SEO Audit Tutorial for 2022 - Perfect for Beginners!

hey in this video i'm going to show you my complete seo audit process so you can find every opportunity possible for improving your rankings and getting more organic search traffic so make sure you grab your favorite note-taking device because i'm going to be performing an seo audit on a real business and make sure you watch until the end because each step in this process builds upon itself like a snowball let's dive right in hey my name is nathan gotch and i'm the founder of gotcha seo and i've personally led hundreds of successful seo campaigns since 2013 and i've helped thousands of seo professionals reach that mastery status inside my training program gotcha seo academy so in case you're new here this is video three in this complete seo mastery training series and there are links below this video to watch the other two lessons after you finish this one and one last thing subscribe now and hit the bell notification because you get first access to the next video in this training series so now let's get super geeky and dive into this live seo audit demo so in this demo i'm going to analyze rsblawfirm.com which is a law firm based in st louis and the first step in this process is to audit the keyword profile here's how so once you're in scm rush go ahead and enter the domain that you want to start doing this keyword audit for so in this case like i mentioned we'll be doing rsvlawfirm.com so once you've done that we're going to go to the organic research section so right away we just want to look at a couple things here at a high level so first of all what is the organic keyword trend like what does it look like is it flat is it growing or it hasn't rapidly declined in any way so looking at this overall they haven't grown a ton and they've been flat since let's say march 2020 but they haven't declined a lot either so this is actually a really good sign initially because it's showing us that they haven't been penalized they're likely not dealing with some sort of link-based issue that we have to go and fix and they've been doing this for a long time they've been going since about 2012 so there's a lot of room for improvement already we can tell because of course they've kind of flatlined here so with a lot of things i'll be showing you in this audit we're going to be able to improve this dramatically but right now let's just focus on the keywords so this is the high level analysis everything looks good here now let's go into the positions now the first thing i want to do is i just want to see if they have any low hanging fruit keywords so these are keywords ranking from positions number 2 to 15 and these are absolutely the best keywords to target at the beginning of an seo campaign because with just some slight adjustments some optimization some additional coverage on the site and maybe some additional link building and maybe even building more topical relevance of course which we'll talk about we can push these up much faster and just by going up a couple positions we can dramatically increase organic search traffic so what you want to do is go to positions here and we're going to do custom range and we're going to do 2 2 15. and then ultimately we want to see how they're doing with the keywords in this range and so we see according to scm rush they're not doing so well like they haven't really improved performance on these keywords that are most important so looking through these obviously anything having to do with st louis is going to be really important to them so we'll go ahead and copy that and then we're going to go filter by keyword and we're just going to enter that in because we only want to see stuff that's related to st louis right we don't want to see stuff that's not super relevant but it doesn't mean that we're going to ignore those keywords it just means that right now at this point we're thinking about what we should prioritize we want to prioritize the keywords that have high transactional intent on the local level so in this case st louis criminal attorney st louis criminal defense lawyer these are their money keywords these are the ones that we really want to improve a couple things you can do you can obviously sort this by volume and see which ones have the highest volume within this segment of keywords so looking at this st louis criminal defense attorney they're sitting at about number 13. that is a golden opportunity they're only about three spots away from the first page so what we would do is make this our number one priority because if we improve the optimization on this page they could see a dramatic increase in qualified leads right so this could be a big win for them and it's easy for us because they're so close already so we just need to figure out what's going to be that next step to optimize this specific page for this keyword phrase and all the related variations now i should mention these variations here st louis criminal defense lawyer st louis criminal attorney these should all be targeted on the same keyword because the intent is exactly the same now we'll talk a little about intent but ultimately we should only be creating new pages if the intent of the keyword is different someone looking for a criminal defense attorney that's a very clear intent but someone looking for a child custody lawyer that has a totally different intent so we need to have a totally different page to be able to optimize for the intent of that keyword so this is the first step is i want to look for these low hanging fruits because this is where most of our time should be spent and once we've really nailed these down we're doing really well then we can move on to the other keywords that are outside of this range now we'll go ahead and exit out of here and we'll go to the next range of keywords which are what i just defined as existing keywords we'll go from positions 16 and then we'll go position 50. these keywords are also very very important but they're just not as important as the keywords that are ranking very highly in those low hanging fruit positions we're still going to want to attack these but ultimately they're kind of far back a lot of them so ultimately if we improve these pages that are already doing pretty well in the low hanging fruit section it's probably going to improve the performance of all these other existing keywords that are sitting on pages two three maybe even four and five typically there'll be a domino effect to improve kind of the whole keyword profile ultimately so the next