- Hey, in this video I'm going to show you a real local SEO audit. And this is the exact
local SEO audit process I go through with every client. In short, I'll show you exactly how to find every opprotunity and issue for any local SEO campaign
you're currently working on. And the good news is that you don't need to be an SEO guru to understand what I'm going to show you. In fact, all you need
are some helpful tools, some shifts in your thinking, and a willingness to learn. So with that said, hit the like button to show me you're excited
to learn about local SEO and let's dive right in. All right guys, so I'm going to walk you through
this SEO audit process, and just gonna tell you right now what you're seeing on my screen here. This is just for my general
note taking purposes, I do have an SEO audit template and also a doc where I actually
explain the action items that I find in the SEO audit. But when I do this initial part I just wanna gather as much information as I can about this particular
website and project. So I've broken this audit down
into a few different areas, and this will vary depending on what type of business it is. But in this case this is a local business. So the only real difference here is just gonna be the addition
of Google My Business. And actually I probably add
one other thing here which would be just citations and reviews. And you can copy this, but for me I've been doing
this for such a long time that this is just ingrained in my head. So I can just kinda put it here, but it's important that we're gonna go through
each of these phases. So I'm literally gonna walk
you through each of these and I'm gonna identify all of the issues that this website currently has. And also, all of the opportunities. And if you're selling SEO services, one really important thing when you're talking to prospects, focus more on the opportunities, don't focus so much on the issues and the problems and all
the negative parts about their SEO campaign. In reality, we want to present
them with the opportunities that they have, as opposed to the issues, 'cause no one likes hearing
that your website's a bunch of garbage so we're gonna
need to fix everything. No one wants to hear that. So they would much rather hear "Okay, we have this opportunities, "we need to go after these opportunities "to make sure that your
website is the best "that it can possibly be "and so that we can
drive real SEO results." So just shifting your language
a little bit is really huge. So let's walk through this, and one thing I like to do is try to get as much intel as
possible from the client. So when you're doing these audits, for example, this client
used to be Mr. Texas. He has some training program
called the Carb Coding diet, and he as some people who work with him who have a lot of authority so we could leverage that
in our link acquisition. And even with optimizing the site for your money your life and eat as well. But it's important that at the onset you get as much intel as
you can at the beginning, 'cause then you're not just
working from a blank canvas, you kinda have something
to work with there. Now of course you don't need all of this, but it just certainly helps. So let's go ahead and start with keywords, because really every SEO campaign
is built around keywords. So what we wanna do is start to just kinda look at the keywords and look at the competitive landscape that we're gonna be dealing with. So the first thing I like to do is simply just take the client's URL and see if they have any existing keywords that we can go after. So I'm already here in SEMrush and I wanna just basically see
are there any opportunities that we can leverage that already exist. What are they already doing well for. So when we look at this it looks like they don't have very much organic traffic, which is isn't a big
deal on the local level but we still wanna see if
there are opportunities that exist. Because in a lotta cases, if they're already doing well and they haven't done SEO, then that's really
exciting because it means that Google probably
already trust their website. And it also means that their website doesn't
have a whole lotta baggage that you have to work with. So I personally prefer
to work with websites that haven't typically
done SEO in the past because then I have just
a really clean slate to go after and do this the right way. So let's go ahead and look
at what they have going here and see if it's anything of value. So we'll look through these keywords and it looks like
they're doing pretty well for body transformation,
which is pretty interesting. We probably have to verify that on the national level, considering that their
site isn't very strong. But looking through here it looks like there's gonna be some, and actually this transformation page looks like it's doing
really well, actually. But the thing is with this, you have to always look
at it form the lens that the client is looking through. So in this case ranking
for body transformation, while that might be valuable
on the national level it's probably not incredibly
valuable on the local level because this client is
bringing people into his gym and actually training them. So he needs to really focus on these
local keywords like Dallas. So actually one thing we can do is we can actually just go
up here in the search and just narrow this down to Dallas only, and just eliminate some
of those national keywords that probably aren't super
important at this point. Now however, national
keywords are very effective if we're trying to build out linkable assets, but we'll talk about that later. So what I would do is I'd
actually just go ahead and export all of these ideas. So I took those keywords from SEMrush and put them into a
Google Sheet here where we're gonna be collecting all the data on this particular client. And like I said, I do have a template that you can use so you don't have to do it from scratch like I'm doing. But I just wanted to show you kinda this
process from scratch. But you can just use the template, and I'll have it below this video so you can use it. But anyway, what we
wanna do is just collect their existing keywords. So that's kinda the first step, and then from there we wanna look at the keywords that are extremely valuable to them. So in this case, personal trainer Dallas is a really big one. So we're gonna in and copy this and we're actually gonna go into Ahrefs. Okay so now we're in Ahrefs and what I did is I went
to the keyword explore and pasted this in here. And what we wanna do is
we basically wanna see who we're up against and try to just get a general idea of how competitive this
keyword's actually gonna be. So in this case Ahrefs is saying that it has a KD of three. And they're saying that we're
gonna need about four websites to rank in the top 10. This is just a recommendation, this is not a law so you can
use your best judgment here. And it's certainly, I've seen in my experience that when you do follow
what is given here it tends to work pretty well. But of course there are a lotta variables. So in this case we just kinda
wanna look at the competitors. And when I'm looking at
this on the local level I basically just don't even pay attention to Thumbtack and Yelp or any of those directory based websites. I wanna pay attention
to the actual businesses that are operating in that location. So this one, fitnesstrainer.com I'm assuming
