HOW TO DO A SEO
SITE AUDIT
Kathy Alice Brown

à About these slides ß
• These slides are from my online course:
“How to do a SEO Site Audit”
For Access & Discounted Price ! http://webenso.com/ssas
• The course also has demos and me lecturing on video, so not
everything is covered in these slides.
• But don’t worry, there is still a lot of great information here!

Course Agenda
• Introduction
• Make sure to download the checklist and tools list!
• Initial Technical Checks
• What Google Sees
• Traffic and Site Speed
• Google Search Console
• Advanced Technical Section
• Authority Checks

Thank you!
Big Thanks to
Mirror-Engraving.com

FOUR TIERS OF SEO
Defining SEO

What is SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the art and science to
having your site rank well in Google as well as increasing
your site’s organic traffic.

The Four Tiers of SEO
ACCESSIBILITY
ON PAGE
AUTHORITY
ENGAGEMENT

Accessibility
• Can the Search Engines Crawl and Understand Your
Site?
• Problems:
• Blocked from Crawling
• Poorly Structured Site
• Orphaned Pages
• Duplicate Content
• Poor use of Redirects
ACCESSIBILITY

On Page
• Is the page providing clear signals about its content?
• Problems:
• Tags on page not optimized for keywords
• Title tag
• Meta Description
• Header Tags
• Alt tags
ON PAGE

Engagement
• Is the page/site useful and engaging with users?
• Problems:
• Slow loading
• Not mobile friendly
• Content not written well
• Not visually appealing
ENGAGEMENT

Authority
• Is the site a recognized authority in its niche?
• Problems:
• No relevant backlinks
• OR too many spammy backlinks
• No social activity
AUTHORITY

GOAL OF THE AUDIT
How to do a SEO Site Audit

Why are you doing the audit?
• To make sure everything is Ok with my site.
• To reassess my SEO approach and make sure I’m in
compliance with Google guidelines.
• Because my organic traffic has been going down.
• To see if there is any opportunity to increase my organic
traffic.
• To deliver a more complete service to my client.

The different types of audits
• General Health Audit
• Competitive Review
• Forensic
• Content Quality Review
• Backlink Audit
• Local SEO

Problems .. and Opportunities
• Approach audit with an open mind
• You are looking for problems
• And you are also looking for opportunities

GETTING STARTED
How to do a SEO Site Audit

Getting Started
• MUST have
• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console
• Understand the history of the Site
• Download the Checklist attached to this lecture

Questions
• How many domains
• Recent changes (migrations, redesign …)
• Any deliberate link building
• Business Goals
• How is it monetization?
• Competitors
• Top Keywords

TECHNICAL CHECKS
Quick checks to find major SEO problems

REDIRECTS
… and HTTP Status Codes

What is a HTTP Status Code?
HTML
HTTP
(HTTPS)
200 - Ok
301/302 - Moved
404 - Not Found

HTTP Status Codes
200 – Here’s your page, everything is great!
301 – The page you requested has moved,
Here’s where it moved to
302 – The page you requested has temporarily moved
404 – I can’t find the page
5xx – Something went wrong

Why Redirects Matter
Make sure Google has your forwarding address
• Use a 301 Redirect if the move is
permanent.
• 302 Redirect for temporary moves
• Best for SEO to use 301 redirects

Top Level Redirects
• Check that there is a 301 Canonical Redirect
• The site should have one canonical location
• Either www or non-www but NOT both
• Check for other redirects as appropriate
• Other domains
• http -> https

ROBOTS.TXT
Don’t block Googlebot and friends

About robots.txt
No crawling allowed here

Don’t Block Your Entire Site
Make sure you don’t check this box in WordPress
Settings -> Reading

Don’t Block Your Entire Site
The slash tells Googlebot to NOT visit any pages on the site
www.yoursite.com/robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

When Spiders are Blocked
IMPORTANT: Does not necessarily keep pages out of the
Google index!!
“A description for this result is not available because of this
site’s robots.txt file”

When Spiders are Blocked
Don’t block JavaScript and CSS files

MOBILE FRIENDLY
A great user experience across all devices

Is the Site Mobile Friendly?

