A Basic (Yet Powerful) Technical SEO Audit for Beginners

Key Takeaways

technical SEO audits are very important but for a beginner to SEO they can be extremely daunting so in this video I'm gonna break down a super basic yet powerful SEO audit that you can use to find some seriously weird technical SEO issues on your website stay tuned [Music] what's up SEO Sam oh here with HFS the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic research your competitors and dominate your niche now a few weeks ago I posted a question on our YouTube community board asking our subscribers to submit their website if they wanted us to feature it in this video so I dug through a bunch of your submissions and congratulations to s Craig of Central Park tutors comm and Jim Miller of excess Cote UK I found a bunch of technical SEO issues with your website don't worry guys you're not alone a lot of popular websites even in the marketing niche have some seriously weird technical SEO issues and the only tool that you need to find and fix these errors is Google now before we dive into the tutorial I want to give a huge shout out to Glen also up from detail com who shared a bunch of these tips with us so make sure to check out his site seriously solid stuff alright so let's break down example site number one that we're analyzing Central Park tutors is a group of teachers and parents who provide private tutoring services in New York City according to HR site Explorer the website gets around 500 organic search visitors per month and Google has indexed around 400 pages so the first thing I'm gonna do is type in their domain in the browser and you can see that they're using the unsecured non WW version of the website and of course we should check for the dub dub dub version too and it looks like the redirect is good so I'll check the HTTPS version now and it looks like this one loads without a redirect and I'll check the secure dub dub dub version which then redirects to the secure URL without the www so the first thing you're gonna want to do is create the proper redirects and choose one version so I would recommend consolidating to the HTTPS domain version which will be applied to every individual page on your website in addition to the home page now let's get to our search queries first we'll enter in site colon Central Park tutors com which will look for all index pages on this domain and then we'll add in URL colon ww-will for any index pages that contain ww-with in the URL and everything looks good here now we'll modify this query a bit and change this last part to - in your alcohol in HTTP which will look for unsecured versions of the pages that are indexed and there are around 164 results here so I'll click on this one and indeed it does not redirect to the secure version in fact this page looks a little bit strange because it has a random link to a money coach some kind of Swiss website in a Winnipeg driving school that doesn't really make much sense to me so I'm led to believe that your site has been hacked alright let's go back to our search query and remove the minus sign to look for secure URLs that are in Google's index and testing this URL there is no redirect either and a bunch of interesting links here too now if you find that your website is having similar issues then I highly recommend fixing these before continuing on with this tutorial so I'll switch gears here and analyze another one of our subscribers websites called XS Co UK now this is a family-run business based in Scotland selling discount items they have an ecommerce store as well as a massive 25,000 square foot retail warehouse and according to HR site Explorer the website gets around 11,000 organic search visitors per month in google UK has indexed around 6700 pages I've already tested all redirect versions and all seem good as well as the other queries we had done before so this time I'll start off with just the site colon domain Cote UK query now from here I'll just kind of skim through the results to look for potential issues and I actually don't even need to scroll down because there's one thing that I noticed immediately most of the pages actually have excess dot-com in their title when the website actually uses the code UK TLD now while this particular issue is more for branding it creates in congruence between the title and domain which may affect click-through rates and other times you'll see templates that have just gone completely wrong so a modifier query and add in title colon excess stop calm and you'll see hundreds of pages where the title tags need to be updated to reflect the correct domain now the thing with technical SEO is that as you discover one problem you'll start to discover others so if we go to excel calm you'll see that they've redirected the homepage to their co uk domain great but let's see if any pages from their dot-com version are still indexed so I'll enter in site : XS comm and you'll see over 100 results clicking through you'll notice that they haven't redirected all pages yet since this URL still loads let's go back to the original Google syrup and as we start to scroll down you'll start seeing some other technical issues that are worth investigating like empty meta descriptions truncated title tags some pagination issues and likely faceted navigation issues too for example we could take the page parameter and change our query a bit by adding in URL : page and you'll see about 100 pages that are indexed here and there's another URL parameter called sort which they probably wouldn't want indexed here either and the list I'm sure will go on particularly since it's an e-commerce website where it's really easy to make technical SEO mistakes now if you're using WordPress then you can search for a whole bunch of common footprints like site colon yourdomain.com then add in URL tag or author or page which will help find pages that you may want to know index or you can look for weird ones like this site colon domain.com in URL welcome to WordPress or in URL hello world which will show you if a site still has the default pages from the initial WordPress install you can also do something like site colon domain comm lorem ipsum to find any pages that are indexed by Google that are still using dummy text to be sure look at the Meta Description to see if the whole dummy text is being used on the page one last tip I want to share with you is for the privacy of your assets employees and clients and that's to do a site search for your domain and then to add file type : PDF or whatever file extension you want to search now the PDFs here on HFS aren't that exciting but through my research I found organizations that are uploading employee salaries home addresses and other personal details that are worth deleting as you can see you don't need any fancy tools to run a basic SEO audit so I encourage you to do this not just for your own site but if you're an agency you can use these quarries to find prospects for new business now the downside to using Google alone is that they don't always recrawl these so call meaningless pages frequently and the results can be quite messy now a few good things about using tools like hf site audit is that number one you can get fresh data since you would run the crawl on demand and number two our tool automatically search for over a hundred common technical SEO issues that you can't quite find using google alone like 301 redirects or 404 broken pages unless you want to click through to each page so from our site audit you can see that we found 276 300 series redirects and 30 404 pages number 3 you can automatically monitor the technical SEO health of your website through scheduled weekly crawls and number 4 you can use data Explorer to create your own custom queries to find issues that wouldn't apply to every site for example if I wanted to look for pages that include access calm in their title tag then I could run a custom query to look for internal HTML pages that return a 200 response code with titles that contain XS dot-com from here I can export all of the URLs and have someone else update the affected pages or send it to a developer to fix the template so while you might want to go and build links or create content make sure that your website's rankings aren't hindered by basic technical SEO mistakes because they're super important and quite easy to fix for the most part now if you enjoyed this video make sure to like share and subscribe and if you want to see more technical SEO videos then let us know in the comments so keep grinding away don't ignore your technical SEO and I'll see you in the next tutorial