What Is Forensic SEO?

What is forensic SEO?

The term forensics is more than what happens on an episode of CSI. For SEO, forensics involves a little detective work to best optimize your site.

Forensic SEO

Identifying and analyzing a website or digital footprint of an online business or brand to determine errors and or missed opportunities.

This type of SEO can be used to find missed opportunities by comparing data and analyzing competitor sites, digital footprints, and discovering additional keywords. Forensic SEO also helps evaluate and recover from Google penalties – restrictions placed on websites by Google for violating their terms. Google penalties include hacked sites, hidden text/keyword stuffing, spam, scraped content from other sites, and unnatural links. Violating these penalties results in your website not showing up on Google. A forensic SEO audit reveals how to update and optimize your website to generate more traffic and increase your business.

SEO focuses on improving visibility and rankings while forensic SEO focuses on gathering information to find out what is causing

A forensic SEO audit benefits your company and website by:

  • generating organic traffic
  • learning what keywords work best for your site
  • showing any bad SEO tactics on your site (that you might now know about, or realize are bad)
  • revealing valuable information about your digital footprint
  • evaluating pages
  • measuring ease of usability
  • inspecting backlinks
  • checking for content quality

Often, websites suffer in rankings, lost sales, and poor reputations without the owners and hosting companies knowing. Website rankings are often impacted by Google core and algorithm updates. While forensic SEO is not as prevalent as SEO, forensic audits can reveal vital information that might save your website.