Mobile Friendly – 3 Approaches
• Responsive Web Design (RWD)
• Site adjusts to different screen sizes
• Separate URLs
• Redirects to a separate URL (“m dot site”) based on a mobile User
Agent
• Dynamic Serving
• Same URL but serves different HTML based on User Agent
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/

… and AMP
• Accelerated Mobile Pages
• Subset of HTML
• Performance Improvements of
15% - 85%
https://www.ampproject.org/

Google Mobile Friendly Test
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

WHAT GOOGLE SEES
How to crawl a site and what to look for

Why we crawl
• To see what Googlebot (other)
sees, we crawl the site.
• Uncover problems with accessibility
as well as on page optimization
opportunities.
• Lectures in priority order
• Screaming Frog, BrowseSEO.net
(free)

SEARCH SNIPPETS
Where the search snippet gets it’s info

<head>
<title>Laser Engraved Mirrors | Etched … </title>
<meta name=“description” content=“In just 3 steps you can get an … “ >
<meta name=“keywords” content=“....” />
<meta name=“robots” content=“index” />
</head>
<body>
<h1>
…
</body>
Meta Data and Search Snippets

The Title Tag
• Important Ranking Factor
• “Get the Click”
• Front load keyword
• Ideal length 55 – 57 characters
• Check for:
• Missing title tags
• Duplicates
• Length
• Informative, Has Keywords, Clickability

The Meta Description
• Not a Ranking Factor
• “Get the Click”
• Ideal length 150-160 characters
• Check for:
• Missing meta descriptions
• Duplicates
• Length
• Informative, Has Keywords, Clickability

PAGE BY PAGE REVIEW
What Google Sees

Page by Page
• Browse the site page by page as a search bot would
• Set up a browser to mimic a search bot
• Review the source code
• Fetch page as Google bot (in Google Search Console) or use the
cache: command
• Use browseo.net
• Identify page archetypes and browse representative
pages

Page by Page
• What are you looking for?
• Text is really text
• Avoid really thin pages
• Missing or Hidden Elements
• Links are not obfuscated, with descriptive anchors
• Proper use of tags

TRAFFIC
The Lifeblood of a Website

The Different Types of Traffic
• Organic
• Referral
• Direct
• Paid

Google Analytics
• Not only a measure of Organic Traffic but useful for:
• Tracking Conversions
• Engagement Metrics
• Time On Site, Bounce Rate, Pages per Visit
• Content Performance
• Demographics and Interests (if enabled)
• % mobile
• Location
• Social Referrals

The Different Types of Traffic
• Is Organic Traffic rising? Falling? Or Flat?
• What are the top Landing Pages?
• How is the site performing with Users?
• How well is the site optimized for Speed?

GOOGLE SEARCH
CONSOLE
Google’s Communication Channel to
Webmasters

Google Search Console
Formerly known as Google Webmasters Tools
www.google.com/webmasters/tools
• Site needs to be verified,
• “admin” access not absolutely required

Google Search Console
• Messages
• Search Appearance
• Search Traffic
• Google Index
• Crawl

Structured Data
• Gives meaning to the words on the page
• Example: Recipe, Review
• MAY result in rich snippets
More Info: http://schema.org

DOMAIN AUTHORITY
Authority Checks

Why Backlinks Matter
The Accessibility and On Page Checks help fine tune the engine
Backlinks are what makes the car go!
Think of a Backlink as a “vote” for your site

Domain Authority
• Not all backlinks are the same
• You want links from high authority, relevant sites
• Domain Authority
• Third party metric from Moz.com
• Not perfect
• Moz Bar Plugin

BACKLINKS
Authority Checks

Backlinks
• Note # of backlinks and # of referring domains
• Note any high DA links
• Flag any links that look suspicious
• Check anchor text
• A good portion should be branded links

Backlinks - Tools
• Google Search Console – Links to Your Site
• Moz’s OpenSiteExplorer
• Ahrefs
• MajesticSEO

CONTENT QUALITY
… and User Experience

CONTENT QUALITY
• Length: in most cases the longer the better
• Readable
• At least one image
• Scannable – lots of white space
• Better than the competition

User Experience
• Look at the site from the perspective of a new site visitor
• Is it ….
• Easy to navigate?
• Is what it is offering clear?
• Looks professional and credible?

