- Hey so in today's video I'm
going to show you my complete step by step SEO audit checklist. In fact this is the
exact SEO audit checklist I've used to grow this
client's organic search traffic by 1,337% and this client's
traffic by 93%. keep watching. (upbeat music) So I'm actually going to perform
an SEO audit live for you. I randomly selected a local
business for the target keyword personal injury lawyer Chicago, and the lucky business is, DeSalvo law. So the first item you need to audit is your Backlink quality. Okay so the first thing we're going to do, is we're going to audit the link profile to see if there's solid link quality and we're just gonna look
at the links in general. So, I like to do is, go to ahrefs then click on the site Explorer option, then enter the target URL. So all you need to do is, go under the backlink profile section and click on backlinks. So in this section what we're
looking for are a few things first of all we're looking
for, unnatural link patterns and we're also looking for
low quality artificial links. So as we scroll down,
we start to see you know maybe a couple artificial
links here and there so we have a Wix link here, and this is just your
classic web 2.0 links linking with Chicago car
accidents which is actually a really bad anchor text to use because this isn't something
that a lawyer would probably even wanna to rank for 'cause this is an actual, it doesn't actually have good intense. So, using this anchor text is actually not gonna be effective. And more importantly it's a
huge footprint when you use geo targeted anchors, so
this is also pretty bad but beside that, this is just
your classic web 2.0 link. And, this isn't gonna do much and in fact I've had to pull
some clients out of penalties for these types of link. You can always tell it to web 2.0 link because this will be on a subdomain, so you see it's Wix site, it's has the subdomain and
then it has a bunch of folders. So it's so deep into
wixes site architecture that it's practically
worthless to even get and not only that if you just look at it it's very unnatural, it's
not gonna add any value and it's clearly built
just to place this link. So if we go through we'll continue to look for some other similar types of links and it looks like here's another one. This is gonna be a web 2.0 link placement. Yeah so once again same type of thing scroll down looks likes more Wix site looks like we have an
article directory here some more web 2.0s more web 2.0s, and you're starting to see
a trend here that a lot of these are web 2.0s you know? they're really easy to spot. And the truth is, if I
can spot them this quickly Google's algorithm can spot
them even faster than I can. So, it's just not a good
thing to be doing in general. So we look at these
once again ArticleCity, you know these websites are just built just a drive links to websites, they're not actually built
to add value in any way and you can tell right away. So these are not the links you'd
want to be getting overall. And once again another web 2.0 link same type of situation you
know they're trying to send, some generic anchor text to
this page to try to dilute it, just not a good idea in general, here's another web 2.0
link same situation. And then one more for good
measure just so you can see what these look like. These are these are not great
links and I would avoid these altogether but you can
tell just this link profile is filled with all these
different web 2.0 links. So this was clearly a
strategy for whatever company was doing SEO for, this law firm, and it's not ideal. But, it does look like
there has been an effort to try to dilute some of these bad links with some more, editorial links which is good so that's one way to offset,
these lower quality links is to get more high quality links to decrease the total percentage of those, in the link profile as a whole. That's kind of, the way
that I go about looking at link quality and of course
you know, I've been doing this for a long time so it
takes me a few seconds to just identify these links but you can almost
always identify web 2.0s by the, subdomain and the
unnatural linking practices. The second item you need to audit, is your anchor text distribution. Okay so next thing we want to analyze, is the anchor text Profiles. So all you need to do is go back to ahrefs then click on the anchor section. And then right away we can
see some good stuff here, so we can see that the majority
of the top anchor texts here are branded anchor text, and
so that's really really good. But it's only good on the surface and so on the surface
level this looks great, but if we go ahead and examine, the links that are sending
these brain and anchor text to the site, we'll probably see that
they're not high quality links, based on our previous analysis
with the link profiles. So and we can tell right away, it looks like the top
links that they are getting are from web 2.0 web sites so we can just go and click this, and you can see right away
that these are coming from, the classic web 2.0s that we talked about earlier in the link profile section. So, yes branded anchor texts are good, but they don't mean much if they're coming from websites that, are totally
artificial and low-quality. And so this is the right thing to do, but it's the wrong execution. So it's better to get
a brand new anchor text from a real website not a,
artificially built website. So if we go through the