is not an actual Dallas based company. So yeah, this is just a
directory type of company so that doesn't really
apply in that situation. But we look to this, it's pretty crazy because
the first five, six, six results are all directory based sites. So in most cases, especially
relatively recently, Google's been putting a lot of weight on companies
actually being in the location. And that doesn't just obviously apply for the local pack, but it applies in the
organic results as well. So if you have a hyper relevant
business in that location and you do the SEO really well, you can actually perform super well. So in this case we wanna
look at the first one here, who is Elevate Fitness Now. So we'll go ahead and look at
what we're working with here. So now we just wanna see how
strong this website actually is to see what we're up against. And in this case I can already
tell this website is not very strong, they have a DR of below five. So it's not gonna be super hard to beat this particular competitor because they just don't
have a robust link profile. And not only that, they
only have about six pages on their entire website. So it's not a really
well developed website. Just not even looking at, just from a pure technical
perspective I know that they can be beat. But we'll go ahead and look
at what backlinks they have, and more than likely their backlinks are not
anything super impressive. So we'll sort this by DR and then we'll actually sort
this by do follow as well. And basically what I'm looking for here is I just wanna see if they have
any super high authority links that would be difficult to acquire. And in this case they
don't really have any, they have it looks like an interview from Voyage Dallas which is very relevant, that's a very good link, hyper relevant on the geo targeted level. So we would wanna also try to probably get an interview
with this particular website that's focused in Dallas. So that would certainly be
something we'd wanna do. So I would put this into
our link prospecting data. So basically wanna just
start just take note of these opportunities here. And what I am gonna do is
go step by step through each of these competitors and actually extract link
opportunities from them. So here's another one,
doesn't look like it's from a very strong website,
only has a DR of seven, but we'll go ahead and take a look and see what it's like. And it's looks like this is probably, this looks like kind of like a PBN link so this is definetely not something we're gonna want to get, nor will even be able to get because this is clearly just built just for link acquisition. So this is something we'll
just go ahead and avoid. Okay, so now we're looking at Fit180. And one thing that's
important is make sure that this is set to domain
with all its subdomains 'cause often you'll just see the links for the actual URL. We wanna see the links
for the entire domain, we wanna see how strong
the entire domain is. So it's a DR 17 which means
it's not super strong, it's not incredibly weak either, definetely something that can be beat. So we'll go ahead and look at the quality of the links hitting
this particular website. And once again we'll go to do follow and then we're gonna sort it by DR. And basically what I'm looking
for is high authority links that they have acquired, and it also makes us think
about from the perspective that we're also gonna have
to quite strong links if that's what they have. So one thing we'll wanna do
is do one link per domain 'cause in this situation they had multiple links
from the same website. So it looks like they have
a link from this website which is a DR 87. So it looks like Fit180 is a
client of theirs or something, so they've basically leveraged
their site's authority to link to their client, which is gonna be a link
we're gonna be able to get. But we can find opportunities that have similar DR just
to compete on that level. So once again, go through
these opportunities here and see if there's anything where we can either get the same exact link or just take note in your head that we're gonna have to acquire some really
high authority links, which really is almost always the case. And that's really the
best strategy anyway. And then one thing I like to
look at is the anchor text and see if they're doing anything unique. And it looks like their
anchor text is very, very under optimized, which
is a good sign for them, it means they're doing SEO the right way, they're not being too
aggressive with their strategy. And also indicates that we
can't be too aggressive with our strategy either,
as far an anchor text, we need to focus on these
branded anchors as opposed to trying to build out a
bunch of keyword rich anchors. Now they do have down here,
personal trainer Dallas, but it's on such a small scale that it's not gonna have
a huge negative impact, in fact, it probably is having
a positive impact for them. This is a good sign 'cause it means that basically we can rank without having to do anything really risky. And in some industries
you have to be aggressive to even compete. So this is exciting to see this, it's not an aggressive industry. All right, so now we're gonna look at this competitor as well. Once again, not a super strong website, only has a DR of five,
37 referring domains, can easily be beat. And let's go ahead and
look at this link profile, and I can immediately tell that they're using private
blog networks for links. So we'll go ahead and just show you real
quickly what this looks like. There's actually a public network, so you'll be able to just see
all these various websites that are getting links
from this public network. And by the way, as a side note, if you ever wanted to try to find niche site ideas, you can actually just go to
one of these public networks and then just find and
look at the websites that they're linking out to. And a lotta the time it's
actually a really effective way to find niche site ideas. So you could do probiotics
for toenail fungus, if that's your thing. But there's a lot of opportunities here for niche websites, and I often will go through
these public networks that I find in my audits and I'll just take note
of what I'm finding. And then eventually I may go after, enter those particular
markets, I don't always, in fact I don't do it 99% of the time. But it's a weird way to
find niche site ideas but it actually is really effective. So in this case, this
particular competitor is just using classic black hat SEO and it seems to actually be working, which is the shocking part. But I know for a fact that
this will not work long term. And the reason is simple, 'cause when we look at the anchor text it's extremely over optimized. And there's just a high probability that this particular
website will get penalized. It's only a matter of time. So this is not what we wanna be doing. And actually the other competitor who they are up against is
doing things the right way. While this particular competitor is not doing things the correct way, they're doing it in a very
aggressive way when in fact they don't actually need
to be this aggressive. And this is just an old
school way of doing SEO and it can work obviously because they are ranking in the top 10 for their primary keyword phrase. But it's really not, in fact it's not a good
