The 1 hour Technical SEO Audit for EvanCarmichael.com. A while back I wrote a post about finding your site’s biggest technical (SEO) flaws in 60 minutes, and I had Evan contact me about doing a similar type of audit for this website. Evan you’re a brave man, and I promise to be as ruthless as possible ;) The point of this post (audit) is to show you what a professional SEO can do for you in less than an hour to help you improve your site.
Since I’ve only given myself 60 minutes to complete this, I’ll likely miss out on some things but I’m going to concentrate on big issues such as: Algorithm readiness – specifically Panda related issues (duplicate content, freshness, page layout)Crawlability / Architecture & On page issues (markup, keyword targeting, JS etc..)Identifying opportunities for Evan (new markets, keywords to target) Here are the tools I’m going to use to rip through this: Without analytics data, I need Searchmetrics to give me a picture the site’s status (search visibility, problems, keywords ranking). Potential Panda threats. Anatomy of a Hands-on SEO Audit – Part 3. A lot of companies offer SEO Audits, however all audits are not even close to being in the same league.
I’ve seen audits that consist of a single page of bullet point “findings”, to 50 page cut-and-paste templates that offer little to no specifics when it comes to the site they’re supposedly created for. Personally, I believe a true SEO audit is much more than either of these, without having to be so long that they’d qualify for the New York Times’ bestseller list. In Anatomy of an SEO Audit series part 1, I discussed the overall way in which I go about the audit process, and delved a good deal into the mindset aspects of audit writing.
In part 2 of this series, I started discussing the components of an audit a bit more. Now what I explain here is not necessarily exactly going to fit in every situation. Write To Your Audience A quality audit needs to be written in a way that is tailored to your unique audience. Your Own Team Writing to Multiple Audiences Splitting Things Up Be Honest Don’t. Anatomy of a Hands-on SEO Audit – Part 2. With SMX West this week, I was going to hold off on the 2nd part of my hands-on SEO Audit series. Then I remembered that heck – I’m not going to be there so I bet enough other people in our industry won’t either that it will be a great way to give all the non-attendees a leg-up on the competition, as they all run around the conference hoping to grab actionable information. :-) If you haven’t read part 1 in this series, I encourage you to go read that first since it sets the foundation for what follows here.
Go ahead – I’ll wait. Okay did you actually think I was going to wait for you to read that before I continued writing? Also while you’re at it, another other great resource I highly recommend when it comes time to writing up an SEO audit is Glen Gabe’s “SEO Techinical Audits“. Don’t Give Away The Farm In this part of the series, I’d like to focus more on some of the things that should and shouldn’t go into an SEO audit.
A site Audit isn’t supposed to be an advanced course in SEO. Anatomy of a Hands-on SEO Site Audit – Part 1. Welcome to part one in a series of articles on the anatomy of a hands-on SEO site audit! This was originally just going to be one article. But then my book-length article nature came up squarely against the awareness that true site audits can be extremely complex. And as much as everyone just loves those cute little 9 steps to blah-de-blah, we all know already that such articles are rare for me to write anyhow. And this particular topic is one that I think comes to the top of the list as far as importance in our industry.
Fifteen College Credits This series of articles isn’t going to be a comprehensive how-to covering every single aspect of the process, since that could easily take up an entire fully matriculated college semester. So once again, I invite you to go get a large cup of your favorite caffeinated beverage, kick back, and enjoy! The Value of Hands On Audits Everyone goes about the process of an SEO site audit differently. You may disagree with me on that concept. How To Do An SEO Audit. The first step in any new SEO relationship is to conduct an audit. Imagine the poor client who has changed SEO providers several times. If the providers were all on their toes, they each conducted audits. Some businesses may dread the SEO audit process because, if done properly, it will be thorough and exhaustive. In fact, whether a company changes SEO providers or not, it’s a good idea to conduct a thorough SEO audit at least once a year, especially if the business is drawing significant revenue from search traffic.
The SEO audit should produce a snapshot of the state of health of a Website (and the publisher’s SEO practices) at the time of the audit. The audit may identify problems but the problems should not be fixed during the audit (because the fixes change the sate of the Website’s health). Why defer making changes until after an SEO audit?
What follows are some high-level suggestions for how to do an SEO audit. Step 1 of How To Do An SEO Audit: Define the Statement of Purpose.