If you've never heard of a Forensic SEO Audit, that's a good thing
Forensic SEO Audits
Think of a Forensic SEO Audit as a basic SEO Audit on steroids. A Forensic Audit isn’t about optimizing your content – it’s about finding out what happened to your traffic and how you can get it back.
Most of the time, the traffic on your web site ebbs and flows like the tide. There are days of the week that do better than others, and periods of the year when you know traffic is going to be up over periods, but generally speaking what you’re looking for is a trend that goes up and to the right. What you never want to see is something that looks like one of these:
WTF? What happened?
Politically incorrect or not, that’s the question we get asked all the time. WTF happened?
Precipitous drops like this happen for a few reasons:
It could be a straight-up manual action. You had your hand in the cookie jar doing something black hat and Google caught you.
It could be a an algorithmic change that Google made and they no longer think you’re worthy of a high visibilty position.
It could be a technical issue resulting from an update to your site or hosting environment.
Etc.
How do I fix this?
The only way to know for sure what happened and how to fix it is to do a deep dive into all the possibile influencing factors, document everything and map what we find to a timeline. In practical terms the Forensic SEO Audit differs from the Basic SEO Audit in the following areas:
SEO Audit vs Forensic SEO Audit
Item
Basic SEO Audit
Forensic SEO Audit
Technical SEO issues
Yes
Yes
Titles, Meta Descriptions
Yes
Yes
Content Analysis
Yes
Yes
Content Structure Analysis
Yes
Yes
Social Media Analysis
Yes
Yes
Website Structure Analysis
Yes
Yes
Data Collection Issues
Yes
Yes
Crawl Analysis
Yes
Yes
Link Analysis
Yes
Yes
Traffic Analysis
Yes
Yes
Creative Analysis
Yes
Yes
Usability Analysis
Yes
Yes
Content gaps and opportunities
Yes
Yes
Competitive Analysis
Yes
Yes
Correlation to Product Changes
Yes
Correlation to site design, navigation
Yes
Correlation to search engine algorithm updates
Yes
Deep Dive into Server log files
Yes
Correlation to Protocol migrations
Yes
Correlation to Domain migrations
Yes
Best case scenario is that you have to fix the problem(s) and wait a bit until Google reassesses your website. Worst case scenario is that you can’t fix it, or you have to completely change your business model.
Knowing what happened and why is critical to keep from making the same mistake in the future.