long term approach at all, so this is not what you wanna be doing. So we'll go ahead and look
at this last competitor, once again, pretty weak domain, only 17 referring domains. We'll go ahead and look at the backlinks. Actually looks like they have a link from texas.gov, so that's pretty intense, that's a really good link, not sure how they even acquired that link. So let's go ahead and see
how they actually got it. So it looks like you can
get a link from texas.gov if you're hiring veterans, for example. So this is a really good
opprotunity, obviously, and there are many companies that have links from this page. So this is an extremely valuable link so we would just need
to figure out an angle to be able to get a link on this page. So definetely wanna add this one to the link prospecting sheet over here. This particular website
is definetely getting most of their ranking power, and I don't think they're in the top 10, I think it's like number,
yeah, so they're number 11. But I'm telling you right now, a link of this nature is enough to really push you up high,
from texas.gov which is, first of all .gov out of the gate is already an
extremely valuable TLD. But then also being a texas.gov
which is hyper relevant to where this business serves and what market it serves. So like I said, we can do this all day but at a certain point you know that the amount of links that you're gonna need
to acquire to compete. So that's basically what
we're just trying to do, see what it's gonna take to actually win for
this particular keyword, which seems to be their most important. Okay, so the next thing I wanna do is actually
a domain comparison. And this is a really good thing just so you can show the client so they can see what they need to do to actually compete. So just go to More and then
click on Domain comparison. So the real value of
this is first of all just to benchmark where we are currently, and to see what it's gonna
take to actually rank. And as you can tell here, the client's website has
no domain rating at all, which means it's definetely important for us to develop a really
strong link building campaign because this will hold
them back from performing. So right away, this is showing a weakness that needs to be overcome. But it also shows that the websites that he's competing against
are not super strong, and that's exciting for me when I see this 'cause it means that I'm not gonna have to acquire as many high authority links as I would in a different market
maybe, like personal injury. Which means that can actually
reduce cost a lot more. Basically increases our likelihood that we're gonna be able to perform well and it's putting us in
a position to succeed. So this is exciting, and usually what I'll do
is I'll just actually take, I'll just take like a screenshot of this, just so we can show the client to see what they're up against. And it's just good 'cause SEO can be a
really confusing thing, but if we can turn it into terms that are understandable to everyone, it makes everyone's life a lot easier. So in this case you can clearly demonstrate the number difference here, you don't even really need to know a whole lot about
how domain rating works or even how important it is. We can just say "This is
just the overall strength "of your website from an SEO perspective. "And when we compared it
against your competitors, "clearly you're behind." That's really all that you need to demonstrate to the client, we don't need to get
overly technical with how we explain these things, they just need to be very simple. And show them data, 'cause
data is the easiest thing for anyone to understand, you just look at data,
you see the numbers, you see the discrepancy in the numbers and then you know that
some work needs to be done to improve those metrics. It's very simple when you do it that way. So the next thing we
wanna do is actually just put the client's URL into Ahrefs and see what we're working
with on their website now. So we have a good idea of what we're going up against, the competitors, pretty weak websites overall. And we know that we can
pretty much dominate, given we acquire better
links than they do. But we wanna go ahead
and look at the client, make sure that it's a strong foundation, we're not gonna have to deal with anything
weird like anchor text over optimization or low quality links, that's really important. So we'll go ahead and first
look at the link profile itself and see if there's any issues
that we're dealing with. Nothing too alarming here, just these general links that pretty much every website gets. But nothing problematic at all, so that's a really good sign. And then lastly we'll
just look at anchor text, and it looks like the
anchor text is just what you would expect from a website that hasn't done a whole
lotta link building. So it's just kinda like random and there's not a whole lot of branded anchor text up top. So one thing we would
really wanna focus on, at least initially, is to
build a huge solid base of branded anchor text so then that afspremier.com and AFS Premier would be the top anchor
text in this profile. So that would be the initial initiative that we'd want to execute on. So then from here what I wanna do is I actually wanna do a content gap. So just click this, and then we're gonna put all
of his competitors in here and see if they're ranking for keywords that he is not. So now we're just gonna run this and see what it comes up with. So we're just gonna look through this and see if there's anything of value that the client would
actually be able to go after. One thing might be boot camp Dallas, now I'm not entirely sure if
the client offers a boot camp, we can of course go to their site and see if they do. They have their body
transformation program, but I'm not entirely sure
if they offer a boot camp. So that would require me to go and ask the client a
little more about that. But in this case we'll just assume that maybe they don't and we can always adjust later. We'll go ahead and look at this and see if there's anything
that's even worth going after. I mean it looks like the only thing that really stands is just
this boot camp in Dallas, so everything else the
client is probably already doing pretty well for so we just need to optimize and amplify
their efforts a lot more. So we have a pretty good
grasp on the keywords that this client is gonna go after. We also have a pretty good
grasp on the competitors that he's actually up against. So the thing is with these SEO audits, you can basically draw a lotta
conclusions pretty quickly. And a lotta the time clients are looking for some elaborate explanation to improve their SEO performance, but in a lotta cases,
especially one like this, because he hasn't done SEO, we just need to actually
go through the process of doing SEO from A to Z. So that means building
out a keyword database, optimizing the site and
building out new content assets and acquiring links. So in a case like this we're
not gonna find a whole lot of issues because they
just haven't attempted to do SEO. But basically what we wanna do is we wanna offer suggestions so that they can improve
their SEO performance on their own if that's
what they choose to do. So in this case, with my audits I don't typically build
out a keyword database, I just show the opportunities that exist. So in this case the client
was actually already ranking for a lot of their