set of keywords are 51 through 100 and i actually define these keywords as clustering opportunities so typically you can find some really good opportunities here from 51 to 100 and oftentimes if you're ranking from positions 51 to 100 it means that your page probably isn't optimized enough to rank for that keyword and you're probably there just by coincidence or just because you mentioned it one or two times on the page and it's not super competitive but at the end of the day you need to have a focus page that 100 nails the intent of that keyword so looking through these we can see there's a couple keywords here obviously you know when we're working on the local level we want to try to keep things really hyper relevant to the location that they're in sure there's some national stuff here right there's pdl that looks like a national term we're looking at no contest divorce that's also a national term so what i would really be interested in more in is the missouri-based keywords and the st louis based keywords so let's go ahead and look in missouri and we'll see if any of these look like good clustering opportunities and i'll tell you what that means in a second so looking right here child custody in missouri the kd on this is not super high according to semrush it would be an easy keyword to go after so this would be something that we probably would want to tackle but you'll see here we'll look at this page and you'll see that this page here is not built for the intent of that keyword so they do mention missouri child custody but the problem is that this page isn't actually designed to satisfy the intent of this particular keyword so we'll go ahead and look at the serps for this one and then what we'll find is that most of the results here are not transactional pages the pages that are ranking are very informational in nature and so i'm seeing some things here that are really good right away like right here we see 2020. that means that these results are outdated so it means that if we create an informational piece of content at the top of the funnel we should be able to rank for this keyword pretty easily and it's still relevant to what we do so the way that they're trying to do it right now is they're trying to use a page that's built for transactional intent and they're trying to rank for things that have informational intent so the way to do it is we're going to build out that top of the funnel informational asset targeting this keyword which is child custody in missouri and once we built out an informational asset it will start performing well on google but ultimately what we're going to do is we're going to drive link equity and relevance to this page here which is their transactional page so we want to rank for st louis child custody and visitation lawyers i'm going to rank for this because this is transactional nature while the other one is informational in nature so this is what i call an intent mismatch and this is really really important to understand and you'll not believe the amount of golden opportunities that most websites are just sitting on right now to build more topical authority and more topical relevance just by splintering these ideas onto a separate page and ultimately creating the page based on what the intent of the keyword is and in this case you have a lot of informational keywords here third degree assault in missouri that's informational statute of limitations on debt in missouri that's informational so we should be building out these informational assets they're not just informational nature but they're actually geo-targeted relevant golden opportunity here to attack these this would be my focus here to build topical relevance and authority so now that we have a good understanding of what keywords they're targeting it's time to perform a technical audit here's how to do it okay so while you're in semrush go to the site audit section and then run the target website through their site audit and then once that's completed it's gonna look like this and this is just the overview of all the technical issues that semrush was ultimately able to identify so there's a lot of information here don't be overwhelmed by it but i'm just going to kind of identify the key things that we really want to be looking at so a couple things here is crawlability crawlability is by far the most important thing that we need to optimize for because at the end of the day if google can't crawl your site well it's not going to index it well if you can't index it well you're not going to rank well those are the prerequisites for even ranking on google's you need to have a crawlable website and it needs to have good crawl efficiency as well you need to have all of your pages getting indexed very efficiently and then lastly to actually rank the pages have to be indexed in google so it's critical it's really really critical now let's go here we're gonna look at the details and we'll look at a few things there's a lot of kind of technical stuff here but there's a couple key points that i really like to look at so we'll scroll down and this is the a really important section here is pages crawl depth so what this means is how many clicks from the home page do these pages exist so the number one target that we're going for is that we shouldn't have any pages more than three clicks deep that's really what we should aim for and there's obviously some exceptions to the rule but for a small website like this that doesn't have a ton of pages there's just no excuse to have pages more than three clicks steep it just isn't necessary it doesn't need to have that level of architecture and ultimately what you're doing when you have pages that are really buried into the architecture is you're telling google that these pages are not that important right and whether that's by accident or on purpose it doesn't matter that's just the way that it's going to be interpreted ultimately by the time google finally gets down there and they may not get down there at all actually the crawlers may not even reach those pages so we want google to be able to crawl our site very efficiently and crawl it the way that we want to so that our website gets indexed the right way but also typically when i see this there's a lot of pages that are kind of buried in the architecture it's typically a signal that we're going to find some content that's not super good right because if the content was good it wouldn't be buried deep into the architecture so that's kind of the first thing i want to look at is make sure