Will an SEO Audit Help?

Google Hummingbird is not said to have affected sites much. Can you say when exactly you found a drop in rankings?

Regular SEO audit is important for proper analysis of your site stats. You can do this manually or there are paid tools available form major brands like Moz.

Depends, I just found out the reason behind some sites being tanked and I was kind of stunned by it:

- duplicate content on many pages
- spun content on many pages
- duplicate meta tags (leave it empty if you don't know what to write)
- many 404 error pages

That people still think they can get away with that, it's amazing.

So yeah if you're unsure about your site an SEO audit can reveal a lot of things and isn't only restricted to the above mentioned things, some other stuff

- back link analysis
- anchor diversity
- how many anchors do you have in total
- onpage over optimization due to kw stuffing
- onpage over optimiziation due to internal linking
- cloaking of affiliate links
- over monetizing pages, more important sites

And there is a lot more that I can't think of right now but I think this are the most important things that let one site succeed and another one fail.

I would never spend 100's or 1000's of dollars for an SEO audit though, I just did 5 sites in 30 minutes and found all the "obvious" mistakes so how much is it really worth.

I guess it might be a little to early to say the recent algorithm change has caused all the drops. Just check to make sure your links are still in place, especially the older ones which have remained for months and years online because they could be the real force behind getting top positions sometimes. Make sure your links do not have the same anchors, this might be a little tricky issue sometimes. Many websites have been doing nice for a long time but very quickly, they get the hit because the system has found them.

Have a backlink audit done and see that there are no spammy links. If everything is all right there, hope that this is just a fluctuation in the ranking. Your site be back soon.

Can anyone make any recommendations as to SEO audit services?

It's good if you do audit for your seo, with this you can manage all activites related to your site seo.

Yes
Not sure
I suggest a warrior Fredbou

Game sites would seem like a logical "hit" from the Hummingbird, most queries related to video games are long(ish) in nature. I am a Gamer myself, and find that when Googleing something about any video game, I disregard my SEO knowledge and type like I am asking Jeeves something LOL. Your strategy should depend on what your site is about. If it is a ton of information about 1 Game, like Call of Duty, with info on the Black Ops series, Modern Warfare Series, Ghosts ect, I would start researching COD specific queries that are most typed in, and optimize some of your site for that. If it is broader, and includes many games from many genres, then I would focus more on broader content, like the latest video game news, new games, stuff like that, and get the most popular keyword searches for that kind of site.