How Agile SEO Auditing & Maintenance Improves Your Website

Before Rank Defender, a technical SEO audit from a consultant would cost you $1,000-$7,000, and this wouldn’t include fixes.

Then you’d need to hire, manage and pay for a developer to fix most of these problems, though unfortunately they’d also create some new ones in the process.

You care about your SEO, so you know that this isn’t a one-time thing. Even with only 2 rounds of audits and fixes each year, it’s an expensive process that takes up way too much of your time.

Rank Defender is set up with only 5 minutes of your time, and continually works to fine-tune your website’s on-site SEO. You might think this comes at a significant cost, but for most businesses it’s cheaper than an Ahrefs or SEMrush subscription.

How Does Rank Defender Work?

After you sign up, you can expect us to:

confirm that we can log in to your website
begin an initial audit and analysis against an extensive list of on-site SEO standards (more details below)
- this can take a few hours to a few days based on your site’s size
send you an initial report, so you can see the health of your website
begin working on your site, fixing the issues we have identified

We don’t stop there though! Once signed up we continue to:

audit and analyze your site on a daily basis
fix any newly discovered issues
monitor those fixes to ensure they stay fixed
send you a monthly report, where you can see your health score improving on a daily basis

You can think of this as a “continuous improvement” process, where we are looking for ways to make your website better in both the eyes of Google and your customers.

Unlike a consultant or freelance developer though, we don’t take days off. We’re working 24/7 to get these fixes done.

Rank Defender's Agile SEO Auditing Process

What If I Use WordPress?

Reliable, high performance hosting and an up to date website is important for SEO and security.

As a result we offer free WordPress hosting, WordPress core updates, plugin and theme updates as part of our service. Our hosting is great for SEO, and is backed up and scanned for viruses or hacked code on a daily basis.

After you sign up and we send you our initial report, we will talk you through the migration process (which in most cases don’t require any action on your behalf).

Don’t want to use our hosting? No problems! As long as you’re using a high end managed WordPress host like Flywheel or WP Engine and can give us access to use your backup system, we can keep your site up to date!

What Exactly Does Rank Defender Fix?

We use our own auditing system, which incorporates based on our founders’ 10+ years of working with SEO. If you use Ahrefs, Google Lighthouse or SEMrush to analyze your website, you can expect us to fix it.

Below are the key areas we audit, fix and monitor.

Performance

Over 30 elements including:

lossless compression of all images
reducing the number of files loaded
minifying required CSS deferring unused CSS
minimizing page and file redirects
preloading key requests

Security

SSL certificate validity
correct HTTPS configuration
HTTP traffic is forced to HTTPS
known JavaScript vulnerabilities are not present
cross-origin links are safe

Accessibility

Over 40 elements including:

form input fields are named
images use alt attributes
links use descriptive text
contrast between foreground and background colors (including images) is adequate
correct heading tag usage

Crawlability & Indexability