Are automated website audits accurate?

Learn what factors effect your Convert website's score on page speed and SEO audit tests, and why those tests may be misleading.

Alastair Day avatar
Written by Alastair Day
Updated over a week ago

Are automated website audits accurate?

Not always. Many automated website audits are built primarily as lead generation tools. They may detect some factors that may contribute to SEO, but they seldom provide an accurate picture. 

For example: Page speed tests give very low scores for some of the highest traffic sites on the internet. Yet these same sites rank at the top of search engine results.

Simply put, automated tests don't tell the whole story. 

What do search engines really care about?

Google's goal is to rank highest the website that will provide the most value and best experience for your customers. 

That's why we do not optimize Convert websites to satisfy tests — we optimize them for your customers.

Some automated audit factors that are often wrong

Compression

Audits love telling you that your images, css, js etc. is not compressed. The reality is what's most important to both search engines and visitors is how fast the web page loads, not the compression used. 

Often sites with little or no compression load much faster than sites with high compression due to numerous other factors. Most high traffic sites use limited or no compression.

Keyword analysis

As Google and other search engines have grown smarter, exact match keywords, and keyword density have become less and less important. 

Search engines can now largely understand natural language and variations of words. Writing your content with the goal of stuffing it full of keywords will generally result in lower rankings, and always result in lower conversions.

Meta tags, titles and alt tags

Meta tags largely have not been an SEO factor for a long time, titles and alt tags do contribute to SEO but there value is on the decline.

Once again, search engines are smart enough to recognize keyword stuffing of these, and usually do not reward that.

Often automated audits will give low scores for multiple title tags on a page. What they fail to take into account is if multiple title tags are used for different screen sizes, in which case Google has no issue with this.

Mobile friendliness

Google does highly value mobile friendly results. The best test for this is: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

A great list of what really matters to search engines is found here:

Interestingly, most of these factors are not included in most automated website audits.

What NiceJob does to optimize your website for search engines

(NOTE: It's important to manage expectations for what what on-page SEO will do for your website. On-page SEO forms a significant percentage of your overall rankings, but is not a silver bullet to ranking at the top of search engines.)

Content

Each page of your Convert website is written to rank well for a specific service and location. We write content that performs great for search engine rankings — but at the same time converts your website visitors into customers.

Convert websites are automatically updated with your customer reviews & stories via the NiceJob platform. This provides search engines with the exact type of content they love the most: Local, keyword rich, user generated content and photos.

Technical Aspects

Search engines love highly structured data. Convert websites strategically use markup and title tags to help search engines fully understand each pages intent. Internal linking strategies are also used to help individual landing pages rank better.

And we automatically inject schema.org markup into your website which helps search engines understand the services you offer and where you work.

Mobile First

Google and other search engines prioritize mobile friendly content. Convert websites are built as "mobile first" sites, they are not only fully responsive, they are incredibly easy to use on mobile devices, which improves your rankings.

Speed

Search engines reward sites with faster page load times. Our platform handles page compression, cacheing, and distribution via a nation wide CDS service. Our pages load fast.

Security

On-page SEO forms a large percentage of your overall rankings, but is not a silver bullet to ranking at the top of search engines.

Engagement

How visitors engage with your page content helps search engines understand the quality of your page content. Convert websites enjoy very high engagement rates which leads to better rankings.

Summary

Convert websites generally rank very well on search engines due to the on-page factors we build, and the off-page factors that the NiceJob platform helps with.

That being said, we don't provide any ranking guarantee — nor do we provide off-page link building services. And we do not optimize for external tests for the reasons outlined above. As a result test scores will vary based on what the test is actually measuring.

In most cities, a combination of on-page and off-page SEO is required to ensure your website ranks as high as possible on search engines.

As a Convert customer, our strategists are happy to help advise you on your SEO, both on-page or off-page! Reach out to us at support@nicejob.com for advice at any time.

There's also some great articles on our blog that can help you drive traffic to your website:

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