A SEO audit is the first step towards formulating your SEO campaign. An audit should provide a detailed review of where a website is currently at in regards to its on-site and offsite optimization. Every SEO company should provide an audit to their clients as a point of reference to jump off from. After analyzing a site's weaknesses and strengths, it is then time to prioritize the strategies that will need to be implemented in order to improve the organic search rankings and overall visibility.

An audit report can be one page listing just a few factors to a multiple paged and detailed report. Many companies that provide SEO services use software to generate a simple audit report that is not even all that accurate. A thorough and hands on analysis by and SEO expert that can provide a report with accuracy is the best way to go.

A good SEO consultant should know exactly how to breakdown the process of analyzing a website. Keywords are the foundation of any website. Knowing the exact keywords that are being targeted is very important. Compare what the site is currently doing to target those keywords. Are the keywords being placed in the correct locations such as the title and Meta description tags?

The search engines love dynamic and informative content. Every page should have sufficient content but don't overdo it. Users love reading original and fresh content, it will keep them coming back to your site. If there is any duplicate content on your site you need to remove it. Also remember to repeat your targeted keywords in your content, but avoid too much repetition it should sound natural.

Review your site architecture and how it affects the search engines. Avoid using frames, Flash, or Java applets to build the parts of the site that you want Google to index. Search engines need to see content in order to list pages. The Google spiders need a crawlable link structure to browse the pathways of the site. Does the webpage have a sitemap? A sitemap will give the search engine spiders a way to crawl all of your website pages and not get stuck anywhere.

Analyzing all of the on-site factors starting with the metadata (titles, headings, description, body text, etc.) and improving that, as to what is currently in the website. There are many other SEO factors to check and be aware of such as, webpage loading time, excessive use of 302 redirects, 404 errors, web compliance and any excessive coding errors.

All of these factors should be carefully analyzed. Automated tools are good to give you a general overview but a professional from a reputable SEO company can analyze and interpret that data.