link profile here you know, we're gonna see more and more of these. It looks like there are some
other ones sprinkled in, but for the most part you know, there's a lot of web 2.0 links, that are sending these
branded anchor text. So as we scroll down we can
start to see some keyword rich anchor texts like, personal injury lawyer in Chicago Illinoi and it's not that keyword
rich anchor text is always bad in fact you need to use
keyword rich anchor text, sometimes to be able to, perform well but you can look at
this anchor text profile and see that it does
look a little unnatural, you know we're seeing, if we
just go ahead and do a search for Chicago you know we can start to see, it's really starting to look pretty bad. Because this is just not
a normal way for people to be linking to web sites. And so when you see where
the same anchor text repeated over and over,
it's typically not great especially when it's for
a transactional keyword. It makes it look even more unnatural, it's more natural for
an informational keyword to get a high volume of
exact match anchor text but for our transactional keyword, it looks extremely unnatural, so, one thing you could do on
ahrefs that's kind of nice, is you can actually just
do something like this once you know what the
target, keywords are, and then you can just see
all of the anchor texts, there using geo targeted
modifiers like this. So as you can tell, it's
not looking too good here this is very over optimized and so, this is something
that you just do not wanna do. This just doesn't look good,
you can tell like look at this strip of, anchor txt this is, this is not ideal. And so let's look at the types
of links that are sending these anchor texts. So if we go to the details section again it looks like some of these
links have from directories like this one, and this is really not good. You should never and
I mean literally never link with an exact match
anchor text or keyword rich anchor text from a website
like this a directory link. And the reason is because, these are not editorial links and these are not high quality links because anyone can go
here and submit a link. And then also, your link is
surrounded by a bunch of other websites that are also
spamming keyword rich anchors, and using a natural link. So you know, your website
is now being associated with all these other websites
that are also spamming. And so general rule of thumb, just don't even get these
links in the first place but if you decide to, use a branded anchor text. just do not use keyword rich
anchor text with any of these link types, just not a good idea. Let's go ahead and look through, some more it looks like we
know, once again another directory type of link. And the problem with these
types of directory links is that, they're not even
relevant to the client. They're just general web directory links and these this is a
very old school practice so maybe these links are
a bit a long time ago. This stuff just doesn't work anymore, this isn't really something
that anyone should be doing. I don't even know how these
web directories are still around they're showing Page Rank as if, Google updates it but we
know Google has not updated Page Rank in several years. So, yes so these are the
links you just shouldn't get in general, but if you do
get them for some odd reason just make sure you use
a branded anchor text but like I said just avoid
them because they're probably not going to help you they
may actually hurt you, more than help you in most cases. Now there are some cases
we're getting directory links is a good idea, number one if it's a actually
high-quality directory with editorial standards,
that's legitimate or if it's a business directory like, Yelp or the Yellow
Pages or something like that that's very trusted, that's fine. And then one other, actually two other
types of directory links that are worth getting. Are gonna be; niche
directories and then also geo targeted directories. So those are worth getting but if you do get any type
of directory base link, just make sure use a branded anchor text. If we go through this entire link profile we would see pretty much the
same types of linking patterns it's gonna be you know artificial links, keyword rich anchor text, all the stuff do you really
shouldn't be doing any more, this stuff just needs to be avoided. The third item you need to audit, is keyword cannibalization. So now we wanna look
for instances of keyword cannibalization so my
favorite way to find, that particular issue, which means two pages are
targeting the same keyword phrase, is to use screaming frog. So just put it the target
URL in the screaming frog and then start the analysis. So the quickest way to find
keyword cannibalization is just to go to the page title section. And then all you need
to do is just search, a word that you're seeing
frequently in here, so in this case I'm gonna do accident and I'll see right away that, you know there's some there's some keyword
cannibalization issues going on right away, so we can see
Chicago accident lawyers, and then we have Chicago
car accident lawyer. Which is a little more
specific than this one but we're starting to get
into some of the keyword cannibalization areas,
but then as we go down, now we're starting to see the issues. Car accident lawyer Chicago, car accident lawyer and then we have car accident attorney, and then you see this repeated over and over and over and over. And these all have their own unique URLs. So this is just your classic
