We’ve just found a really critical error that’s been holding this website back from a lot of growth what’s up yesio legends here in this blog I will tell you how I do SEO audits.
Google Search Console Basic Check:
So I like to start my SEO audits tackling the technical issues first and the best place to start with that in my opinion is taking a look at Google search console. Google search console is the closest contact we have to Google and it’s the easiest way of knowing what Google thinks of our website so even though Google might not pick up the entire minutia inside SEO audit.
We do want to make sure that we know exactly what Google thinks of our website. So have they flagged any serious technical issues things like your website being mobile friendly or you’re not having a secure https version of your website. So stuff like this is what we can take a look at inside search console are there any sections of your site that aren’t being indexed.
So all this stuff is what we want to take a look at inside of the search console so mobile usability we can just make sure that all the pages are mobile friendly we can take a look at our sitemaps. If Google is having any trouble taking a look at our sitemaps and if we have any security issues or any manual actions. We will see all that stuff directly in Google search console and guys don’t forget that this is free so it’s a great resource and a great way to start off that SEO audit after taking a Google search console.
Google Analytics growth trend check:
If everything checks out I just want to quickly take a look at Google analytics so what I want to do here is take a look at the trend of this website’s organic traffic so has it increased over time is it decreasing what’s been happening over the last six months a year two years. If we have that data available right this is gonna help me understand where that website is in this specific moment and now once we’ve done both of those checks.
FREE Technical SEO Audits
I like to perform an additional technical audit so for those of you that are looking for a free technical audit there’s a few resources that we can take a look at so something like seositecheckup.com. These guys give you a pretty in-depth SEO audit even though sometimes some of this data isn’t super accurate. And on top of it there’s a lot of things where you might have to sign up or pay for the specific product right so that’s kind of annoying but it’s definitely available and worthwhile another tool that works really well is something like SEO reseller.com.
So I’ve recently done an audit we can check that out right here and it’s going to give us some interesting data that we can take a look at so usability security organic traffic paid traffic all this stuff. If you are working with clients you can actually save this as a pdf and send this to your respective clients. You can even white label it and add your little logo this is my old logo so this works quite well. However guys I do want to say that if you can afford to pay for a premium SEO tool something like semrush or ahrefs. I really recommend it these tools are game changers they’re really going to help you improve your organic traffic.
AHREFS Site Audit:
I’ve been a longtime fan of ahrefs and we’re going to use that for today’s video so within ahrefs there’s actually a site audit feature. If we take a look at one of my test websites we’re gonna see the different types of things that ahrefs can bring up inside of this site audit. We’re gonna get this health score which basically sums everything up just to give you an idea of how that website is doing a lot of different things in here that we can take a look at but this is the main area right.
So what are the top issues that I might want to take a look at so it’s giving us issues. Like title tags they’re missing duplicate pages orphan pages broken links redirects 404 pages the image file size is too large so these type of issues are very important to find this is stuff that Google search console hasn’t found.
So it’s a really great feature that ahrefs has right you can just quickly plug in your domain and you can have this type of audit right away and I know semrush has a very similar feature right so once we’ve found these issues. We can then list them in terms of priorities that are going to help us start to structure what are the first things we need to do.
When we’re working with this website so if you’re looking for a deeper dive or you’re a more advanced SEO you might also want to do an additional technical audit using something like screaming frog. I am going to be making a video on screaming frog pretty soon. So you definitely want to subscribe you don’t want to miss out on that one okay so now that we’ve gotten the technical stuff out of the way we now want to take a look at the keywords.
Keyword and Traffic Audit:
We want to take a look at the traffic for the website that we’re doing that audit for so I’ve actually found a random New York City lawyer. I’m just gonna use that website for this example today so the website is thebarnesfirm.com. And first thing I’m gonna do is I wanna take a look at this overview inside of ahrefs so how much traffic is this website getting and what does the authority look like, right so we’re seeing it’s getting around a monthly 50k in organic traffic that traffic value is ridiculous there’s definitely going to be some very competitive keywords in there again just quickly take a look at the domain rating the url rating. And what that pattern looks like what that trend looks like over the last few years.
I do want to open up the organic keywords page just to take a look at what type of keywords are they ranking for and are they actually the target keywords that they should be ranking for right that their business actually cares about. So here we go if we quickly take a look at these keywords. So slip and fall lawyer pretty significant volume looks like a keyword the difficulty isn’t too bad but they’re pulling in quite a lot of really high quality traffic and so guys this is exactly what we want to see when we’re doing this keyword audit.
We want to see keywords that are hyper relevant to the business that we’re working with right so let me give you guys an example of what we don’t want to see there’s this pretty big translation website called datetranslations.com. And if we take a look at some of their more popular keywords we’re going to see that not all these keywords are super relevant even though a lot of these pages are bringing a lot of traffic. They could be good for generating backlinks they aren’t extremely relevant for the main idea of the business which is translation right so things like is globalization good or bad. What was the first language simlish phrases and that’s the it looks like it’s the sims language uh what’s the oldest language in the world so I don’t know how relevant this traffic is a lot of this traffic might not be super helpful.
