SEO Audit Tutorial 2021: How To Audit a Website (Like An Agency)

in this video i'm going to show you exactly how to audit a website step by step following the same exact process that we use inside of our agency for our clients and by the end of this video you'll be able to audit your own website or a client's website or any website for that matter just like a professional agency so let's go ahead and get started so now that we're inside of my computer i can go ahead and show you the whole entire process but before we get started there's two things i want to mention the very first thing is for those that are not completely sold on why you should be even doing an seo audit in the first place the seo audit takes place way before you do any optimization or anything to the site is the very first step of the seo process okay and the reason we do that is what most people do actually is they go ahead and they optimize their site and then they wonder why they're not ranking and that's because they have thousands and thousands of seo errors in their site so what we want to do is we want to go ahead and clean all of that up before you build out any pages or you start optimizing anything and you're working on a clean foundation so that way you can avoid all the stress later down the road the second thing i want to mention is inside of our agency our seo audit process is anywhere between six hours or more per client and the reason is our seo audit strat strategy and process is pretty long and so i'm not going to show you all of that in this video because that would be impossible to even try to teach but i'll show you all the major key points along the way of exactly how we do it from beginning to end and that way your audit will actually be much better than what most agencies out there do having said that let's get started now the tools you need to have for this seo audit i'm gonna make sure that it's free all right the majority of the tools that i recommend going into this are free so screaming frog you should have right is this tool over here and if you type it in right it should come it's a free software that you can you can download as well as ahrefs if you know what ahrefs is it's this tool right here ahrefs is actually a paid software it is recommended that you have it but you know not an absolute requirement you'll see what i mean in just a bit and of course you should have your webmaster tools right your analytics and your search console to your site which you should already have set up so now let's look at the seo audit process now our seo audit process looks at the on-page seo which basically means you know your actual site like what is actually wrong with the site is there any technical errors on the site and then off-page seo audit is just like what it sounds uh we're looking all the optimizations from the seo done outside of your site so these are things like the backlinks that you built your presence and so forth analytics on it so we're going into your analytics and checking making sure some of those metrics that we care about are in the right parameters and then your search console right we're going to go ahead into your search console and look at the very basic but important essential things that we need to look at that make sure to let us know if there's any outstanding errors that's going to hold back your site okay so that's kind of just the seo audit process and things that we look at now let's start off with the very first thing which is the on-page seo audit and the on-page seo audit i'm going to use the site as an example during this audit and the very first thing we do is we start with the basics okay the basics is we wanted to see is the site even indexed is google even picking up your site and the way we do this is we do site colon and then without any spaces clean the zen.com so you put in your url make sure you know you don't have to put www or anything like that and if you see the pages right these are all the pages being picked up by google now had i done this and nothing showed up that means your site is not getting indexed right or certain pages aren't getting indexed if you don't see certain pages here right so as we can see we have 205 pages being indexed so that's a good thing right we got to make sure that google is even picking up your site to begin with before you start doing anything else i like to do what's called more of a look audit so it's more of a web design principle and we just want to look at the site and see is it a good looking site does it have a call to action above the header right above you know above the above the fold you know is there multiple call to actions as you continue throughout the sections now for example this site needs a little more call to action if you notice you know but down here they have a little more call to action which is fine is is the call to action consistent is or is it inconsistent all right is it you know one moment saying call us and the second one was saying your policies and the third one is saying learn you know learn more about us or is it a consistent call to action about one to two things mainly pretty good it just needs a couple more call to action i guess and then we look at do the necessary pages exist right now google wants to make sure you're a legitimate website and there's certain pages that have to exist on your site for google to even think you're legitimate and that means having an about page right those those are in central having a contact this page so i know this site has it but trying to find it right now is going to be a little yeah so they have a contact page you want to make sure you have your privacy policy your terms of service right obviously your home page i feel like i might be forgetting something but those are the main pages that google really looks at to make sure you're real and obviously you should have your other pages like your faq services but you're about your contact us in terms of service privacy policy google does want to see that you know if you're real so once you have those essential pages the next thing we'll look at is does the site have an ssl right this little icon right here that is a ranking factor if you don't have that get that done asap another thing i want to show you but i'm not going to show you this on this side i'm going to show you on a different site so let's go to another website just to illustrate my example we want to see actually let me wait for this to load we want to see if it redirects to the correct version now what that means is when you have an ssl you see this thing https what happens if we remove the s and then we click enter does it redirect right back to the https yes it does that's a good thing now let's go a little more deeper let's go look at one of the pages and let's do the same thing again right https let's remove the s and submit no it does not see it does not redirect us to the https version it just redirected us to