case of keyword cannibalization and so we would wanna go through and consolidate or delete
some of these pages so that only one page on the website target's car accident lawyer, which is a transactional keyword so it should have transactional intense. So a lot of this stuff is probably not, in fact it's not going to rank at all. And it's definitely not helping and so typically some
SEO companies will build out these pages because
they think it's gonna help with topical relevance, but it actually doesn't
it actually just causes keyword cannibalization,
and it doesn't help at all. Actually detracts from the primary page that you're trying to rank. So it'd be much more effective
to take some of the content on these pages, and add it
to the transactional page and make that page way more
deep and way more authoritative that's a much better strategy. So you can use screaming frog
to quickly find all kinds of keyword cannibalization issues. You see how quickly I was able to do it so just look for common
words that you're seeing and then search in hear. And then find pages that
are targeting the same exact keyword phrases and then
go through the process of fixing them and focusing
one page on the site for that primary keyword phrase. The fourth item you need to
audit, are low hanging fruits. Trying to improve the rankings
for your most important keywords should be the priority, but it's also good to find keywords where there's opportunity to rank for them and typically what I'm trying to do, is I'm trying to find keywords
that have low competition and we'd be able to rank
for them very quickly, with just a few changes to
the page or architecture or other optimization techniques. So what you need to do
is go back to ahrefs and then go to the keywords,
organic keywords section. So then what we're gonna do
is, sort this by position so we're gonna go to, 15 and
then we're gonna do from five. So now this is gonna show us our keywords that they are in positions five through 15 and so that's typically where
I would call low hanging fruit because to 15 you have a few
keywords that are right off the first page, so with just
a little more optimization maybe a little more links. You might be able to push
those to the first page. And then also the ones
that are in positions five you can push those up into the top three possibly which is gonna
dramatically increase the organic CTR so it
gets substantially more once you get into those
top three positions. Now of course one thing
you want to look for here if this was our client. I would of course wanna
look at these informational keywords and see if we
can improve for them, but in reality a lot of
these informational keywords aren't gonna drive sales, and
are not gonna drive leads. So what we want to do is you wanna actually look
for the transactional keywords to see if there's opportunities to improve with the transactional keywords. So we know that this client
in particular is targeting Chicago for, personal injury
and keywords to relate to that. Let's search Chicago
and see if there's any low hanging fruits that we can go after. So based on what we see here
there there is definitely some opportunity, now you
may see this volume here and think that this is an
important or isn't good to target, but it actually
is because I've said this many many times but not all
keywords are created equally. So when we look at this one,
Chicago's slip and fall lawyers it only gets 30 searches per month but all it takes is one
client, to be a massive massive return on their investment. So and that's why companies are
willing to pay $25 per click or $65 per click or even $75 per click because they know, that
getting just one client for one of these keyword
phrases is a substantial amount of money so the
getting the return is huge. And so you gotta be
careful not to chase volume because it's completely
dependent on the keywords and the industry as well. So in this case it looks like, you know there is some opportunity
here to to improve these pages and get them higher up, so he's sitting in position seven and so getting him to the
top three for this target keyword phrase would be huge for him, because that would immediately
increased the amount of clicks going to his site and of course possibly
increase the amount of leads that he's getting. Now looking at this page
well of course have to see if it's built well for conversions, but getting more clicks to the site gets him more opportunities to get leads. So I recommend when you
start a new campaign look for these low hanging fruits because, if this is your
client you can get them some quick wins right out of the gate, they're gonna love you so
much more and then why you've already gotten in those quick wins. You can then start to go
after those really competitive keywords that have more search volume and kind of the keywords that, probably all of his
compares are focusing on putting all their resources into, so, one workaround to do that is is to go after these
low hanging fruits. The fifth item you need to
audit, is the site architecture. So while you're in screaming frog you can also examine
the site architecture. So there are many ways you
can go about doing this you can of course do a manual analysis which is usually necessary. But you can get an overview of
the site architecture pretty quickly just by using this tool alone. So while you're in the internal tab just scroll over, and we're gonna look for a
column called crawl depth this is how many clicks it
