How to Do an SEO Audit (in 20 Minutes or Less) [AMS-09]

Key Takeaways

and sings with you and don't show you how to perform an SEO audit for any website in 20 minutes or less stay tuned [Music] hey guys it's Joshua Hardwick here with a h.res before I dive into this process let me first introduce the tools I'll be using for this SEO audit so I've got Google Analytics search console PageSpeed insights if you don't structured data testing tool 8 reps obviously propagate a SERP simulator and a webpage word counter and as you can see I've got all of these already open in multiple browser tabs so if you're following along with this video I'd advise you to do the same and get all of these open and you'll be good to go and this file tab is the website I'll be using for the bulk of this demonstration which is simple life is short on but obviously you can use your own website or a client's website or whatever you want to use so let's get to it now the first thing that I'm gonna do is I'm not sure that only one version of the site is actually browsable so right now you can see that I'm viewing the website HTTP troll on double slash simple life in short calm but I want to make sure that this is the only location at which I can access this website so all of them all of the versions of the site should redirect to this version which we call the canonical so first I'm gonna check the non secure version at HTTP rather than HTTPS and straight away you can see that this does in fact redirect to the technology called HTTPS version which is a good start but now I'm also going to try the www version with and without HTTPS so let's type those in HTTP that seems to redirect and HD HTTPS with with the www so that also seems to redirect too so there are no problems there all of those different versions that someone could Tanna type in or in fact redirect into the canonical version of the site so moving on I need to actually crawl the website so that I can check for any other issues and first I'm now you use href site audit tool which if you're following along tell me founder atreus comm slash site - audit and just a quick side note you could you use streaming fraud for this or another crawling tool but sigh audit is probably your best bet if you following along with this video and so here what I'm gonna do is I must sir start a new project enter the domain select the correct ATT HTTP protocol which in this case is HTTPS and then I'll hit next and next again so then on this but on this page and then leave the majority of the sentence here as they are but I will actually check the execute JavaScript toggle and the check HTTP status of external links toggle now this just ensures that we get the most accurate or they and then I'm just gonna hit there is one final time so finally I'll just don't check this option to schedule a weekly crawl and finally just hit create project and that's it assign is now being crawled so while we've that's finish I'm gonna perform a few more manual checks the first of which is making sure that the site is actually indexed in Google which I'll do by searching in Google for site to long simple life is short calm and it looks like there are of ram 222 resource and as i know this site pretty well i know that that looks about right but if you're following along with this and you have no clue whether that number actually corresponds to the real amount of pages on your website then come back to this step once your crawl inside order is complete so i actually already ran across this website before i start recording this for you so to demonstrate this I'm gonna go to the internal pages report inside audit for the crawl that I entity completed before working on this video and in this case you can see that there is a small discrepancy in the number of pages being indexed compared to that those that are actually on our website which is actually been caused as I've investigated this already has been caused by Google index and a few individual elements from the home page which is something that you know needs to be faced at some point so next up I'm over on the quick chat and check if the site ranks for its brand name so to do that I'll just type in the simple life ashore into Google and as you can see it does in fact rank and it's a number one resort - so there are no problems there it's now muster jump back to the site and I run a few basic on page checks after all the most important pages on the side starting with the home page so to do this some snow right-click and here view page source which will show me the HTML for the page then I'm going to start by taking a look at the title tag so if you're struggling to spot this just hit command F or ctrl F I believe on Windows and type a less than sign followed by the word title you can then see that it gets highlighted in the HTML and you can see that title tag so here the title tag reads instant life instant affordable life insurance quotes - simple - short calm so at first lines this looks pretty good you know but I want to check a couple of things number one is this a good length because title tags that are too long get truncated in the search results which doesn't really look good and number two I won't check whether this is optimized around any worthwhile keywords which it should be ideally I so number one is easy to check just copy and paste the title tag into a syrup simulator such as syrup sim which is what I'm using here and it'll keep back whether or not it's too long and in this case you can see that everything looks good so let's move on and check the keywords so to me it looks like this title tag has been formulated around the keyword affordable life insurance or perhaps life insurance quotes so I'm a check both of these in href site hrs keywords explore or rather so if I'll just quickly type that in you can see that both of these appear to have a decent amount of search volume so again you know there's no problems there it looks like this is quite a well optimized title tag so let's move on and check the meta description so again you can find this easily by searching just type in the less than sign and then you know matter and you're kind of get all all the meta descriptions and tie up sides and all that kind of stuff and so I'm gonna paste this again into the syrup simulator and as you can see length is totally fine and it also looks to me like it's being pretty well written you know it's quite a nice description that kind of sums up the site quite well so finally understand check the h1 side on the page now it's not an absolutely absolute requirement these days but I do generally prefer there to only be one of these on the