How to Do a SEO Website Audit, Step by Step

We cover search engine basics so we can continue our initial technical checks.

How many pages of your web site has Google indexed? We get an answer in this lecture.

Google no longer shows the number of search results as a default after a query is entered. Here's where you can find the information.

The HTTP status code that a web server sends back to your browser is hidden to you, but very important for SEO.

I demo how to check the HTTP status code that requesting a URL returns.

Some of the more common HTTP status codes.

A canonical redirect is when you redirect a site's URLs so they either resolve all as "www" URLs or as "non-www" URLs.

In this video I cover two ways to implement a redirect from one domain to another. And I share why GoDaddy redirects are not my preference.

Examples of Canonical Redirects using mod_rewrite code in .htaccess

A misconfigured robots.txt file can play havoc with your site's SEO.

A look at some robots.txt files, the Sitemap directive, where to find a list of Google crawlers, a resource to help with learning about robots.txt syntax and Merkle's robots.txt Validator and Testing Tool.

Mobile friendliness is a ranking factor and a must have for modern websites. We review the three ways a site can be made mobile friendly.

List of resources mentioned in the previous lecture. 

Responsive Demo. Using Page Speed Insights and Chrome Dev Tools to evaluate a web page's mobile friendliness

Google now penalizes sites that show annoying popovers on mobile devices.

Using Chrome extensions to spoof the User Agent, and about the HTTP Vary header for Dynamic Serving.

Recap of the robots.txt and mobile friendly checks.

• Make sure that robots.txt isn't blocking access to web assets Google should have access to

• Check that the robots.txt file includes a Sitemap directive

• Check for mobile friendly errors and warnings in Page Speed Insights

• Review an example page of each page template for mobile using Chrome Dev Tools, Browser Plugins or BrowserStack

We learn more about search spiders and why we need tools to see the website from a search spider's perspective.

We find broken links and 302 redirects on our example site.

What I recommended for the 302 redirects I found.

How does Google and the other search engines put together the snippets that show in the search engine results pages? We learn about the important metadata on your site for SEO. 

We review the site's page titles (also called title tags). 

Meta descriptions are all about getting the click. This newer video also gives us a peek at Screaming Frog Release 10

We use Screaming Frog to take a look at the H1 and H2 tags of our site.

We look at linkdepth, download time and take a closer look at image optimization.

Screaming Frog's internal tab shows all the fields collected, including fields found on the other tabs, such as page title and canonical link. We take a closer look at this tab to answer questions like "How do I find the pages with a low word count?" or "How do I see the link depth for a URL?" Bonus lecture created to answer some student's questions.

Now, it's your turn. Here's a recap of what to review when you crawl your site with Screaming Frog

Crawlers gather information about a site, but to do a comprehensive audit it's necessary to look at individual pages as a search bot would.

I show how to use a free tool to browse a site like a search spider would

Here's how to check that the site's HTML is valid. Doing this check led me to uncover a problem with the site's OpenGraph tags.

An alternative tool to check your pages tags.

A recap of the results of the checks for this section.

In this section we cover traffic, using Google Analytics to review a site, and how to check the performance of a site. 

Traffic to your website comes from different channels, we cover an explanation of each.

How to use an organic traffic segment and set up a year over year comparison. We also take a look at the top landing pages and engagement metrics. 

Recap of our review of Google Analytics: Traffic, Top Landing Pages, and Engagement Metrics

Google Analytics Universal has been replaced by GA4. Many Universal properties have stopped collecting data and must now use GA4.

In this lecture I will show you have to create a SEO Landing Page report using Custom Reports in Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

To create a custom report in Google Analytics 4, you need Analyst permission. Users with Analyst permission can create, edit, delete, and share personal assets, and collaborate on shared assets like custom reports. They can't edit any settings or manage users.

Site speed is a ranking factor so we need to review the Page Speed Insights section in Google Analytics to see if the site needs to be optimized to be faster.

Unfortunately Site Speed metrics are not available in GA4

Especially when it comes to the new Core Web Metrics, Google Page Speed Insights is a great tool to evaluate speed and page experience metrics for an individual page.

Starting in June 2021, Core Web Vitals will be part of the new Page Experience ranking factor.