takes to get to whatever the target pages. This one for example, this
is extremely deep into the architecture, so it's
probably an older article so it would make sense
if this was a really important article for the website you would wanna push this
further up the architecture because nine clicks deep
is really really low in the architecture which
means it's a low priority for the crawlers, and so if you want a page
to be a high priority to the crawlers needs to be
higher up in site architecture. And as a general rule of thumb, you really don't want to go
beyond three to four clicks deep and so one of the thing you
can do, is you could to get an overview look at the
site architecture sector or the site structure section here. And you'll actually see,
overview of the crawl debt and so ideally you know,
these bars should kinda be between one and four. This should be the bulk of your pages now in this case they have a lot of pages, where they're four, five, six,
seven even nine clicks deep. So that's way too deep for an architecture so you wanna push these all forward, if they're important pages if
they're not important pages then that's a different discussion, because you need to talk about, you know whether those pages should
even exist in the first place, if they're such a low
priority in the architecture. You can also see here to
you know how many URLs have this level of depth. Looking at this there
are a lot of URLs that are really deep in the architecture so definitely a lot of work that can be done here and screaming frog is just amazing for giving you this high-level overview that you can then go deeper on and start to see you know why are these pages, so deep in the architecture and then you can decide
what to do with them. The sixth item you need to
audit, are linkable assets. Okay so the next thing
we want to look for, is to see if this client has
any linkable assets that we can use for our link building
and promotion for this website so if you've been following
me for a long time you know that the best
way to promote a website in my opinion, the safest way
to grow websites Authority is through creating linkable assets. And so whenever I start a
new campaign the first thing I look for is, does this
client have anything that's worth linking to. And a lot of the times they don't so we have to go through and
create these linkable assets but in this case we're
gonna see if maybe there are some linkable assets that we can leverage in our link building. So, just looking at this
site you know we can see a few things here, we can
see there transactional pages we can see an FAQ section
which could be useful for link acquisition. See testimonials which aren't
usually good for links. And then we see an injury blog
and then guides and courses. So these all might be
interesting linkable assets. But typically for a linkable
asset I do on a target a keyword phrase, so
we'll look at the blog and see if there's
anything worth linking to. So looks like, this might
be something interesting what to do after a car
crash and what not to do. And so that's a really interesting topic and I think something like
this could be linked worthy. This does look like something we could use for link acquisition and
so, what you wanna do is just go through whatever
the site you're working on just find these different linkable assets, you don't need a time you only need, you know one to five and then just go use these
as your catalyst for growing the website's authority, and it'll make your life so much easier because then you don't have to build links in an unnatural way and
use a bunch of geo target, anchor text like, I showed you earlier. So this is the most natural way to build any website's Authority
including local national or EECOM it's all the same strategy. And the seventh item you need to audit, is your page level optimizations. So you literally wanna go page by page and make sure that each of
his most important keyword targeted pages, are optimized well. And so this is definitely the longest and most time consuming process because you have to go through each, transactional page that they wanna rank. And then we also wanna through
all the informational pages that they wanna rank as well and make sure that those are optimized well. And once we've figured out
if they're optimized all then we have to actually
go through that process of optimizing them, but for
now let's just go through an audit of one of his
transactional pages in this case. So his home page is the primary target for the most important
transactional phrase he's trying to rank for which is Chicago personal injury attorney, or variations of that
could be of course personal injury attorney in Chicago or anything that's closely related and so, and a few things I noticed right away, if you wanna rank for
a target keyword phrase it should be the very first heading that shows up on the page and so this is all great
here for sales purposes and lead gen purposes. But it's not great for SEO purposes and in fact if you're
trying to drive organic search traffic it needs
to be very very clear what this page is about
right out of the gate. And so basically what you're trying to do is you're trying to
instruct Google's crawlers about what this page is about and it needs to be abundantly clear, there needs to be no ambiguity and so right here, Google
may be able to deduce what this page is about. But, if you're competing
against other people Google's going to prefer