page so one h1 sad and it's also best in my opinion if the keywords are sprinkled in there as well so on there pick on this page you can see that there are actually two H ones which are effectively just duplicates of each other so this is not a big deal personally I prefer to remove one of them but aside from that you know it's a nice length I can see that the keywords that we just checked or indeed sprinkled in so this is another pass for this website so I recommend performing these manual chase on all of the most important pages on your website and by important I'm generally referring to those with the most traffic you can use Google Analytics to find this out or alternatively if you're not using Google Analytics you can go to HOF site Explorer enter your domain and then go to the top pages report which will show you the pages that perform best in terms of organic traffic that interest in case a were status list and perform in the same manual chase on each of those pages but anyway let's move on and let's get back to the crawl report in a draft site audio so this tells us a ton of information basically but I'm gonna start by checking the HTML tag report to see if it found any other on-page errors across society and as you can see it did 44 pages with multiple h1 tags 33 pages missing the meta description and 7 pages where the title tag is too long oh and there's also one page where the Meta Description is too short so I'm not a bore you by sifting through everything you want these errors in this video but these are issues that should at least be investigated and probably faced at some point so let's move on Annette stammered yo and check for duplicate and thin content so sticking with the site audit and I go to the content quality report along the clusters of duplicate pages you can see these reporting notable so again this is a pass for this particular site but it's worth noting that this only looks for Julia Compton on your domain on the on the domain that you've actually crawled it doesn't check if any of our content is duplicated across other web sites to do this you'll need to do is copy scape so I'm going to do this and a URL from the side I'll just use the home page for this example and in this case you can see the tropics ape has had to be found a few matches but despite this I don't think there's anything to worry about here if you look closely these look to be triggered by the disclaimer in the photo which in all honesty is probably just a stock disclaimer and nothing to worry about whatsoever so for this site you know I'm not too worried about stolen content or anything like that so I'm gonna bother checking any more pages but I do want the check for thin content which is content that's kind of short and pointless and doesn't really provide any value so I'll just I'll just quickly hop back to a site audit and check the content quality report once again and here I'm looking for a low word count errors of which as you can see this side doesn't appear to have any so you know we're all good at the end in this instance so next up we've got site speed now the most obvious two off to use for this is butyl space within sites which is a good tool when it actually works if I try this with simple life insurer for the home page for example you can see that it kicks back a speed unavailable error which is obviously pretty useless there are other tools that you can use the check site speeds such as GT metrics but actually this is something that else that site audit should have already checked so jumping back again to site audit I'll check the performance report this time and see if there any slow page errors so there are in this instance and clicking forward to the clicking through rather to the full report on this issue will reveal a list of all the slower than URLs so you can kind of investigate those individually and you can even vet all of these all of this list by organic traffic so you can then prioritize the Fitness's which is a nice hat in my opinion so moving on next up I'm a check for structured data issues so for those of you not familiar with structured data it's basically a type of structured markup that some sites choose to add to their pages so as to supply Google with a more structured view of that page if you've ever seen resorts with star ratings or reviews or talar accounts or any of that stuff in the SERPs then you prevail then you're probably familiar with the structured data or at least the results of it so to test structured data that has Google's structured data testing tour so basically just enter a URL and it kicks back whether or not there are any errors with the structured data on that page now the site I've been using thus far doesn't have any kind of a special structured mark data markup so I'll use a different URL for this example which is a piece no recipe from Martha Stewart calm so I paste this into the structured data testing tool and run the test it sheets back a couple of warnings the life of an author name and the lack of nutritional information for the recipe both of these things not upsetting the big deal but worth Fritzing nonetheless okay so before it should be for I continue I should mention that I'm just going to switch gears here and use the H rest blog as the example site for the next few steps the reason for this is because I'll need to access data from analytics and search console and I don't actually have this data for a simple life insurer so next step a quick or - rapid analysis so for this I'm gonna head over to the acquisition report in Google Analytics and i go to overview and then organic search and so i'm also going to set the time period for the past month and it looks like as you can see we're averaging around 1,800 visits a day from organic search on the h.res blog which isn't too bad at all so next I'll check the landing page report so this shows you the pages that are bringing in the most search traffic as you can see for the Atrios blood it looks like it's our website traffic article so finally I must set the period to the last twelve months to get a sense of whether traffic your is a increase in or decrease and as you can see it looks like it's rising quite nicely actually so if for whatever reason you know what after neutral analysis installed you can instead use the top pages report in HOF site Explorer to get a sense of the pages that receive the most organic traffic so it's clear that organic traffic is moving in the right direction for a dress blog but what about rankings so to check this out go to HSI explorer enter the blog URL and then check the organic search tab on the overview report looking at the