primary keyword phrases. Now they're not ranking on the first page, but they're still doing pretty well for a lotta their keyword phrases, which is really amazing considering they haven't done a whole lot of SEO. So one thing I like to do is
actually take this keyword and look at the actual search results. So we'll just go to google.com, and lets' go ahead and just search and see what this looks like. And I always do an incognito window 'cause I just wanna see
just the raw search results that are showing. So in this case it looks like the local
pack here does show up, so we know that we're gonna have to rank in the local pack and we're also gonna have
to rank organically as well. So the real trick to
beating these directories is to rank in the local pack 'cause they typically cannot. So this is extremely important for this client to get up here. So I would go ahead and
take a few notes here, so one thing I like to do
is I'll actually just take, take my calculator real quickly and I'll just do nine
plus 13, and then plus 50. And then we'll go ahead
and divide that by three. So what I did is I just
basically got an average of the reviews here. And we know that the top three
websites have, on average, 24 reviews, and most of
them were about five stars. So we're gonna wanna go and put some notes here
under Google My Business, and we're gonna put 24
reviews as the average. And then we're also gonna
wanna put averages five stars. So right away we know that we're gonna have to go out and acquire reviews for this client. So we'll actually see
if the client is even showing up here. And pretty interesting that Fit180 is kinda
showing up everywhere, so they must have multiple locations. So that's an interesting thing. Will see though if the client
is showing up anywhere. And it doesn't look like they are. And one other thing I also like to look for too is
these top ranking sites, are they using the city in their title. So in this case FitnessTrainer Dallas, so they are using an actual
keyword in the title. And let's go ahead and look and see what this site is. And I'm actually really shocked that this website is
ranking in the local pack, considering it's literally
just a directory website. So this is a really bizarre situation, and I would expect that this
probably will not continue to happen. And I'm sure whatever
location they're using, yeah, so they don't actually
have a physical location. So they're definetely doing
some interesting stuff here in the local back. But these other ones
have physical location and I'm assuming so does the client that we're working with. And actually we'll go ahead and look for the client itself. So AFS Premier, we'll go ahead and search in the local pack and see if they're showing up. Actually just go ahead and search here. And okay, so here they are. Which is great, they already
have 29 Google reviews. So they actually already
have more Google reviews than the average site. So this is really exciting here, and we should be able to really improve this if we just improve the Google My Business listing a little bit more. And one thing we wanna make sure is that they're actually located in Dallas which is the primary location. But it looks like they're
right in the center of Dallas and it is actually legitimate. So this is really exciting, I would get really excited if I saw this because a lot of the
time you'll get a client and they have no reviews, and sometimes they're not
even in the primary location that they need to be in. So having a physical location
in the actual target market is absolutely amazing. So just with a little refinement here we can definetely push this
listing up into the top three, more than likely. So we'll go ahead and make a copy of this address. And the reason for that is because you basically wanna be able to look at the citations. So we'll go ahead and do that. And then also for the client we also wanna recognize that they have 29 reviews. So 29, and then the average is about five. So basically just to compare
this against the competition. So one thing you'll notice right away is that they actually have physical
fitness program in Dallas as their primary category. And so this is a part of the reason why they're not ranking in the local pack, because if they wanna rank for personal trainer Dallas,
they're gonna have to make sure that category's accurate. So we'll go ahead and I'll
just show you real quickly what the original categories are for the people who are ranking. Yeah, so if we look at who's ranking for personal trainer Dallas, it's no secret that their
categories are personal trainer. So if the client wants to rank for that particular keyword phrase, they're gonna have to change
their primary category. And that's ultimately gonna
be a business decision because what's more important, is ranking for personal
trainer more important or is ranking for a fitness
program more important. And in this case when
we look at the volume, it's probably better to rank for this because ultimately this can probably lead to sales of the program as well. And this has the most volume so this is probably the best thing to go after in this case. So I'll just go here and
put GMB category mismatch. And one thing you'll notice about the way I do these audits, it's kind of erratic, it's
just the way my mind works, I have to work through
it in my own unique way. I oftentimes will go directly
in logical order like this but sometimes I see things and then I dive deep into
the issue that I see. And so that kind of changes the process that I'm going through here. So don't feel like you need to be held down by a particular checklist or a particular template. Do go in whatever direction you want, look for those opportunities, that's what it's all about when you're doing these audits. You're just looking for opportunities to make this client's website better so they can get better
rankings and more traffic. So now I'm gonna start to leverage some of the tools at my disposal to find even more opportunities. So one thing, since we're kind of on this local kick right now, we're gonna go ahead and see how accurate the citations are for this client. So we'll just use Moz Local, this is not the one you have to use but I typically will just use this just to get a general idea. So then very quickly we can see that this client has a
lot of missing citations, it's got a few incorrect citations. Nothing too alarming here, it's just the product of not doing a whole lot
of citation building. So this is gonna be a
very easy fix to handle, and how we go about fixing
citations will vary, we have some vendors that
build citations for us and then we also will use
services like BrightLocal to clean up citations as well. Honestly, there're so many tools and services at this point that you pretty much can't
go wrong with any of them. But I'm gonna go ahead and just export this
as a PDF, and this will of course go into the
client's SEO audit folder. Okay, so at this point we're
pretty good on keywords, we know basically what
the client's going after, we know what the competitors are about so we're going to just exit out of that. Now let's go ahead and look at the actual
speed of the website. And it's pretty funny when
you're doing these audits, at least the way I do it, I don't even actually look
at the website for a while. There's so many things that