a non-secure version right that is not good right so if your site does that what that means is in google's eyes it's almost like you have a duplicate copy of your site you have a secure version of your site your https version and you have an http version that's out on the web in google size and duplicate content is a no go you will have a hard time ranking um long term so you want to get this fixed if anything like this is happening okay every time you go on any pages and you put you do this right you remove the s and you click enter it should always always redirect you to this to the same version basic things again we're still looking at is it mobile friendly google does care about that so for mobile friendly there we go so you just type in mobile friendly test right and you just put your site there i've already done it because i didn't want to take too long uh while it took you know to scan but is it page mobile friendly it is page speed matters right uh not only for the users but also google does measure that so you want your page speed your page speed to be under three seconds okay so i like to use gt metrics but you can also use what's called ping dome to check your your page speed and what you're trying to look for is is your page speed below three seconds right if it's too high then you need to get that fixed asap then now let's get a little more technical right so right now we just covered the basics let's go back to cleanzin.com and the very first thing we want to see is there are is there a site map right there should be a site map every site needs a site map so we do your site slash sitemap dot xml right so if you have an xml sitemap it should be there and it should show up and we just like make sure everything looks fine and we can leave right now if a site map doesn't exist that needs to get created that also should exists so you put in your site robots dot text and this page should exist if it doesn't it needs to get created and now what we're looking for is there anything weird here right like right now if you said disallow homepage that's a bad thing because we want the home page to get picked up so we want to make sure there's nothing weird going on in the robot's text we also want to make sure there's a link to the site map within the robots text which this site doesn't have a correct version or a correct way of doing it would have been like this site instead a link to the sitemap with thin robots text it's a good thing or recommended thing to do okay then we start to look at thin content pages what does that mean that means are there pages on your site that shouldn't be getting indexed by google right so let me show you an example so we do sitecolon cleanzin.com like earlier and what we do is we're looking for pages that shouldn't be getting picked up right because we want google to only pick up the pages that are really essential like the pages we're trying to rank or you know this is i guess fine but you know we're looking for these weird pages like your login page doesn't really need to get picked up or indexed you know no like you could go ahead and de-index that does your interview page need to get indexed not really the web profile is definitely not this is a thin content page meaning it has no value to the user right this has no value so again it should get de-indexed it doesn't necessarily mean you have to delete these pages just de-index them so google doesn't pick them up right so you're just seeing your examples like cleaning memes like the author page like an author page archives like those should not be getting indexed or picked up by google you're you'd be wasting basically crawl budget and just having thin content everywhere the next thing we'll look at duplicate content you want to make sure there's you don't have pages within your site where there's a duplicacy across the site so what i like to do is if you type in duplicate content checker the one that's going to be ranked at the top is going to be sightliner so i love using this tool type in you would put in the website in there and it will scan it for you so free tool it should come up with all the things that you might have a duplicate where there's pages matching with the same words and you want to fix that right because google does not like duplicate content at all where you have a page or two two three pages that have almost the same exact content then we look out for broken links right and your redirects and those things your url is there any issues with your url this is where the tool i mentioned earlier screaming frog comes again it's a free tool and i did this for a different site and i already scanned it ahead of time again so that way i could just get into showing you these parts so what you'll see is after it's done scanning you'll see all the pages listed here and then the status codes right here so i'll tell you what kind of status code now these are 301 redirects meaning they are 301 just basically means this page has been permanently redirected to a different url which is fine but we also want to just check on them make sure you know this 301 really does work right so if we open it in the browser yeah it works okay right so you want to go ahead and just check a couple of these 301s just make sure everything is you know just check a couple of them at least ah so this was never a 301 this was actually a 404 so these are the things you want to fix right broken links right and then you see multiple 404s here right google does not like broken links so we need to fix that we either need to do what's called a 301 redirect where this page redirects to a different url right or we need to do what's called a 410 so we need to change this from 404 to 410 because 404 just means hey i can't find it 410 means it's permanently deleted you're letting google another's page is completely gone whereas 404 is you know it's looking for it but there's nothing there so it does not like these error codes okay so make sure you go ahead and fix that there's also another tool you can use to check if there's any broken links it's called broken link checker i'm not sure who comes with these names but it works believe this this site right here yep you can put your site here and we'll check for broken links now although this site doesn't have it there's something called 302 307 right if you see those status quo again those need to be fixed that just means it's temporary redirect right we want permanent we either want a 301 or a 410 301 is permanent permanently redirecting a new a url a 410 is permanently telling google hey this page no longer exists and you know yeah that's basically means the last and final thing we want to look at is for these pages that we've already scanned we'll look at the meta title and the meta description for these pages now if you're not familiar with what a meta title meta description is just when you type in i'm just going to type in something a random keyword the