a page that is more clear than the ones that are not. And so in this case, you know
there are probably competitors who have placed their
primary keyword targets above the fold in the right locations. And so more than likely, this is a H1 tag. And it actually isn't okay
yeah so this is not a H1 tag the first heading on a page
should always be an H1 tag and so right here this isn't
an H1 tag so this is not ideal and I don't actually know will go actually look at the page source, and
see if we can find an H1. And there's actually not
an H1 on this page at all and so that that's a problem
right there so every page should have an H1 tag it's
it's the most critical tag on a page, so that's the
first issue is that there is an H1 tag. The second issue is that
the primary keyword target, is in the primary heading
which would be the H1. So if we scroll down we'll
see that you know his primary keyword target
here is, in a heading tag and I believe this is an
H2, so if we go and look yeah so there is an H2 tag here, which is good it has the
primary keyword in it. But if we're gonna structure
this page in the right way, we would move this heading up here and it would become the H1 tag. And then you can use some
of this other copy around it but this needs to be the very
first thing that shows up on this page above the fold. Pretty basic there but it's
really really important now there is something that
I like here that's great. I like that there's a contact form here right away that they can fill out, I like that there's a phone
number here that makes it very easy to call on mobile. So there's a lot of good stuff
going on here that's great. The only thing I would say about, and this is purely from a conversion rate optimization standpoint, this lead form is blending
in with the background so it doesn't really stand out a lead form should really stand out, when someone is on this page
because you want their eyes to be drawn to it, but
when you look at this page everything's kinda blending in. And more importantly, you
don't want your headings to be the same color
as your call to action and although it changes up, upon hovering. There's still a lot of
the same colors here and the problem is that
you're not creating contrast. And the key form really pop, and really making people want
to fill it out is creating contrast on the page. So this is the most critical
element of the page, so it should really have a lot of contrast and this actually will apply
to the phone number as well which is also the same
color as everything else. So you know your two
primary conversion points above the fold, need to
really have a lot of contrast so you can get drive more
conversions so not an SEO thing but it is a part of SEO
because there is maybe some possibility that Google
can track goal completions. And it's hard to really
know if that's true or not. But you know Google is
analyzing how people interact websites all the time, so if
they're looking at 10 pages competing for the same keyword,
and five of those pages never get any conversions,
then may say, you know maybe this page isn't the
best for the searchers. so it's probably likely
hard to prove like I said but it's likely that they
can see if goal completions are happening, so therefore
conversion rate optimization may actually impact SEO. So something to think about there. But anyway that's the first part of this and then as we scroll down this is, probably not ideal for readability you know just having
these huge blocks of text and then also the headings
are the same color as the call to actions not ideal. So the way to fix this
is to fix the design so instead of making it
these huge blocks of text you could do a left right
format which would have, you know text here and then an image and then text here and then
an image, and that helps break it up and make it easier to read. And then another part of
this, is if you're gonna have these sections here, on the home page you need to make each section needs to have
its own call to action because when you look at these, these are actually linked to other pages and these links you don't
even know that there are links in the first place. And so, this isn't really built for users this is built to try to
manipulate Google's rankings and, it's not ideal. And this stuff just it doesn't work. It's much better to build a
page that's built for users instead of building a page that's built to manipulate Google's algorithms. So this needs to be restructured
the internal linking strategies need to be changed, and Plus you know linking
with these keyword rich internal anchors, isn't
really gonna do much because they're already in the navigation, with pretty much the same
anchor text so you're not really getting any benefit by doing this. So just something to think about there, and then as we scroll down
you know once again hard, with the readability here. Everything's all blended
together the phone number here isn't linked. So that would force someone
to actually have to type the phone number into their phone. Which is an ideal, so and
then as we scroll down you know the one thing I do
like is that there's a lot of content which is good
because that's gonna be really a big deciding factor between you know, multiple people competing. But there's a lot of room
for improvement here, as far as design and user experience. So and then right here
we have some testimonials which is great I love putting testimonials on transactional pages, so this is excellent. Once again you know maybe