that the pages are no more than three clicks deep now in this case there are many 117 to be exact and then we also see here that there are 67 pages blocked from being crawled so we do want to investigate just to see what that might be and why these are no indexed or difficult to crawl and so we'll go ahead and open this up so this is the page that scmrush is claiming is being blocked from being crawled so there are two ways to basically confirm that that is true we can go into view page source and then we can just look for no index and see if it's currently here and it is so this particular page is being no indexed and no followed that's just telling google that please don't crawl this page ultimately and do not put it in the index so the question we have to ask is why is this page no index so when we investigate a little bit further it looks like they're actually linking out to sdltoday.com and this is probably something that they were a part of and they just don't want this page indexed for whatever reason so there's nothing really inherently wrong with this we just don't want to be using the no index function to kind of hide the fact that we have thin content because it's much better just to eliminate thin content altogether if it doesn't have any valuable kpis so but in this case if they're using it as a form of social proof or a way to build authority then it might make sense now having a little bit of thin content here and there is not going to destroy your rankings but when it starts to happen at scale it can become problematic so you don't want this to get out of control but i think in this case it's not anything to be too concerned about okay so i went back to the overview section of course you can keep digging in through all these things but let's also look at the issues tab and see if there's anything related here that could be problematic it looks like overall pretty good here there's a couple errors nothing too severe and there's a couple warnings and there's also some notices but for the most part there's nothing too concerning a lot of these things are not going to really move the needle a lot if you go and fix them but they're things that maybe you should add to the list because at the end of the day fixing these little tiny technical issues is not really going to drive performance because for the most part anyone can go and fix these little micro technical issues that it's not really going to move the needle what's really going to move the needle is first of all targeting the right keywords which we talked about building out the absolute best page for that keyword then building topical relevance around that keyword and ultimately acquiring links those are the high impact actions that are really going to drive results now this is a local business so it's not a huge website there's not a ton of really technical seo opportunities it can be different when you're working with an ecom site or a larger website where there's a lot of opportunity to optimize crawl budget and build out powerful architecture but on local level a lot of these little kind of technical tweaks aren't really going to move the needle really at all so then we'll go to the crawled pages tab here and this is just a really cool way to kind of see what the architecture looks like so you can look at pages and then even sort it by crawl depth and you'll see pages that are really buried deep into the architecture so in this case it looks like all their tag archives are buried usually for us on the local level we just basically delete all these tags they don't really serve any purpose and usually they just cause duplicate content for really small websites you don't need this level of depth as far as tagging it's just not necessary ultimately and then also with the site architecture you can see how everything is laid out by folder there are some technical issues here like having this st louis criminal defense attorneys as a folder and then everyone under it is also includes that that's going to lead to keyword cannibalization we'll go and look at an example of this what i would define is kind of dangerous is if we go into the personal injury section here this page here that says st louis personal injury attorneys nothing wrong with this this is perfectly fine but it becomes problematic when you actually use this as the folder for the preceding pages so we'll go and look at wrongful death and you'll see we still have st louis personal injury attorneys in the folder although this is a different page and so what this is going to do is going to cause keyword cannibalization or at least increase the odds that it's going to cause it i would not do this in fact most businesses do not need to have especially for a local business you don't need to have complex folders like this unless you're targeting multiple locations but in this case it would actually be better to just do st louis wrongful death attorneys instead of st louis personal injury attorneys wrongful death it's just because we don't want any other pages to compete with this primary keyword we only want this page right here to be the only page that's optimized for this specific keyword and this is very very important so i would not do this type of url structure just because it could cause so much keyword cannibalization and lastly we go to the statistics page and you're going to see a lot of things we already talked about here but there's a few things happening obviously with crawldub we see that 33 pages are more than three clicks deep so this is something that we need to go through and fix sometimes it's not even about pushing those pages further up into the architecture sometimes it's about actually deleting those pages because they're not serving any purpose so sem russia's site audit tool is a really really good tool to give you kind of this high level understanding of what the page is all about and also they even added this core web vital section here too where you can go and see how well it's performing for core web vitals in this case there's a lot of room for improvement right so they need to go through and optimize for core web vitals as well because google has said that this is going to be a ranking factor okay so all you need to do is open up screaming frog put the target website through here and then start the crawl and once it's done the best way to find keyword cannibalization is to start searching based on url or by title so what i'll do is i'll just go right into here and i'll just start searching things that i'm starting