I have to examine before I even get to the point
of doing a manual analysis of the website, which involves me actually
looking at how the website flows and looking at the user experience and looking at how the
content's developed. That part requires the most subjectivity but you don't even get
to that point before you do all this other technical work. So actually gonna take this client's URL and then we're gonna go to
Google's PageSpeed Insights. And we're gonna go and see
what we're working with because really it should be
a really important objective to get this site to be
as fast as possible, because that's best for SEO performance and that's best for conversion
rate optimization as well. So right away we see this, it's at about a 39 out of 100 score. So obviously a lot of
opportunity here to fix this, at least on the mobile level,
now let's check the desktop. So it has an excellent desktop
store, so that's great, 90, probably just some slight changes to improve that a little bit. But mobile clearly is a thing that we're gonna have to work with to improve that more. So I'll usually just take a screenshot of this just so the client can see. And this actually gonna go into my report. So you'll notice throughout this I've been taking screenshots, that's all for the completed report that I'm gonna give the client. So I can actually show them
these particular things and that I'm not just
making things up here. And then often I'll also
do a GTmetrix analysis too. So we'll go ahead and look at that. And the last one I would do is also actually
Pingdom analysis as well. And I'll try to do one that's close to the primary location. But in this case I guess Washington, D.C. is probably the closest. Okay, so GTmetrix score, it
looks like the site loads fast but it has some other issues
that need to be worked on. So one thing is just it's
not serving scaled images which means that the image size is not what is actually showing
on the site itself. So basically what has to happen is that image gets downsized and as a result that
creates some loading issues. So we wanna fix that,
definetely not a huge issue but we can definetely
fix that pretty easily. So once again I'll go ahead and just download the PDF. Okay, now we look at Pingdom. And it looks like they have a really nice score on Pingdom, the website loads super fast. And there's obviously
some room for improvement but overall, definetely
a really good result. Yeah, so in this case I would just definetely focus on the Google PageSpeed Insights, the mobile loading. And then I would also
focus on the GTmetrix score so we can improve that. So the really cool thing about
improving site loading speed is that they give you
so many recommendations that you really don't have to be an expert to identify the issues. Now however, you will
probably need a developer to fix some of these issues. But overall, pretty much anyone
can identify these issues, so just going through and getting them fixed will require a little technical expertise. So now I'm just gonna
test the mobile friendless of the website. And I can pretty much guarantee that it's mobile friendly just
based on the other analysis that we did for the page loading speed. But we'll just go ahead
and do it anyway just to make sure that it is. Okay, so Google's tool has confirmed that the website is mobile
friendly, so that's great. So what I'll do is I'll actually go to the client's site on my phone and I'll just search it
in Google just to see. We'll do AFS Premier Fitness and then we'll go to the website. And basically what I
wanna do is just make sure that this is mobile friendly. And so we'll click this, make sure that the menu is working, that's great, menu works. Look at the phone, phone works. Doesn't look like they
have call tracking set up so we'll definetely wanna
set up call tracking, so we can actually add that
do our document here and say, this could actually go
in a different category, maybe under just CRO. And we'll put, add call tracking. And this is important because then they'll be able to know where those calls are coming from. And let's continue looking through here, looks like video's working,
slides are working, overall a really good,
really good mobile design, very impressive. And then also they have their actual address here at the bottom. I don't know if their schema markup, which we're gonna be
checking in a second here, but overall definetely a good mobile site. So that's basically what we're looking at, just to scan the mobile site, make sure the design is sufficient. All right, so now we know that
the site is mobile friendly, it has a great mobile experience. So I'm just gonna go ahead and do that, so we don't need to
worry about that anymore. And so now we need to
make sure the site is doing well on the security front. So really when it comes to SEO there's one big factor
when it comes to security and that's gonna be the SSL certificate. So right away on the website we can tell they have an
SSL certificate installed. And so that doesn't seem to be an issue. When we're looking at
this on this surface, now we're gonna run this website through Screaming Frog SEO Spider, but for now it looks like it's okay. So now I'm gonna take this domain and run it through Siteliner because I wanna see if
there's any duplicate content spread across the website. So we'll go ahead and do that and we'll see what we're working with. And at the same time I'm run it through Copyscape as well. And so basically the reason why you wanna use both of these tools is because Siteliner's gonna give you content that's on the actual site. So it's gonna tell you if
there's duplicate content on the site level. Copyscape's gonna show
you if content has been duplicated on other websites. So basically, have other
websites scraped your content or stolen your content. So we'll go ahead and run that too. Okay, so looks like nothing to worry about here with Copyscape, now we'll go to Siteliner and let's see what we're working with. So it does claim there is
some duplicate content, now it's okay to have some
here and there on a website, not a big deal, but we just
don't wanna have too much. So let's go ahead and see what it's pulling
as duplicate content. It looks like this language has been used on multiple pages. Yeah, it doesn't seem to be
anything too alarming here, it's just some information
has been duplicated but nothing too severe. Now obviously we'd want each page to have 100% unique content, but this isn't something
I'd be super concerned about and it would definetely be
low on the priority list. But I'd go ahead and just add this report, and actually we can just
download a site report PDF. And then we'll just go ahead and this to the SEO audit folder so we just have an idea
of there is some presence of duplicate content but it's not anything that's gonna be high on the priority list. So next thing I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna look at the site from Google's perspective. I wanna see what's showing
up in Google's index for this website. And you can get a good idea of what's going on just by doing this. But it's just gonna
give you a general idea of how their site is being indexed. And it may give you an indication if
there're some pages indexed that probably shouldn't be
indexed in the first place. It can also show you keyword
cannibalization issues, there's a lot of intel that you can gather just by
