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:

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.

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:

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.