Post on 15-Jul-2015
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
DOING AN
AWESOMESITE AUDIT
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Closet web developer & Wordpress fanatic
Jono AldersonHead of Insight @ Linkdex
@jonoalderson
Technical SEO, analytics & CRO geek, agency guy
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Technical SEO is
hugely important
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
...but everybody’s website is really shit
has room for improvement...
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
You’re hemorrhaging ROI.
Your content marketing is running at 20% efficiency.
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
damaged
stuck
back-to-front
ugly
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
The ‘Site Audit’ is a process for periodical identification and
strategic prioritisation of issues.
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Nobody wants an audit.[!]
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
People don’t know what they want, or how to
communicate it.But a site audit’s a thing, right?
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Your responsibility as a consultant is to interpret, and to deliver success.
Or is it?
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
You decide.(But if you’re responsible for results, you
need to effect change, effectively)
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
So.How do you stop your audit landing
in the graveyard?
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
The problem, and the process
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Fixing things is often big and complex
(politically, psychologically and technically)
Super-difficult Easy
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
To effect change, you need to anticipate objections and to
avoid the spiral of doom.
Spiral of doom Audit graveyard
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
You have multiple audiences with different
needs and different super-powers
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
C-levelBe in control
“one direction”
MarketingMinimise risk“changing priorities”
FinanceMinimise cost
“speculate to accumulate”Third parties & other SEOs
Defend themselves“Challenge the status quo”
Tech & LegalMaintain status quo
“power of veto”
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Know your audience
If any one of these groups has any objections, you enter the spiral of doom
Success depends upon perfect, unquestioned, immediate consensus
"We’ll just need to run it past..." sounds like progress, but it’s is the spiral of doom
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Tech & LegalMaintain status quo
What’s the business case for this?
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Tech & LegalMaintain status quo
What’s the priority of each item?
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Why should we do this, if our competitors aren’t?C-level
Be in control
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Tech say that this will be really expensive
FinanceMinimise cost
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Third parties & other SEOs
Defend themselvesWe’re not KPI’d on this.
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
How do I justify dropping other priorities to focus on this?C-level
Be in control
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Know your audience
You need multiple flavours of deliverables to tackle this
1) Some quick wins*
2) A long-form, editorial audit
3) A spreadsheet of itemised, prioritised issues
4) Cheat sheets for each individual issue
5) A storyboard style presentation
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
You will need...
● Exhaustive keyword & market research (actual consumer insight)
● Performance and/or commercial data (or compelling estimates/models)
● To be prepared to challenge conventional thinking on what an audit looks like, and how long it takes
If it’s taken less than a week, you’ve rushed it.
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Long-form editorial
Required to get senior buy-in and backup to overrule other objections.
Compellingly model commercial impact/opportunity
Communicate using their language
Instill fear and/or greed (watch out for impact vs opportunity!)
Demonstrate capability
… and finally, identify and outline issues
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Long-form editorial
There’s no such thing as too much detail (12,000 words).
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Summarise the issue.
Two A4 sheets, size 10 font. No more, no less. 20 minutes per sheet. Standardisation is important.
Cheat sheet
Summary of issue
Impact (with metrics*)
Absolute priority score
Date completed & impact
Other areas (of organisational or resource) impact
Competitor context
Business World
User story
Brief for fix*
Benefits from fixing (with affected metrics)
Implications of not fixing (as above)
Possible risks
On-going maintenance or process reqs
Tech World
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Storyboard
Large numbers of 404’ing product pages
What is this: People who search for our products in Google click a link to our site, and get a 404 ‘not found’ page.
So what: Poor user experience, high bounce rates, missed sales opportunities. Need to change the way that ‘out of stock’ behaviour works.
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Quick wins
Use the ‘Cheat Sheet’ format
Focus exclusively on simple, binary issue
Pick on symptoms(!) if you need to
Use to overcome objections
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
The audit itself...Brief tips
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
The auditChallenge the brief. It’s never good. Domains vs sites, geo considerations, different levels of
commercial intent, etc
Familiarise yourself with the ecosystem
Collect and group group issues as you go, but don’t start writing yet
Start with Google before you break out the toolssite: searchesinurl: (or -inurl:)filetype: (xml, html, swf)
If you can’t say that you’re confident that you’ve found, quantified and understand the whole ecosystem, then you’re inviting objections
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
site:amazon.com filetype:xml -inurl:sitemap -site:askville.amazon.com -site:docs.aws.amazon.com
Typically, the first cut focuses almost exclusively on indexation and/or
error control.
Until this is (at least partially) tackled, it’s hard to diagnose anything else.
Manage people’s expectations around this. You may wish to make this ‘pre-
project’.
Indexation Ctrl
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
The audit
Focus on the cause, not the symptom.
Don’t focus on missing tags, broken redirects, etc. Find the why.
Group things by the why, and use the symptoms for reference + justification
Separate isolated/misc issue into line items in your line-items doc
Chase the money (and time is money, too).
100 hours of work on a broken forum, or 1 hour of work on an ecommerce template?
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Eyeball for patterns v.s. issues● Discern the root cause
● Template level? Where is the problem?
● Page/URL level? What type of thing is it?
● Front end or back end (or other)?What kind of skill set is needed?
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Enrich understanding with other tools & processes
Use these to validate, quantify, and to strip back layers of the onion - NOT just to report on #404s, etc.
Don’t be afraid to go broad; include user testing, heat-mapping, crawls - reinforce the points you’re already making
New/extra issues can expand on existing ones, or be woven into the story
Piggyback on other people’s learnings and processes, e.g., the Moz 2015 checklist.
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Break out the processes, too.
There’s no point fixing things if they’re just going to re-occur.
Use your buy-in and lack of objections to push for process change.
Technical SEO is easy!
Start here: http://www.jonoalderson.com/resources/the-ultimate-website-development-template-behaviour-brief/
Avoid “SEO Friendly like the plague”
Tweet me @jonoalderson!
Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Jono AldersonHead of Insight @ Linkdex
@jonoalderson
Thanks!