MKT 420 SEO Week 4 Steps for performing an SEO Audit including SERP page analysis, content analysis, review of code, measuring trustworthiness, evaluating potential keywords and content organization.
3. Step 1: Know the company
• You cannot evaluate for SEO without understanding
the company and what they do
• Time invested here will pay off in terms of key word
research as well as content analysis
4. Search for information
• Google the company and review their website
• Review the Wikipedia entry
• Search for recent news to see what is new with the
company and its products
5. Step 2: SERP Review
• Does searching on branded words pose problems?
• SEO temperature check; First step in diagnosing the
patient; Gives an idea of how bad it might be!
• What about common misspellings or variants of
branded words? Search these too! Customers will
be…
• Check to make sure descriptions are compelling
and warrant a click through
6. Step 3: Traffic & Competitors
• What does the website’s traffic look like over time?
Growing? Declining? How does it compare to
competition?
• SEMrush is a great tool for this
• SEO Website Checkup is good too
• Interpret this data for diagnosis of problems related
to search as well as a foundation for goals and
metrics related to campaigns
• Bottom line: Is this website being discovered or is
it’s competitors’?
7. Step 4: Check the code!
• This is scariest part of SEO for marketing folks
• It shouldn’t be! It’s really finite and there are tools
available to do it for you
• Develop your skillset here over time. I’m only asking for
basics
• Robots.txt (can crawlers find you?) sitmap.xml (what
should they do when they find you?)
• Rel=canonical (are URLs helping you or not?)
• Metadata (Title tag, description tag, H1 tags and
descriptions for image and video/microdata)
• Use tools like Moz toolbar & the WWW consortium’s
code validator to help—don’t even need to look at code if
you don’t want to
8. Step 5: Content Analysis
• Check quality and quantity
• Length, spelling and punctuation matter!
• Unique?
• Readable?
• Organized? Breadcrumb trails?
• Links to social media and a good blog
• Are obvious keywords represented in content?
• Use a readability validators as well to check how
easily understood the text is
9. Step 6: Authority & Trust
• How do the page and domain rank for
trustworthiness?
• Use Moz for metrics as well as Ahrefs for historical
data related to trustworthiness and authority
• Google likes pages it can refer searcher to in a
trusted way
10. Step 7: Recommendations
• SEO professionals make recommendations
• They are not web developers! They rarely go in and
fix code; The diagnose problems and present
solutions
• What needs to be fixed in the code?
• What needs to be fixed in the content?
• What new content is needed?
• Semantic search (knowledge based search) and
structured data (data about data) prefers knowledge
and information; How does the website facilitate
knowledge acquisition?
