Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

DOING AN AWESOME SITE AUDIT

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

Closet web developer & Wordpress fanatic

Jono AldersonHead of Insight @ Linkdex

@jonoalderson

Technical SEO + analytics geek

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

Technical SEO is

hugely important

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

...yet consistently terrible

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

Fixing things is often big and complex

(technically and politically)

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

The ‘Site Audit’ is a process for identification and prioritisation of issues

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

Most SEO audits suck

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

audit graveyard

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

Nobody wants an audit.

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

Your responsibility is to make things happen

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

The Process

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

Anticipate objections

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

Think about who you’re talking to

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

Consider that you have multiple audiences with

different needs

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

Know your audience

● C-Level

● Management*

● Marketing

● Tech

● Finance

● Legal

● Third parties

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

Know your audience

● If any one of these groups has any objections, you enter the spiral of doom

● People will anticipate other people’s objections (good neighbor syndrome) and/or find reasons to defer

● 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

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...

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

You will need...

● Exhaustive keyword & market research

● Performance and/or commercial data

● To challenge conventional thinking on what an audit looks like, and how long it takes*

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

Long-form editorial

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

● Demonstrate capability

● Identify and outline issues

● Manage the politics

● Differentiate between commercial impact and commercial opportunity

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

Long-form editorial

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

Cheat sheet

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

● Overview of issue● Summary● Impact (with metrics)● Absolute priority score● Date completed & impact● Other areas (of organisational

or resource) impact

● 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

Business World Tech World

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

Itemised issues

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

Itemised issues

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

Storyboard

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

Storyboard

Name of issue

What is this: Lorem ipsum dolar sum

So what: Lorem ipsum dolar sum

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

Quick wins

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

Quick wins

● Use the ‘Cheat Sheet’ format

● Focus exclusively on simple, binary issues

● Pick on symptoms if you need to

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

audit graveyard

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

The audit(!)Brief tips

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

Move slowly!

cook it slowly

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).

○ 1,000 hours of work on a broken blog subdomain, or 10 hours of work on an ecommerce template?

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

The audit

● 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

● Start with Google before you break out the tools

○ site: searches

○ inurl: (or -inurl:)

○ filetype: (xml, html, swf)

○ (URL Profiler does some cool duplication stuff)

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

Eyeball for patterns v.s. issues● Discerning 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?

● Separating opportunity from issue, and fact from opinion

● Collect and sort issues as you go; iterate the documentation

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

Break out the tools

● Use these to validate, quantify, and to strip back layers of the onion

● 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

(!)

Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

Jono AldersonHead of Insight @ Linkdex

@jonoalderson