meta title is this thing right here very important the meta description is this thing right here right the description right here right title description so it's going to be very important for ranking because it lets google know what your site is even about once you scan the site here's what you could do here's the cool thing about screenfloc i'm going to go ahead and maximize it start to see the meta description so right here you can see that the site has 15 missing meta description we could filter it so we don't want any missing meta description so we want to go ahead and fill that out okay so if there's anything missing you're looking out for that is there any duplicate right is there multiple meta description there just the same exact copy across all the pages thankfully on this one no so you're just looking at those you're also looking at the title right is there anything missing thankfully no but if there was we would want to get that fixed are there any duplicates the second page of the blog looks like a duplicate which isn't that big of a deal currently but you're looking for things like that right you're looking for when you're looking at your pages right you're also just looking at the titles to see to make sure these these pages aren't targeting the same keyword right like think little things like that right you're not seeing multiple pages that are both they're all targeting like one keyword that would be very bad because those all those pages will be competing for one keyword and your pages will basically eat each other so those are the things you're looking for any weird abnormalities like that and then last but not least is the h1 tag the h1 tag it would be the top header most sites don't even have this as a header so look we go we right click click view page source control f and then we look for the header one tag does it exist it does and it's not really there's no text inside of it oh yeah the so the header one tag is not being used properly for example right you would want your keyword here inside of the header one tag but the the client is not doing that so we would want to go ahead and put the header one tag here we want to put you know house cleaning in indianapolis if that's our keyword for example and we would set this as a header one tag of course that's the code but again headers tell google what your site is about right so now that we've done the on page we move on to the off page now we start looking at the the backlink profile so let me show you with an example let's type in cleaningglow.com this is where you're going to need ahrefs i don't really know any other tool that does this portion without ahrefs but i'll still show you so you plug in the site and all this stuff comes up and then you will notice right here referring domain and backlinks referring domain just means the amount of websites that are mentioning you so there's 104 websites out there mentioning this website this uh our client and then there's 4.45 k backlinks which means these websites have mentioned them for that almost 4.45 k not each times but just in total now the first thing we're looking at is is that a weird ratio right if you only have 104 websites but you have 4.45 k mentions that's very odd that is not normal right that means this a lot of those pages are just spam that are mentioning you over and over in different in multiple different blog posts so we're looking for things like that is there a weird ratio between the amount of pages that are linking to you versus the amount of links you're getting from these page these sites another thing we're doing is we can click on the backlinks and see what their refer what websites they are see so you can see a lot of these websites are very spammy right these are bad quality websites and we definitely want to disavow this and get rid of them also you can also see the anchor text that they're using to you know this is some pretty crazy stuff if you're reading this they're using these keywords to direct it towards this client's website so this looks like something like an seo attack negative attack from another competitor who's sending out bad links to this website is we want to see what we'll get a graph of how many websites are you know mentioning our clients over time and you'll start to see these big spikes right big swipe look at that all in one day a hundred what is that 161 websites started mentioning cleaning glow which is not normal you cannot have just 160 websites all in one day that is a clear indication of a negative seo right some huge amount of spam is happening here so like these are the things we're looking for when we're auditing that's basically when it comes to that but another thing i want to mention is there's a tool called majestic seo and it can it can let you know how trustworthy your google thinks your site is again this is a free tool up to a certain extent but after a while they do charge you so let's do let's put in let's put in cleanzen.com all right and so you should see two scores right here a trust flow and a citation flow trust flow is how trustworthy your site is in google size now first of all that score a score between 10 to 49 is considered average so this is average 49 and up is considered very good okay now another thing we're looking at is the ratio of trust faults citation flow now what a citation flow is how much volume of backlinks and mentions you're getting how much volume are you getting so the trust flow in the citation flow this should be a good ratio right the amount of trust you're getting should be pretty good compared to how much links you're getting if this is very high like if your link volume is very high but your trust flow is very low compared to it it just means you're getting so many people linking out to you but a lot of those sites are not that trustworthy you know they're not quality so the general recommendation is your trust flow should be or at least you know no more than two times this number so we have 14 let's multiply by two and we have 28 which is actually right on the dot so this is the the highest that we can accept you know but if it's slower it's fine as well right if this was 20 that's 14 even better but if this was 40 and it's still 14 very bad so things we're looking forward to see how trustworthy it is another thing we'll look at this is only for your local business if it does not apply to you if you're an e-commerce store or something else only for local businesses google does care about something called directories and so we do a citation audit which just means a directory audit and it's very important that the name address and phone number and the url that are listed in these directories are all consistent like if you're if your address is different on every different directory or you're saying it differently or you're not mentioning your your url in certain directories then google doesn't like that google wants to make sure you are consistent