formatting could be improved a little bit, and also when you have testimonials it's best to try to get pictures of the individuals,
people buy from people so we want to have a lot of
faces here that's important. looks like we have some
sort of lead magnet or something of that nature,
but then we have two of them so if we really want to probably improve the conversion rates on one or the other, we probably want to focus on
one instead of having both 'cause now we're creating
some decision fatigue here, and I like this a section
that where you can basically explain why they should
work with this attorney. That's something that I
do recommend with the law transactional pages to
add more content so it's definitely a good thing. So yeah this is good for the most part I think the formatting can be improved for readability reasons
we always wanna focus on that left right format
we're using sections to break up the content
so it's easier to read because, people when they read online they skim they don't read
word for word and typically what they'll do is they'll read headlines, and then they'll go
back and read the rest, but that's only if it's
readable and it seems like it's worth reading. Now when you look at this it's so, there's so many different formats going on so many so much bolding and underlining and different colors it needs to be refined a little bit more. And once again you know
some contrast issues here you have you have
headlines that are orange and then you have call to
actions that are also orange so the contrast is going to create issues, and then these this is not linked again and this is not
linked down here as well. So yeah those are some things that, you know this this page has
a lot of room for improvement but it definitely has you
know, a good foundation for good on page optimization. Now we can look at some other
things like we'll go down here in the footer and it
looks like the address is in the footer which is good so this will help certainly
with keeping the NAP or name address and phone
number information consistent, once again, the phone
number is not linked here in the footer so I'm
assuming what happened here, is that you know they assumed,
because this was linked here in the navigation that, you
know, they wouldn't even do the others but if you're
gonna have a phone number on the page then it should be linked. And then you know one other
thing we can look for, is if we examine this
we can see if they have schema markup, and it doesn't
look like this has any schema markup, and I
could of course run this through a schema markup
tool and see if they have it but it doesn't look like they do. So one other thing to take
this page to another level, is to add some schema markup to this some structured data. I would consider adding
a video to this page you can put it above the fold
which would then help you increase dwell time, help you
build a relationship quicker with prospects, and it helps
you differentiate yourself from other attorneys because,
most of them probably not going to have videos. So having a really high quality video that explains your unique value
proposition and the results that you've gotten for your
clients, is a pretty big deal. So I mean, it helps from
an SEO perspective to. So that's one thing and then
if we look at just the general keyword placement and density, we'll look at Chicago there, there's some challenges here. So first of all putting
Chicago car accident lawyer and then putting Chicago fall down lawyer. You're starting to
cannibalize the primary key, we're targeted of this page
which is just personal injury so you wanna keep this
very very structured and very specific to whatever
that primary target is, so I would avoid talking
about these other things especially using a geo
targeted modifier like that. So you'd want to use
Chicago fall down lawyer or Chicago car accident
where on those pages instead of starting to place them here 'cause now we're starting to get into some murky water, with that. so we wanna keep everything
extremely targeted that's really important. And then this is just kind of, it's just stuffing keywords really and it's not necessary you
really only need to have your primary keyword target in the H1 tag, maybe in the first you know H2 tag and then just sprinkle in a couple times, but you don't you don't need
to be this over optimized to rank and instead what you
want to do is focus on building an incredibly user
experience on this page, everything else will work out, and then of course you
need to acquire links the right way, so yeah just
making a really great page for users and then placing
your keywords in the most important positions, is far
more important than just stuffing the same keyword
multiple times on the page. So those are just a few
things that I noticed right off the bat, now of
course you'd want to go page by page and you go
through this same analysis of every single one but, as you can tell your own page
optimization is much more than just placing keywords
in fact a lot of good on-page optimization is actually, restructuring pages and
making them better for users and most importantly making
them better for conversions. So those are the seven
high impact SEO audit items you need to tackle if
you want better rankings and more traffic for
your company's website or your clients websites. So if you enjoyed this
video please like it hit the bell notification
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