SEO Audits: No Pain, No GainPresentation 10/22 PubCon Vegas

Prepared by: Selena Narayanasamy

Me!

Foundation Digital

Technical and off-site audits for clients of all sizes, in both highly

competitive/niche industries and large e-commerce sites.

Strategy creation, ranging from content marketing/strategy/execution,

outreach strategy/execution, website restructuring or migration.

Preparation

It All Starts with Onboarding Correctly

Create an organized onboarding process•What do they think is the issue?•Have they worked with agencies in the past?•Are you going to be undoing the mess of multiple hands?•Is your POC trying to get support from you?•What are their push cycles for development work?•Get access to analytics, WMT, and any other accounts

Preparation

Have a preset checklist of initial areas you look at prior to starting

•Pull at least 1 years worth of organic data from analytics

•% of branded phrases vs. non-branded phrases- These become your initial

buckets to look at.

•Do a quick review for potential over-optimization issues: Will this require

cleanup work? If so, gather all relevant data before starting.

•DO an initial crawl (Screaming Frog) for canonical/redirect issues, duplicate

content, internal linking issues, etc.

Preparation

Identify true problems. Ability to differentiate is highly important

Prioritize impact vs. capabilities

•What needs to be done in order to have an impact vs. what can their team actually implement.

•Create strong written documentations (get all OCD about it)

Preparation

Set yourself up for success: Qs and As

“I lost rankings for x keywords”

Start with analytics, backlinks, phrases both on-site and off-site

“I can’t get these interior pages to rank or drive traffic”

You: Look at overall crawlability of the site, structure, link support, keyword targeting, optimization of pages

Audit Mistakes

• Do not rely on one source: Make sure you’re using multiple tools to identify trends

• Do not make decisions from only one resource: Conclusions should be drawn after reviewing analytics, backlinks, site structure, etc.

• Do not take tool data literally.• Letting the client’s or team’s perceived issue skew your critical thinking

and problem solving.• On-site issues can cause more problems than off-site issues. Don’t

neglect site structure.

Tools

SEO Tools Make the World Go Round

Just don’t let the tool make decisions for you. Use critical thinking

•Screaming Frog- Overall structure, meta data, duplicate content (hash), sitemap crawling, internal linking structure•Majestic SEO- Backlink review, new links, deleted links, advanced report for more granular review•Open Site Explorer•SEMrush- Mainly ranking & ad related data•NerdyData- Great Post from Aleyda Solis [find sites with badges, sites mentioning competitors, sites with the same UA]•Google/Bing Webmaster Tools•GTMetrix: Site load time, timeline waterfall, optimization suggestions•Alchemy API- Semantic/Natural language

Tools

SEO Tools Make the World Go Round

Just don’t let the tool make decisions for you. Use critical thinking

Ahrefs: another tool for link audits/site explorer

Link Research Tools: Great for penalty cases. Helps identify batches of poor links, but still needs the human eye to determine whether they should be removed/disavowed

Raven Tools: All inclusive suite for content, link/outreach tracking, rankings, site crawling, etc.

Authority Labs: Great for rank tracking/charting/monitoring

ArchitectureScreaming Frog

Strong architecture can make the difference between a website that performs strongly with little off-site work vs. performing OK with strong off-site work.

•How are they segmenting data? Transactional vs. informational•Is there logical nesting? Are the main and sub directories related to each other?•What are they/aren’t they disallowing? [Robots.txt]•Are they internally linking related pages and topics?•How many pages are indexed? (WMT or site:)•Are they using parameters for tagging? Are these pages being indexed? •If they are, is Google ignoring canonicalization? •Is there pagination without rel=“prev” & rel=“next”

Architecture

Redirect Issues [Screaming Frog]

•Can cause incorrect/unwanted indexing•Can create a roadblock when trying to properly spread equity•# of 301/302/404s- WMT & Screaming Frog

Architecture

URL Backlinks Response Code Destination

http://clientdomain.com 1,961 302 temporary https://www.clientdomain.com/

301 permanent https://www.clientdomain.com/clientdomain

302 temporary https://www.clientdomain.com/clientdomain/errornot-found?aspxerrorpath=/clientdomain404 error

http://www.clientdomain.com 1,753 302 temporary https://www.clientdomain.com/

301 permanent https://www.clientdomain.com/clientdomain

302 temporary https://www.clientdomain.com/clientdomain/errornot-found?aspxerrorpath=/clientdomain404 error

https://www.clientdomain.com 63 301 permanent https://www.clientdomain.com/clientdomain

302 temporary https://www.clientdomain.com/clientdomain/errornot-found?aspxerrorpath=/clientdomain404 error

http://www.clientdomain.com/clientdomain 1 302 temporary https://www.clientdomain.com/clientdomain

302 temporary https://www.clientdomain.com/clientdomain/errornot-found?aspxerrorpath=/clientdomain

404 error

Architecture

Ideal ScenarioResponse

Code Backlinks Destinationhttp://clientdomain.com 200 1,961 -http://www.clientdomain.com 301 1,753 http://clientdomain.comhttps://www.clientdomain.com 301 63 http://clientdomain.comhttps://www.clientdomain.com/clientdomain 301 445 http://clientdomain.comhttp://www.clientdomain.com/clientdomain 301 1 http://clientdomain.com

Content Performance

CPR (content performance ratio)

CPR = # Pages Receiving Organic Traffic / # of Indexed Pages (site:)

Website with 1,000,000 pages indexed & 25,000 receiving organic traffic = 2.5% CPR

Just because a website has a lot of indexed pages does not mean it’s going to perform better.