throughout everywhere and every directory you're listed on so you want to make sure you fix that so we do a citation on it those there are some tools that you could do although i don't i mean it's not the best tool but why sparks is a good tool to try to go ahead and do that we use a different tool but this works as well so that's that for the off-page so we've looked at the technical audit of the you know the site we looked at the off page presence of the site now we're going to look at analytics for analytics there's so much things we could do but we are just going to cover the basics one of the first things that i like to look at is we want to look at the bounce rate i'm gonna use a different site just to make this a little bit easier right so for example this is just a a website that was just made not getting that much traffic but you can see they have a hundred percent bounce rate but we would we want to look let's say the last 90 days okay that's not normal it's not measuring right so there's a 76 bounce rate that's bad you when you're looking at your site you want to set it within the last three months or so just to get an idea but the bounce rate should be lower than 70 percent meaning people that are landing on your site and quickly jumping off right without meaning they just land on one page and they don't really do much they don't interact with your other pages and they just leave that's not good google does not like that so you want to make sure that when somebody lands on your site they need to go ahead and you need to make it engaging enough where they're going from one side to the other so if i land on this home page i just read and then i backspace and go somewhere else i just bounced off versus going to a different page and reading more so again we want to make sure that's under 70 then the next thing we want to look at is is there any weird irregularities with the traffic so we go to accusations go to all traffic and we want to see where these traffics are coming from right that they're getting but this let me actually use a different one the last website i was using so all traffic channels we'll just do for this purpose of this video we'll look at the last three months okay so acquisition all traffic channels that's what you do on your analytics and you're seeing what percentage of this is coming from organic search what percent of this traffic is coming from direct so a lot of their their traffic's coming from seo nowadays ever since we've taken over but back in the day there was something weird right so you're looking for is there a couple months back they were getting so much traffic directly where this was an insane amount like they were getting like 5 000 direct traffic meaning people were quote unquote typing in their url directly into the browser that's what a direct means that's and but yet they were very small companies so it made zero sense you know they were not like walmart or amazon to get that kind of traffic so that's an irregularity and we were able to discover was actually all bought traffic spammy bought traffic which seems to have been resolved these are the things you're looking for and then you're looking at you go to audience and then you want to see what location or what country your traffic's coming from like if you're in the usa but the majority of your traffic is coming from india something's wrong right a little bit from every different country is fine that's normal what's not normal is if you see like 2 000 right here traffic from india but we're in the united states targeting u.s it would make no sense we would need to investigate that further so that's an analytics audit so you go into your search console i'm assuming you've set up your search console properly and look into the coverage to see if there's any errors no right sign map will let you know some of these extra errors that might be on your site is there a site map that's been submitted currently no because it's a new site we're uh working on but if you don't have your sitemap submitted you should definitely submit it so google can pick it up technically google can pick it up without the sitemap but it's again it's a good recommendation to enter your slime map here and submit it to the search engine right so google can index all your pages faster then you're looking at your core web files is there any now again it's a new site so there's no data mobile usability is there any mobile errors i like to look at the manual action has it google taken manual action against you have they penalized your site for uh black hat tactics always check that by doing these four these things you have officially audit your entire site okay so that's the main key takeaway audit the actual website then the off page profiles right we're just looking at the main things right now and then we're checking to make sure if there's any weird irregularities inside of your analytics and search console and now we have a site that we can work off of that's basically it if you did like this video definitely please like comment subscribe please do subscribe if you do like these and please do give it a like because it lets me know to keep making more of these in-depth tutorial if you do find them helpful so both those things let me know if you're enjoying this content other than that if you want to see how a page is actually optimized because this video is on audits if you want to see how a page is optimized you can check out the how to optimize a page video that's going to be in the description i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Abel Fekadu

Views: 12,926

Keywords: seo audit, seo audit 2021, seo audit tutorial, seo audit tutorial 2021, how to do an seo audit, seo audit checklist, seo audit guide, seo audit template, seo audit service, seo audit for beg, technical seo, technical seo audit, technical seo for beginners, audit a website, seo audit tool, audit my website, how to audit a website, website audit, seo, seo 2021

Id: FzOIh4Ddo8I

Length: 25min 0sec (1500 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 07 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/invisibledomination]

Hey guys, I know SEO is something everyone wants and needs (although spammy marketers have ruined its name).
So I'm working on building a series of videos for DIY so you never have to rely on these agencies to get higher ranking for your local business site.(which I know the struggle as a former cleaning business owner when I was new)

In this video I covered the very FIRST STEP of every proper SEO process which is to audit the site and diagnose the seo errors that are present & need to be fixed BEFORE doing anything else

Let me know if you guys like it!

Shoot me a comment on the video and/or here & I'll do my best to answer all the questions.

If you like it please also do like & subscribe on the channel as that helps (since I'm just starting out & every support helps)

Thanks guys :)