to see some similarities for in this case this client wants to rank in st louis so let's start looking for instances of keyword cannibalization for st louis so if we go ahead and sort by address you'll start to see and of course we'll never look at stuff that's indexable but for the most part we're pretty much going to see things that are just indexable right here and right away the first thing i see is st louis divorce family law so then we'll get a little more granular we'll just type in divorce and now we're able to see is that they have a bunch of urls that all have st louis divorce family law attorneys in the actual subfolder so what we're going to do is we need to actually fix this because we don't want all of these pages to be optimized for this keyword phrase we only want this specific page to be optimized for this keyword phrase otherwise we're going to run into keyword cannibalization issues and if we actually look at the title over here as well we're going to see that if we look at divorce lawyer saint louis and then right below we also have divorce attorney st louis so these are actually the same exact keywords just slight variations but they have the same exact intent so these two pages are actually competing against each other this is a very quick way to find instances of keyword cannibalization and you need to go through and clean this all up and in this case it's just a matter of cleaning up the url structure and probably consolidating these pages into one primary page which would be this one so now that we've identified all possible technical opportunities it's time to audit their content here's how okay so all you need to do is go into the content marketing section then click on content audit and then you need to run your website through the content audit tool it's going to ask you to integrate google analytics and google search console so you'll absolutely need that data to be able to do this the right way so they'll give you a nice overview of all the opportunities that exist for your content right now but what you could do is you can actually click on table and then we'll start to look specifically at the urls that they're recommending that we need to either rewrite or remove need to update maybe review or even just filter those out that have poor content so when it comes to rewriting and removing we're looking at a few different urls this one right here how to write a blog post this is an old blog post here on gotcha seo the average view duration is extremely low which is a bad sign and there's not really a whole lot of traffic going to it it's just an indication that this post has not really done well from an seo perspective so we probably need to rework it or improve it in some way to make it perform better maybe we picked the wrong keyword there could be a variety of things but we need to investigate why that post is not doing well if we go and look at it we'll see and ultimately this post was not really designed to rank it was more designed to be a content marketing piece more than anything looking at this we know there's a ton of room for improvement this is the type of stuff you need to be doing you need to be going page by page and determining what's going to be the next course of action so based on this we can take this specific url and then we'll actually go back into semrush so then search the url up here and make sure you do exact url we just want to see if this page has anything valuable that we want to retain so based on this this page here has virtually no traffic at all it does have some keywords that it's slightly ranking for but i'm going to go ahead and suspect that they're not very good so based on this this post is a losing post this is a losing page that we need to do something with it in this case i would probably consider upgrading it or maybe picking a different keyword to attack because just based on what we did it wasn't good enough to perform so i would probably scratch this one and go back to the drawing board now with that said looking at this it does have existing backlinks so you are going to want to try to retain those backlinks so if you're going to redo this post then it doesn't really matter but if you're going to scrap and start new you're going to want to 301 redirect this post to the new one or just 301 redirected to a post that already exists if you don't want to tackle this particular topic again so just take advantage of scm rush's tool here to rewrite and remove all of these posts that just are proven to not be doing super well you should go one by one and decide what is the next best action for these pages because this will help clean up the site make it leaner make it better and ultimately make these pages perform better than they currently are and then there's a couple other categories you can look at need to update once again these are posts that are older so they probably need some updates and ultimately they probably need to be upgraded and re-optimize and ultimately update it to be based on the current situation for these given keywords and then there's also quick review once again very similar to the previous one and then poor content these are just going to be pages that have pretty much very little words and likely very little traffic now in this case of gotch seo this is why you always need to be nuanced in your approach because with gotcha seo we have these dedicated story pages and these pages are critical for us because they actually serve as content marketing and marketing for our seo program so these are critical for us but when you run a tool like this semrush or whatever tool you're using is going to tell you that hey maybe you should do something about these but in reality this is serving a business objective so sometimes you have to approach this differently you can't just look at it from an seo lens you also need to look at it from a business lens as well so i highly recommend taking advantage of semrush's content audit tool and you can also mess around the filters to be able to rip through this content even more and get a little more granular as well so at this point we know all the possible content opportunities now it's time to see if they have any on-page seo opportunities here's how to do that okay so while you're in sdm rush you'll see over here on the left-hand side go to on-page seo checker and then what you're going to do is you're going to click manual and then enter the page that you want to rank and then enter the keyword that you're trying to rank for and then just