Large volumes of pages that are indexed yet receiving low amounts of engagement signals (links, organic traffic, commenting) can send negative signals

•Ecommerce Websites Can be painstaking to clean up.•UGC Websites (Blogs, videos)

Backlink Audits

Percentages, percentages, percentages!Anchor text percentages: Look at this in relation to your competitors. Double digits can cause issues.

If you see high percentages:•Is there brute force linking?•Links per domain- Are referring domains near the volume of backlinks?•Sitewide links? Blog rolls, sidebar links, footer links.•Are these percentages exact match & higher than branded?

Industry thresholds? The more volatile, the higher the threshold.

•Payday loan industry•Flight industry•Adult industry•Pharma Industry•Gambling Industry

Short term tactics, not sustainable for the long term.

Content PerformanceHow do I do this?

Review organic analytics data from the past 6 months to a year.

If large, use unsampled data.

Review only landing pages that are receiving organic traffic

Compute that number into the content performance ratio

Audit the remaining content!

•Aggregate organic, KWD Volume and social data for remaining pages•Separate buckets for types of content that are performing that can be spruced up or updated•Create specific recommendations for culling content that have minimal link/social support with no organic traffic

Content Performance

SourceUrl KW VOL Status Total Social RefDomains EXTBacklinks Citation Flow Trust FlowThird Party Site 0 Found 1,380 84 668 38 25Third Party Site 0 Found 941 84 668 38 25Third Party Site 0 Found 423 54 86 37 33Client Site 0 Found 54 38 45 19 10Third Party Site 0 Found 7 29 209 16 16Client Site 730 Found 1,673 25 91 27 14Client Site 56,678 Found 288 20 81 35 23Third Party Site 0 Found 161 18 43 12 7Client Site 661 Found 84 15 24 19 11Client Site 19 Found 584 14 103 22 14Client Site 0 Found 142 14 33 25 14Client Site 3,262 Found 6,699 12 64 25 14Client Site 492 Found 1,463 12 28 24 15Third Party Site 39 Found 341 11 54 20 3Client Site 12 Found 0 11 64 26 21

Deep Link Ratio

Percentage of links to the internal pages. Double digits preferred.

DLR = # of internal links / # of links to the site

Old school link building typically targeted the homepage

What’s the website’s internal link support in comparison to competitors?

What types of pages are being linked to? Informational? Transactional?

Backlink Audits

High percentages

High percentages with low volume of referring domains

Backlink Audits

Track the drop off of referring domains• Indicator of feed links• Indicator of non-static links• Only momentary value

Penalty Assessment

SEMrush, Google Analytics & Webmaster Tools

• Over optimization of internal links?• Over optimization with exact match keywords• Thin or duplicate content? [copyscape, “sentences”,

syndication]• Major technical or website structure changes?• Was it a page level drop?• SEMRush is great for identifying drop trends

Enter domain >> charts >> search traffic

Competitive & Brand IntelOutreach/Link Building [Links still matter!!]

Tools: Majestic SEO, Link Research Tools, Open Site Explorer

Where are the links being obtained from?Are they quality over quantity?Average citation and trust flow scores of the backlinks? [Majestic]Average page & domain authority of backlinks [Open Site Explorer]

What kinds of content are being created for link generation?•Infographics•Microsites with pre/post campaigns•Guest blogging: Is it done properly and mutually beneficial•Working directly with publishers: Who do they have relationships with?•Sponsorships?•Partnerships?•Events IRL?

Competitive Research

Pull logical conclusions from the raw data

•WHO: Who are their true organic competitors?•WHAT: What are their tactics? Outreach? Sponsorships? Content Marketing? What are their core issues?•WHERE: Where are they obtaining links? Publications? Governmental sites? Educational institutions? New website? •WHEN: Are they seasonal? When do they start pushing their seasonal content?•WHY: What’s their motive? Are they looking for sharing? Links? Coverage for their brand?

Keywords

• Keyword Cannibalization:

Targeting the same keywords for

multiple pages

• Are there pages to capture longer

tail traffic?

• Are there related phrases being

targeted?

What percentage of volume does

each topic/category/bucket

have?

• Break out subdomains or directories

• Pull overall volume from SEMrush

So What Now?

Auditing = Focus, Organization & Critical Thinking

Find the Issue & Create a Strong Roadmap for Implementation

DON’T FALL DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE.

Thanks!

@selenavidya

selena@foundationdigital.comgplus.to/selenavidya