Brief On-page Audit:
But it’s still it’s good to see the breakdown of traffic another thing that I like doing while I’m checking out a lot of these keywords is I like to open up some of these pages and just quickly glance over. And make sure that the on page is being set up correctly given that we’ve already done a technical audit with ahrefs we would have probably already seen some on-page SEO mistakes.
But it’s still for me it’s really important just to quickly take a look at some of the on-page and make sure that it’s properly structured so some of the things that I’m looking for here is number one the title tag and meta description. So if we quickly just search this specific page we’re gonna see that looks like this title is a little long maybe there’s a better way of formatting the specific title but we do see that the meta description is specific to this page and it looks like it’s quite well written.
So if we go back to that page what I want to do now is just quickly inspect elements some of the sections of this page so I’m going to just grab the mouse here and what I want to see that there’s one h1 so it looks like that’s set up uh quite well. Then I want to see other subheadings that help to break down the rest of the page properly right so we have an h2 and it looks like the actual text inside of h2 is relevant a nice block of text and, then another h2 and it looks like there’s an h4 here so this all looks solid some of these images look a little weird maybe because it’s responsive but it looks like the on page on this specific page makes sense right.
So we’d also check some of these internal links make sure that everything is working here so looks like they know exactly what they’re doing in terms of on-page so this to me is a necessary step. You can just quickly go through a few of their top pages make sure that the on page is correctly set up. And if it isn’t that’s already a really high impact thing that we can do and really improve that website’s ranking online.
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Backlink Audit:
Now we can take a look at the backlinks we’ve already taken a look at the technical side of this audit. We’ve had a quick breakdown of the keywords and the traffic we can definitely go more in depth. I’m just giving you guys the main ideas here and now we want to take a look at their backlinks right so I like to go back to the overview and what I like to do is I like to get into the referring domains and not the backlinks right.
So we can have multiple backlinks per domain so taking a look at the referring domains just helps us have a bird’s eye view of all the links that this website has acquired over the last few years. When I’m taking a look at these backlinks there’s four quick checks that we can do one thing that’s a must when we’re doing these quick checks is I want to have do follow selected right.
However we’re not really interested in nofollow links right now we’re interesting do follow those are links that pass authority from one page to the other right so let’s take a look at these four tests. The first one is i want to take a look at their top links so the links with the highest domain rating. What’s the most powerful website that has linked out to this specific website and why right so we have aol over here and we can open up the links to target. We see there’s some reviews something like find law.com maybe iheart.com so different pages talking about what’s open.
Right now this might have been during covid uh so we see ab7abc7news.com this looks like a really relevant link yeah so it’s talking about the specific attorney so that law firm in New York city. So all these links look really solid a second check that we want to do is we want to take a look at first scene. so these are going to be the most recent links that are coming into this website right so the main thing here is we want to see.
If there’s any toxic links coming in have they been involved in some ugly link building schemes are they getting a lot of links recently for content that they’ve published so we want to see the types of links that are coming in most recently? And what they look like and again we can just check this one out right here uh greendiary.com open up the links to target. So it looks like this is uh an in content link from a domain rating 52 url9 so we might want to open up this link check it out.
If it makes sense and that way we’ll have a better idea of the types of links that are coming in right now the third check that I like doing is taking a look at the best buy links in terms of pages. So what pages have the highest amount of links that’s going to help me understand the pages that are going to perform the best right so we have Los Angeles personal injury attorneys so 47 referring domains coming in Oakland Manhattan san Diego.
So these guys definitely know what they’re doing a lot of referring domains coming in for really relevant pages and the final thing that I want to take a look at. When I’m taking a look at the backlinks is the anchor so that’s going to give us a really solid bird’s eye view of all the different links that are coming in what specific anchor text. They’re using to link out to this specific website so looks like the most popular anchor text is the barnes from.com so the actual domain which is actually a healthy site so these are probably natural links that are coming in. Then we have the brand other domain versions and then with a very small percentage we have an exact match anchor text so this looks like a great anchor text ratio. We don’t see any anchor text that are over optimized so looks like they’re doing things quite well.
The last thing that I want to talk to you guys about is when we’re doing these SEO audits it’s also really important to take a look at the competitors and just know where this specific website is in the space. How big it is in comparison to other competitors are they doing something that you aren’t so there are a few things that we can do. If we go into organic search and we scroll all the way down we’re going to see the top 10 competitors in the us so we can then go on and do quick audits on some of these websites see if there’s anything that they’re doing that we haven’t yet it’s going to give us a lot of ideas of what we can do in the future.