doing this simple search. So just do site: and
then I actually go ahead and remove all of this
and then I make it so that I'm only looking at the root domain. So we'll go ahead and search that. And it looks like there
are only 24 results here, and that's a good sign, that means that there
isn't excessive index bloat or pages, in other words, pages indexed that shouldn't be indexed. Now right away within
a couple seconds I see that there is some over
optimization going on, we have multiple pages that are optimized for Dallas personal
trainer which is something that we do not want to happen. So we actually will need to go through and fix these types of issues because we really only
want one page targeting that primary phrase. Now we'll talk about that later but basically what we'll do is we'll uncover these issues when we run the site through
Screaming Frog SEO Spider. But as we look through here it looks like there're multiple situations
where the same keywords are being used on multiple pages. Okay, so what we're
gonna do is we're gonna paste the client's URL in here. So what we wanna do is
we wanna connect the APIs so we get as much information
as we can about this website. And so we have Google Analytics connected and we have Ahrefs connected to the API. So basically what this is gonna do, it's gonna pull all the
data from those two sources and attach it to each
individual page on his website. So we'll go ahead and start. Okay, so the Screaming
Frog SEO Spider crawl is officially done. So what I did is I just
exported the results and I put it into a Google Sheet so I can analyze it. So once I've gone through and seen that there are basically no
issues as far as indexability. I go ahead and just
take that off the list. So then all I'm left with are the URLs that Google can actually crawl and put into the index. So from here the first
thing I almost always look for is gonna be keyword cannibalization. So really the best way to do that is to just sort this by title. And then there are a few ways to find it, so first you can just obviously look and see what you come up with. But one thing that I'll do is I'll often just do a search here and we'll just type in Dallas and we'll look up personal like that. And what I'm doing is I'm just trying to see if Dallas personal trainer or Dallas personal training is
showing up on multiple pages. We can actually add something in here, we'll do filter by condition and then we'll do text contains. And in this case we'll just do Dallas. And then we'll be left with every page that has Dallas in the title tag. We have two pages here that
have the exact same title tag, so that's just not gonna work. So we would either want to maybe consolidate these pages or figure out a way to optimize
them in a different way if consolidation is impossible. So 10 pages that are
competing against each other for the same phrase. So we'd really wanna figure out a way to handle this particular issue. And typically the way that I handle this is to
under optimize the pages that aren't as important or the pages that we're not
necessarily trying to rank. And we wanna be extremely
clear with what page is targeting what keyword. So in this instance if I was
Google crawling this site I wouldn't know what page they prefer for Dallas personal training
or Dallas personal trainer because there are some many pages that are optimized for it. So the only thing Google can really do is look at the link profile and see which page likely
has the most backlinks, because then that implies that that page is most authoritative
and most trustworthy for that topic. But in this case the client doesn't have a robust link profile so what's gonna end up
happening is probably just not gonna rank at all. So we have to really improve this and make sure that we're
not having multiple pages targeting the same keyword phrases. So the next column I like to look at is the word count column. So we can go ahead and just sort this and see what we're working
with as far as word count. And some of these pages, you can expect them to
have low word count. But what's important is to
have rich content on the pages that matter the most
from an SEO perspective. So in this case, obviously the homepage
is gonna be critical. So it looks like they
have around 2,700 words which is pretty substantial. So that's actually a
really good foundation to build upon. And obviously just having
a high word count isn't how you're going to rank, but it's a good place to start because then we can start to mold and morph that content in a way that is beneficial for search engines. And we actually are gonna be using a tool later on in this process to give us recommendations
about the best way to optimize this particular page based on how the industry itself or how that particular
keyword is optimizing. And that's, it's very important point because every single
industry is different, every single keyword
is different so we have to always optimize based on the situation, not based on just a general standard. Now of course there are best practices that we do go after, but we have to adapt
based on the situation. And in some cases some keywords
require heavy optimization while others require very little. So we gotta make sure that we're using the tools at our disposal to come to those conclusions and we're not making decisions
based on our opinion. That's never really a
good strategy at all. Buy yeah, always look
through your word counts and see if there's
anything that's alarming, lotta pages with really low word counts. Typically I'd mark those but in this case, smaller website, probably
not gonna be too problematic. Now the next thing I like to look at this this crawl depth section. And what this means is just
how many clicks does it take to get to these particular pages. In this case it looks
like the deepest page is only about two clicks deep. So that's not a problem at all. We wanna stay about three clicks deep, that's probably the maximum we wanna go, 'cause otherwise it becomes more difficult for Google to actually crawl the site, and then of course index those pages well. So we wanna keep the amount of clicks to a minimum as possible. So three is typically my target but of course it's gonna
depend on the sites. So if it's a website
with millions of pages, obviously the crawl depth
will be a little bit deeper because that's a necessity. But we always wanna try to push those pages further
up into the architecture so that Google can crawl them often. And of course index them more often. But in this case everything looks good. Now the last part I like to look at is actually the data that we integrated as
far as Google analytics and Ahrefs. So in this case I know the
client hasn't done a lotta SEO so I would expect them not
to have a lotta traffic and not to have a lot of backlinks because they just haven't
invested in SEO yet. So these results here,
obviously given the background that I know about this client, I'm not gonna draw a bunch
of crazy conclusions, I know they're probably not
gonna have a lotta traffic and they're not gonna have a lotta links. But typically if I was auditing a website that has already done SEO
and they already have a lot of established traffic, then we would wanna start looking at pages that A have low traffic,
and B have low backlinks. And in particular, pages