QDF and Content Scraping Checks
• QDF – Query Deserves Freshness
• Content is unique – Not found elsewhere

REL CANONICAL
Advanced Technical – Controlling Indexation

rel canonical
/shoes/red-tennis-shoes/
/red/red-tennis-shoes/
/red/red-tennis-shoes/?sort=price
/shoes/red-tennis-shoes/?color=red

Duplicate Page Titles
• To get a list of duplicate page titles in Screaming Frog:
• Reports -> SERP Summary -> Filter: Page Titles – Duplicate

Duplicate Page Titles

Rel canonical
Add the rel canonical tag to all the parameterized URLs
For the URL:
https://www.mirror-engraving.com/new-born-baby?
dir=asc&order=position
Add:
<link rel canonical=
https://www.mirror-engraving.com/new-born-baby />
Note: rel canonical needs to be added to the head section of the HTML

META ROBOTS
NOINDEX
Advanced Technical – Controlling Indexation

Meta robots tag
Has two parts:
• Noindex/index : Tells the search bot whether to index the
page
• Follow/nofollow: Tells the search bot whether to follow
the links on the page
“nofollow” vs. “rel nofollow” you add to a link (a href tag)

Meta robots noindex
<meta name=“robots” content=“index,follow” />
<meta name=“robots” content=“noindex” />
<meta name=“robots” content=“noindex,follow” />
<meta name=“robots” content=“noindex,nofollow” />
Similar to the Robots X-tag

Noindex vs. Robots.txt
• A meta robots noindex tells the search bot to crawl the
page but to not put it into the index (and remove it if
already there)
• A disallow in robots.txt tells the search bot not to crawl the
page
• Blocks link authority from passing through
• Blocks Google from seeing the page
• Does NOT remove the page from the index

Don’t block the search bot
Remember: If you block the search bot from crawling with a
robots.txt Disallow, then it won’t SEE the noindex tag.

When to use noindex
• Consider noindex if the page is not a great landing page
• Thin low quality pages
• Pages with no unique content on them
• WordPress archive pages such as tag or date pages
• Empty checkout pages
• Empty wishlist pages

WordPress tag pages

REL PREV & REL NEXT
Controlling Indexation

Pagination
/red-tennis-shoes
/red-tennis-shoes?page=2
/red-tennis-shoes?page=3
/red-tennis-shoes?page=4

Pagination
• On page=2 add:
<link rel=“prev” href=“http://…/red-tennis-shoes” />
<link rel=“next” href=“http://…/red-tennis-shoes?page=3” />
Search on “pagination with rel next rel prev” to get Google’s
documentation on these tags.

OTHER TECHNICAL
TOPICS
Random Interesting Stuff

Other Technical Topics
• Lazy Loading/Infinite Scroll
• Not SEO friendly out of the box
• AJAX Crawling (deprecated)
• Dynamic generated content with a HTML snapshot

More Interesting Tools
• https://validator.w3.org/
• https://gtmetrix.com/

BONUS: LOCAL SEO
SEO + NAP and Citations

“Map” Results

The Local Search Ecosystem

NAP and Citations
• NAP
• Name, Address and Phone Number
• Citations
• Listings in local directories (Yelp, Superpages, YP, hotfrog)
• Listings in Google My Business, Yahoo Local, Bing Local
• CORRECT listing in “core data aggregators”
• Factual, Infogroup, Localeze, Acxiom
• Consider Moz Local

BONUS: WORDPRESS
WordPress powers 25% of the internet’s
websites

WordPress
• WordPress is SEO Friendly
• Make sure the Yoast SEO plugin is installed and
configured properly.
• Yoast provides:
• A way to customize title and meta description tags
• Social optimization tags
• Indexation control
• Generates a XML sitemap

WordPress
• Not all WordPress themes are responsive
• You need a Responsive theme or WP Touch
• Performance
• WP Smush for images
• WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache for Caching

Thank you!
Kathy Alice Brown
Digital Marketing Consultant
• SEO Site Audits
• Copywriting
• Facebook Campaigns
Discount Link for
Course:
http://webenso.com/ssas