We review the Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console and do a quick demo of the Performance tab in Chrome Dev Tools

The Web Vitals Lane in Chrome Dev Tools shows you the timing of the FCP, LCP and the layout shifts (CLS) for the page that is rendering.

Recap of how our site performs.

Site speed is a very technical topic and can be overwhelming! This lecture helps get you started.

In this lecture we cover improving page speed for WordPress sites.

A review of two third party tools that can help evaluate a page's speed.

Google Search Console is Google's SEO communication channel to site owners and has a wealth of information on Google's perspective of your site.

Structured Data is additional markup that helps Google and other search engines understand the context of your site.

An example of testing for Structured Data

We look at the "Enhancements" section of Google Search Console, where we can find feedback about our Structured Data from Google.

In this article I provide a link to a free tool that you can use to generate some common types of JSON-LD Schema.

In the new Google Search Console you can find an URL inspector tool.

Google's new Performance Report delivers similar data as the old Search Analytics report, but with a new User Interface and access to much more data. The Performance Report gives you insight into the keywords your site is ranking for and how your top pages are performing.

You can use the Compare feature in the Google Search Console Performance Report to compare device types, timeframes and more.

We review Additional Google Search Console Reports: External Links & Links to Your Site, Manual Actions, International Targeting and Mobile Usability.

The new Index Coverage Report gives us an expanded look at what Google thinks is good enough to index. 

In this section we can find Google's crawl report and whether a XML sitemap has been submitted.  

Recap of the Google Search Console Review for our site.

You want your best and only unique pages to be in the Google index. We have three tags: rel canonical, meta robots noindex and rel prev/rel next that help us control what gets indexed of our site.

The rel canonical tag helps manage duplicate content.

The meta robots noindex tag tells Google to not index the page. We look at reasons why we might want this and a comparison of the noindex tag with robots.txt.

There are additional rules you can specify in additional to noindex, nofollow on the meta robots tag. Also covers the data-nosnippet tag.

Pagination is important to get right when it comes to your site hierarchy.

Recap of the opportunities we found in our example site to control indexation

New in Screaming Frog release 10, new columns that gives us the indexability status of a page.

An additional two new features in Screaming Frog release 10. 

1) Visualizations - a visual way to see the levels of your site.

2) Link Score - a measure of a page's page rank based on internal linking

More and more sites are using JavaScript to dynamically generate the site's web pages. We talk about what this means for SEO, and how you can check that Google understands the JavaScript on the page.

A deeper dive into JavaScript SEO, common issues, and how Google tools and Screaming Frog can help you diagnose issues.

We take a look at a page that uses the AngularJS framework. We use two Chrome extensions to turn off JavaScript and to also get a technology profile. Then we use the Rich Results Testing Tool to see if Google sees the content on the page.

Let's look beyond the accessibility and on page factors of a site and evaluate its authority and engagement

We define Domain Authority.

We use a browser plugin to check the Domain Authority so that we can do a competitive review for the sites that rank for two completely different queries.

We take a look at the top keywords for the site.

Why backlinks are important for SEO. 

I demo two tools you can use to look at a site's backlinks.

Evaluating Content Quality and User Experience.

We check for freshness of content, and whether the content has been scraped (and find something surprising)

Another way to check for scraping and plagiarism

Social Media is an amplification channel that can supercharge marketing and SEO campaigns. Learn the 3 things I check when reviewing the social media presence of a site.

Recap of the results of our Authority Checks

Local SEO is SEO plus some special considerations. If your site targets a local audience, here's the additional checks you need to do.

Considerations for a SEO audit of a WordPress site

We cover the 5 elements you need to optimize on a page, plus additional factors you need to consider in today's SEO landscape when optimizing your page for SEO.

Google makes hundreds of changes to its algorithms every year, most are small changes and not noticeable.  But there are a couple of Google updates per year that ARE noticeable and can change your site's SEO performance.

The question is, how do you keep abreast of Google updates and other changes in the SEO landscape?

Aside from a color change, the basic functionality of Screaming Frog didn't change much between release 7 and release 8. However release 8 does have some cool new features that we explore in this video.

AI has the potential to seriously disrupt the search industry. You can use it to write code, generate title tags and content.

Thank you for taking this course! In case you didn't download them earlier, I've attached all the resources for the course to this lecture.