that have no traffic and no backlinks at all. And typically we wanna
figure out why those pages don't have traffic and
why they don't have links. Now typically, a page won't have traffic because A it's not optimized well for SEO, B they're targeting a keyword that wasn't actually qualified, they shouldn't have been
targeting it in the first place, and C, the page itself doesn't
actually have backlinks. And of course there are many other factors that will determine that, but we look at a page like this and we'll see when is the best time of day to do cardio for weight loss. Now that's probably a
very competitive keyword, based on my experience in this industry. And then we look at
the actual page itself, there are a few issues. First of all, we have this image here that's kinda pushing
everything below the fold which then can hurt user experience, and as a result have users
clicking off of this page which then actually will
hurt SEO performance. So you gotta see how these things are kind of all tied together. And then we go down and we'll see that it's a short article, and short isn't necessarily bad but typically we wanna see
these articles really well formatted and easy to read. In this one, this is the only title here and then there are no other
headings on this page. Definitely some room for improvement here, and it makes sense this page probably isn't performing very well. So I'd go ahead and just mark this, probably mark this whole
column here as just something to take a look at. And we wanna start to help this client create better content, and make sure that
they're targeting keywords that their website can actually compete for in its current state. So then one other thing that kinda stands out to me is that doesn't look like
there are a whole lot of linkable assets. And so one of the biggest things that we wanna do when we're trying to promote a website and we're trying to build
links to a website is we need to have some pages that are
actually worth linking to. And so of course it would ideal if we could just drive all of the links to our most important pages, the pages that are gonna
drive the most leads and the most sales. But unfortunately that's
also the most unnatural way to get links. And so we want to actually
drive links to pages that really deserve links. And so in this case we're gonna wanna build out
some informational assets that are more at the top of the funnel. And so this particular page, this is a good example of what we would do but it's not quite how
we would execute it. So that's one thing that we'll wanna put on
the recommendation sheet, is that we wanna build
out some linkable assets. And we'll actually find
ideas for this client, I can actually show you
how we go about doing that in a second. Okay, so at this point we
have a pretty good idea of what's going on with
the site in general, as far as technical
performance and content. Now we haven't actually
done a manual analysis of the website where
we actually go through and look at the pages and see if there's room for improvement. But right now one of the best things we can do is actually just use
my favorite on page SEO tool which is Surfer. So what you wanna do is actually just take the most important
keyword for the client, in this case I'm gonna do
personal trainer Dallas. Now of course I would
probably change this variation to be more of a natural phrase. So Dallas personal trainer
is much more natural than personal trainer Dallas. Now although that may
be what people search, this is an easier way to optimize the page in a natural way. So I always like to modify it to be natural language. So in this case we'll go ahead and do create a query, and while you're in Surfer
actually this is the main page that you'll land on when you log in. And I'll have a link
below this video where you can sign up. But go ahead and hit create a query. Okay, so now that the analysis is done for Dallas personal trainer, we actually wanna put
the client's URL in here and then we'll click compare. Now Surfer has so many capabilities but just for this demonstration I'm just gonna show you one of my favorite components
which is the audit portion. So go ahead and click audit. And then what surfer's
gonna do is it's gonna show you all of the issues that this particular page has, relative to the competitors. So it's gonna obviously show
you common missing backlinks. Now this is a really important section because you should try to get backlinks from many of the websites that your competitors have
gotten backlinks from, that's kind of the base level work that you need to be doing. So of course you can do
show missing backlinks and then we can go ahead
and actually export this. And then we'll put that in the folder when we deliver the report to the client. So that's the first thing you wanna do. And actually it's really
important because. And this is actually really important because you can actually
show the client the domains that their competitors have links from. And then we can show them
how much it actually cost to get that type of link. So for example, getting
a link on New York Times, we're talking probably three
to $5,000 to get that link. And that's because it's a
very difficult link to get, therefore it's more expensive. So when you're thinking about how to budget and how to make a
dent in a particular industry you also have to consider
the price you're gonna have to invest to get some of these links. And when I'm saying price, of course that means actually
buying them from a vendor, but it could also mean the
price as far as the time that goes into actually having to build a relationship with someone. Or actually become the author
on one of these websites. So regardless of how you go
about acquiring the link, there's still going to be a cost, whether that's time or money. So you need to calculate
those costs in your proposal, if you're gonna submit a proposal to the client after the audit. Now if this is just a one time audit, of course you can still
show those comparisons and show them what they're gonna need. But still, this is extremely valuable, just this alone. And you can actually do
this same thing with Ahrefs, you can do link intersect. But it's just nice that
it's right here in front of you with Surfer. So now let's go down and take a look at some
of these other things. So then surfer is basically
just gonna show you how you should optimize your page, and basically how many times you should mention the particular keyword that you're going after. So in this case it looks
like the client really needs to add a few primary
keywords to their content. And so knowing that this is
the most important keyword for them, we're gonna wanna add that naturally in the content. And the thing with this tool is you gotta really use it the right way. So remember in the beginning I coulda put personal trainer Dallas, and so then it would've
showed me how many times that's mentioned across
the other competitors. And then it would given
me a recommendation on how to actually optimize that specific phrase. And of course we wanna
optimize is a natural way so that's why it's important to make sure that you modify the primary phrase so that it's natural language. So that then we actually go through and optimize that page
it's nice and natural. And Google honestly as
