create paths to overcome these challenges.

These are different services, but they can use the same tools. However, the practical steps involved may differ significantly. In consultancy, you’re working on a site that is indexed and already ranked, improving and applying innovations. In the audit, you’re solving more complex issues before your site can start ranking again and recover what was lost.

What Is the Role of an SEO Audit?

The audit identifies major issues with your website, from poor page indexing to penalties (black hats). There are different penalties, but it’s not just these that can harm your website.

For instance, new websites, with a recently purchased domain and newly structured, often require more effort in content and digital marketing overall. After six months, your site might still not be well-ranked, even if it’s indexed in Google Webmaster Tools.

Google views newer websites with suspicion because many domains are bought for just one year and not renewed. As a result, there’s a large market for “spam sites,” which are disposable within a short time. Google’s domain filter, which performs this analysis, is called the Sandbox.

Initially, it may be harder to rank and achieve extraordinary results, but after a year, all the work in SEO improvements can yield better outcomes. The more severe penalties usually have other causes.

Penalties stem from SERPs (search engines) to maintain a healthy and positive environment and prevent the use of marketing techniques with bad faith. While it may seem strange to think that some people use underhanded methods for gain, this happens more often than you might think.

To focus on user experience, Google and other search companies have established rules to prevent relevant and legitimate sites from being harmed by competitors and users looking to benefit at any cost.

Types of Penalties

In Google, the most important search engine for us Brazilians, penalties are divided into manual and automatic (algorithmic) penalties. Some developers refer to penalties as Penalty -30 and Penalty -950.

Manual Penalties

Manual penalties happen when a Google employee manually analyzes your site and identifies violations of its guidelines. Sometimes you receive a notification about this warning, and it’s common for Google to indicate what you should do or correct.

After this, you can take the necessary steps and request reconsideration, meaning asking Google to reanalyze your site, explaining what was done, admitting the previous mistake, and describing the key information about your site and your improvement goals. Upon this new review, Google may lift the penalty.

Automatic Penalties

Automatic penalties occur through bots. Google’s algorithm identifies the error and simply removes what you’ve done, without any prior warning. In such cases, it’s crucial to have an analyst frequently checking Google Webmaster Tools or Google Analytics.

However, you can notice that you’ve received a penalty if your organic rankings drop drastically without an apparent reason. It’s common for forgotten websites with no new content for a long time to suffer such drops, but penalties are different.

If you’re applying SEO strategies, creating content, improving technical aspects of your site, and promoting it regularly on social media and other sites, it’s unusual for rankings to drop that significantly. In such cases, it’s likely that Google has left an error notification in the data analysis tool (Analytics or Webmaster Tools).

These penalties can severely affect your business, so it’s important to try to avoid them. An SEO consultancy’s job is to recommend best practices, apply improvements, and identify common issues. In an audit, the mistake is already made, and there’s much that still needs to be uncovered and redone.

Some Tips for What Can Be Done

Google has various algorithms to detect black hat or questionable practices. These include Panda, Penguin, and others, which have significantly changed the way SEO is done in recent years.

Google doesn’t want commercial, institutional, or content websites to be of low quality. The algorithms have helped improve the level of excellence, pushing developers, content creators, and designers out of their comfort zones.

These changes have made Google much stricter in its evaluations. Therefore, a site from 2013, for example, could be outdated and full of errors if no updates were made since then. The improvements required are much deeper, as if your site needs to start over from scratch.

The most severe penalties involve exclusion from the search engine. If you search on Google using this sequence: “site:yourdomain.com.br” and it doesn’t appear in the results, it could be because you’ve been banned from Google until you make corrections following best practices and request a new review. This process can take quite some time, but it’s not impossible to recover.

Tips to Avoid Google Penalties

• Avoid overusing keywords on your pages (whether on the homepage, service pages, or blog).
• Don’t link or partner with websites that manipulate links (excessive, meaningless, and purchased backlinks, for example).
• Work on a consistent link-building strategy, seeking partners, improving outreach to other sites, and engaging with communities interested in your content.
• Don’t use cloaking or create doorway pages.
• Always think of your user, not the search engine.

If you’re interested in resolving all your penalty issues and sudden ranking drops, an SEO audit might be your light at the end of the tunnel. But remember, it’s a hard job that needs to be done in stages.

If Google starts to analyze and trust your site more after six months or a year, even after penalties and more complex issues, keep in mind that Google will be stricter with your site. Still, it’s possible to turn things around and build a profitable business website with excellent search results.