go ahead and click collect ideas so once the scan is complete sdn rush is going to give you all kinds of ideas for on-page seo and it will be based upon the keywords that you input so if you only put one keyword in one page you only get recommendations for that but if you put a bunch it's going to give you recommendations for all of this and based on their data they think that if we implement these changes that we'll see an increase of organic search traffic by over 1 000 so that would be quite nice now what we want to do is actually go to the one that we wanted to analyze initially which is the st louis personal injury attorneys and we'll look at eight ideas here and see what opportunities currently exist for this specific page and so looking at this there are a ton of opportunities for example we need to add more keyword variations the actual body of the page and we need to make the text content more readable so there's a variety of things that we can do right now to improve the performance of this page and just follow these recommendations and then once you've made these changes update the post and you should see an increase in performance and if not then it probably means that you either need to build more topical relevance which means you build more supporting assets to this page or you need to go out there and acquire more links and in this case it looks like they do need to acquire more links that the competitors already have so take advantage of this on-page seo tool can really be a game changer so now we know all of the on-site opportunities that exist now it's time to audit their backlink and anchor text profile on both the domain and page level here's how to do that so all you need to do is go into semrush's backlink audit tool and then just put the domain in here that you want to analyze the link profile for and then hit start backlink audit and i recommend doing the root domain that way you can get access to all of the links that are linking to the entire website now all the audits going you can actually go right into the domain overview section just click on backlinks and then you can literally just go through here and start to analyze these links and see if there's anything that looks abnormal or ultimately anything that's going to cause problems so right away the first one i notice here is this web 2.0 link and so we'll go ahead and take a look and see what it looks like it looks like it's been deleted but ultimately these types of links are extremely toxic these are just your classic web 2.0 links and they're really not going to do you any favors they should pretty much be avoided at all costs now you do need to know the nuances of analyzing a link profile which can be tough and that's why semrush is going to make it much easier once this analysis is done it's actually going to tell you which links are what they would consider to be toxic or dangerous but as you go through here you can start to see the ones that are gonna cause some problems because ultimately if they don't look natural if they look spammy then they're not really a link that we're gonna want so we'll have to figure out if that's a link that we actually just want to keep maybe it's not causing a whole lot of problems or is it one that we're going to need to remove or even possibly disavow now you pretty much almost never need to disavow unless it's a really nasty link and typically that would be because of negative seo but sometimes you will get some really spammy links but for the most part you're not going to need to use a disavow tool i just like to look through here real quick scan if i don't see anything too alarming then we should be good to go but when i see this when there's ultimately a home page link it's typically an indication of some sort of public blog network which is quite common but overall this link profile looks pretty clean and you can actually sort it by follow just to be safe and then we'll put it on active just to make sure we're only really looking at links that are currently active now this isn't always 100 accurate for example we just checked this one and there was nothing sem rush has to recrawl all these links and they're crawling millions and millions of websites and links at any given time so this will take time to update but overall if you can scan through here and you don't see anything too alarming you don't see any aggressive exact match anchor text or anything of that nature which we can go over here and look at the anchors we can go over here and look at the anchor text and we'll see that the majority of their anchor text is branded or generic and this is really good nothing too alarming they do have a missouri divorce lawyer but ultimately as long as it's not the majority of their anchor text profile they'll probably be pretty good for the most part overall this link profile looks pretty good it's a good foundation now at this point they need to go out there and start acquiring really high quality editorial links and then based on the backlink audit sem rush has declared that the really the majority of their link profile is actually really good so they're doing a nice job as far as not being super aggressive with link building they haven't done anything in the past that's going to hurt them now so at this point just a matter of getting continually acquiring high quality editorial links that are super relevant to what they do so whether that's relevant on the geo targeted level or whether that's relevant on the niche level either of those are going to be really important and high quality for this particular business so that is how you perform a proper seo audit step by step and the goal of this process is to find every possible seo opportunity that exists now here's the deal not all actions are created equal in seo and that's why you need to know how to prioritize all of your opportunities and then develop a strategy and that's exactly what the next video in this free seo training series is going to tackle i'm going to show you how to develop a winning seo strategy based on your findings so to get first access to the next video in this series subscribe below and hit the bell button right now and if you got value from this video please like it and drop your comments below thank you so much for watching and i'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Semrush

Views: 73,801

Keywords: seo audit, seo audit 2022, seo audit checklist, seo

Id: SIR4Kn62bLQ

Length: 26min 38sec (1598 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 18 2022