organic keywords graph I can see that the rankings are indeed on the increase which again is good and is what you'd probably expect when you see a rise in organic traffic as we are dealing with a dress blood but actually as we recently wrote rewrote our SEO tips article I kind of want to know how that specific page is performing so next up on there enter that into the search bar and check this same graph so it looks like there was a slight dip in January but it's now ranking from more keywords than ever which again is definitely a good sign digging a little deeper I also want to know how it's performing for the main target keyword which in this case is - SEO tips I'll check this by searching for SEO tips in the organic keywords report and then view in the history charm so it looks like rankings have increased since the update update in September and now the rankings are reasonably steady in positions 3 to 5 you know hovering around the area so pretty good but still room for improvement which leads me neatly onto the next step of the audit process actually which is finding low-hanging keywords opportunities so let me go back a step and view data for a therus blog as a whole and then I go to the navigate rather to the organic keywords report once again and then here I'm a filter for keywords where a tres blog pages on a chess board currently ranked in positions 3 to 5 I'm also going on a search volume filter I set that a minimum of 1,000 searches per month so now I can see keywords that have a good number of monthly searches for which we already have rankings in positions 3 to 5 basically these are low-hanging opportunities and which will increase rankings by just one or two positions for any of these keywords it would no doubt result in a nice traffic boost so you're actually noticed that while these keywords on the list is SEO tips which is definitely a keyword that we should focus on so at the end this brings me nicely onto the next step which is a backlink profile analysis so much like the organic traffic analysis this isn't so much about finding specific problems and fixing them as it is about making sure things are generally heading in the right direction so I'll start by doing to the overview report in site Explorer and checking out the referring domains graph so it looks like the number of referring domains is steadily increasing as is the traffic but what has the managers of those domains using when linking to us so let's scroll down to the anxious cloud and take a quick look so it looks as though there's a mixture of anchors but as you can see it's mostly branded anchors which is again quite good so finally I might have a bit deeper and make sure there are no dodgy sides actually linked in to the hrs blog so for this audio to the referring domains report then sort the domains by domain rating from lowest to highest so nothing is jumping out at me particularly in this report so on the whole things I would say are okay obviously this is a very quick and high-level view so if you're concerned about dodgy size linking to you and I won't recommend spending more time in this report and delving a little bit deeper okay so next up I want to make sure that there are no broken pages on the blog and especially not broken pages with a lot of backlinks so I'll go to the best buy links report and then filter for 404 pages so looks like there are a few broken images but nothing to worry in no pages with a lot of backlinks most of these images are likely the resort of old blog posts being updated or deleted and none of them as I say have a lot of links pointing to them so these are nothing really to worry about if you do see broken pages with a ton of referring domains then you may have issues in that case I would actually recommend checking out the full guide to finding and fixing broken link switching and find at each website on it / blog / fits broken links so I'm also doing to check for broken outbound links on the blog and for this I'll use the broken links report under outgoing links a certain looks like there are a few these either need to be removed or updated ideally which brings me to the final two steps in the SEO audit process both of which revolve around content so the first is a Content gap analysis this basically involves finding keywords that competitors rank for yet we currently don't so for this I'll use the content gap tool within a dress so I don't think know a handful of competitors for a dress backlink o for example c j-- media and homer web enter these domains as the targets in the content gap tool then I'll add a tres blog under the but the following target doesn't rank for option by the way I should stress that all of these need to be set to domain mode so finally I must now show keywords to uncover any Content gaps so right away there were fewer quite a lot of results but to fill out these down I'm a filter only for keywords with a search volume of at least 5,000 so now I can see a few good keywords there our competitors are running for yet we currently on and these would be well worth as creating some content around after all the content if our competitors are ranking for such terms and what's to stop us running for them so on to the last step of our SEO audit process which is running a full content audit now we did this a couple of years back and ended up deleting over 200 pages from the href spot all of these were low quality pages that serve no purpose and brought virtually no traffic to the site but the cool part is this orogenic traffic actually increased after that we deleted these pages so what exactly did we do well it was quite simple actually we found low quality pages with little to no ordinary traffic and if they had potential and could be easily improved then we updated and relaunched them if not we deleted them a redirect at the URL to another relevant page on the blog to be honest this is quite an in-depth topic and it's one that we plan to tackle soon with a full post on the blog but for now I will advise that should you choose to perform a Content audit you should avoid deleting content unless you're absolutely certain that it preserves no purpose and has no value even then it may be better to just improve and relaunch fat content and that just about brings us to the end of our sixteen step SEO audit process so I hope it was useful and of course don't forget to check out a full post on the h.res blog where you can find a much more in-depth write-up of this entire process and again if you enjoyed this video don't forget to hit subscribe there's plenty more where this came from cheers guys 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