this point is so advanced that it knows that Dallas personal trainer and personal trainer Dallas are almost the same exact keyword phrases. So it's very rare where Google
can't tell the difference. So then what I do, and if we were actually
optimizing this particular page I would actually just export this and I would send it to a team member. And then I would have them go
through these recommendations and optimize it. But in this case we're
just giving recommendations to the client so I'm just gonna export. And then one thing that's
really important is once you make those changes, you can actually go back into Surfer and click refresh and then it will actually
recalculate these percentages. And then you can see where you land once you've put in all that work. So really, really cool feature. So now let's go to the
second section here, and then when you scroll down you actually see this words section. And this is also a really great section because it's basically gonna tell you what the ideal word count is for this particular keyword phrase. So in this case it actually tells us that we should remove content
form the primary page. And believe it or not, I've done this many, many times. I followed this exact
recommendation from Surfer and it always produces better results. It's pretty crazy because
it's an indication that Google believes that when your content
is substantially longer than what is necessary that it's probably filled
with a lotta fluff. And typically what will happen
if it's really long too, it could end up actually
getting over optimized as well. So we want to fulfill the intent of the keyword with as
little words as possible. And we also want the page to blend in with competitors, we don't want it to seem
substantially different, either on one extreme or the other. So we don't want it to be substantially longer
than everything else and we don't want it to
be substantially shorter. So that's the real value
of Surfer in this section, is that it's actually just
gonna tell you a range that you should go for
based on the averages. So in this case, it's
telling us we should try to aim to get between
1,000 and 1,900 words. So we would need to remove
a substantial amount of words from this page. And so that would be a
part of the initiative that we'd wanna go for. And then once again it starts to talk about some HTML stuff that we can go and fix. I recommend doing everything
that Surfer suggests. And then once you've done everything, then you can adjust if you're
not seeing improvements. But in most cases, if you make all of these changes that they recommend, it is a
very, very high success rate. Now of course you need to go through and you need to actually
start acquiring links too. There are a lot of other factors involved. But from just a pure on
page SEO perspective, and if you have all of
your other ducks in a row, you've done all the other
forms of optimization that are necessary and
you've acquired links, optimizing your page based on
Surfer's recommendations is almost a guarantee to
improve your performance. Like I said, as long as you've
done everything else well. So I just can't recommend it enough. So then just keep going down, there's some other
things we wanna look at. Obviously all of this stuff, very similar as far as keyword placement. We need to make sure that
we have a keyword in H1 like I mentioned earlier. We already saw that based
Screaming Frog export that he didn't have
any keywords in the H1. And then of course having the
primary keyword in the title, super, super important. So the section I actually like to look at is down here at the bottom which is the load time. And if you click show details you can actually see the comparison from your client's site or your
target site versus the websites that are performing really well. And more often than not, you'll often see that websites that are not doing well
typically load a lot slower. So one of the easiest ways to improve your SEO performance is just to improve your website loading speed. And it's crazy because this
point has been hammered by pretty much everyone and it's been getting hammered
for a really long time, even Google hammers it and says how important it is. But for some reason we don't
prioritize it in our efforts, and it needs to be prioritized
right at the onset. We wanna try to make our
website as fast as possible. In fact, we want our website probably to be the fastest in our
particular market if possible. But we definetely, certainly
do not wanna be the slowest, and we don't even wanna be, we wanna be in at least the top five or even top three as far as speed. So in this case, lot of
room to improve right away. So definetely something
we're gonna wanna do. Okay, so now that we've already
run personal trainer Dallas through Surfer we can just go
ahead and mark that as green. And then we actually wanna look for keywords with
different types of intent. So best gyms in Dallas, probably not something that
the client actually wants to go for but it seems like they just kind of ended up ranking for it. Now of course we can verify but we know for sure that they wanna rank for nutritionist Dallas. So we will go ahead and
mark this one as yellow. And we're gonna continue
to go down here and see, look for ones that have different intent. So that one has a little
bit different intent, we'll continue to go down. Dexa scan Dallas, definetely
slightly different. Strength and conditioning
is slightly different. We have in home personal trainer Dallas, now we don't know if he actually offers that so we probably would
just leave that for now. We do have Dallas weight loss program, which is certainly something that has different intent. Dietitian which could be
different than nutritionist, although they are kinda similar. But we'll go ahead and mark that too. And then this is what you need to do, you just need to keep going through here and looking at all
these different keywords and looking for opportunities
to target keywords that just have different types of intent. And the reason for that is because we're gonna want to actually create different pages for these keyword phrases, or optimize existing pages. So just continue to go down and look for different
keywords with different intent. So here's another good one,
female personal trainer Dallas, so we could actually
optimize a page specifically for this variation, as opposed to just
personal trainer Dallas. Female personal trainer
Dallas is different, so we could actually optimize. One of those previous
pages that we found here, it looks like Sarah, this page
with the trainer by the name of Sarah, we could probably optimize that for female. So that's one option. But definetely wanna go ahead and keep looking for these
different opportunities. And then you're just
gonna take these keywords and run them through Surfer so that we can once again, get
even more recommendations. All right guys, so I decided to end this
local SEO audit tutorial here because I have several
videos about link building on my channel already. And I'll have links in
the description below. And I just wanna say that if you watched this
far, thank you so much because that was a big commitment and it shows that you're
someone who's serious about learning local SEO. So please like this video
and subscribe to my channel because I publish new videos every week. Thanks again for watching and I'll see you in the next video.
