Doing an awesome site audit

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Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson DOING AN AWESOME SITE AUDIT

Transcript of Doing an awesome site audit

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Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

DOING AN

AWESOMESITE AUDIT

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Closet web developer & Wordpress fanatic

Jono AldersonHead of Insight @ Linkdex

@jonoalderson

Technical SEO, analytics & CRO geek, agency guy

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Technical SEO is

hugely important

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...but everybody’s website is really shit

has room for improvement...

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You’re hemorrhaging ROI.

Your content marketing is running at 20% efficiency.

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damaged

stuck

back-to-front

ugly

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Let’s do a site audit.

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The ‘Site Audit’ is a process for periodical identification and

strategic prioritisation of issues.

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Most SEO audits suck[!]

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audit graveyard

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Nobody wants an audit.[!]

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People don’t know what they want, or how to

communicate it.But a site audit’s a thing, right?

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Your responsibility as a consultant is to interpret, and to deliver success.

Or is it?

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You decide.(But if you’re responsible for results, you

need to effect change, effectively)

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So.How do you stop your audit landing

in the graveyard?

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The problem, and the process

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Fixing things is often big and complex

(politically, psychologically and technically)

Super-difficult Easy

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To effect change, you need to anticipate objections and to

avoid the spiral of doom.

Spiral of doom Audit graveyard

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You have multiple audiences with different

needs and different super-powers

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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”

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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

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Tech & LegalMaintain status quo

What’s the business case for this?

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Tech & LegalMaintain status quo

What’s the priority of each item?

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Why should we do this, if our competitors aren’t?C-level

Be in control

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Tech say that this will be really expensive

FinanceMinimise cost

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Third parties & other SEOs

Defend themselvesWe’re not KPI’d on this.

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How do I justify dropping other priorities to focus on this?C-level

Be in control

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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

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You will need...

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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.

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1)Long-form editorial

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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

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Long-form editorial

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Long-form editorial

There’s no such thing as too much detail (12,000 words).

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2) Cheat sheet

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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

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3) Itemised issues

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Itemised issues

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4) Storyboard

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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.

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5) Quick wins

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Quick wins

Use the ‘Cheat Sheet’ format

Focus exclusively on simple, binary issue

Pick on symptoms(!) if you need to

Use to overcome objections

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audit graveyard

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{{ DEEP BREATH }}

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The audit itself...Brief tips

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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

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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

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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?

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(!)

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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?

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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.

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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!

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Jono AldersonHead of Insight @ Linkdex

@jonoalderson

Thanks!