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From SEO Theory To Business Success

Turning SEO Audits in to Real-World Profit

Barry Adams

Polemic Digital

13 November

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Barry Adams

➢ Doing SEO since 1998

➢ Founder of Polemic Digital

➢ Co-Chief at State of Digital

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What is an SEO Audit?

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Start of an Improvement Process

Analysis of a website using applied SEO theory to initiate

a process towards improved organic search visibility.

SEO Audit

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https://jamesclear.com/marginal-gains

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SEO Audit Model

1. Technology 2. Relevancy 3. Authority

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Web Search Engines

Three distinct processes:

1. Crawler 2. Indexer 3. Query Engine

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Web Crawler (Googlebot)

• Spiders the web;

➢ Starts with list of pages from previous crawls and XML sitemaps

• Extracts hyperlinks and adds to crawl queue

• Retrieves new and changed content

• Access can be restricted with robots.txt

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Elements of the Crawler

• Crawl ‘Politeness’;

➢ How fast can we crawl a site?

• URL Importance;

➢ How often do we need to recrawl a URL?

• HTML Parser;

➢ Can we find links in the crawled URL?

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Crawler: HTML Parser

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Indexer (Caffeine)

• Analyses content

• Analyses links

• Analyses webpage layout

• Can be influenced with meta tags

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Elements of the Indexer

• Web Rendering Service;

➢ Renders webpages as a browser would (Chrome 41)

• PageRanker;

➢ Calculates a URL’s PageRank

• Canonicalisation;

➢ Determines the canonical URL

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PageRanker

• Calculates each canonical page’s PageRank;

➢ Links, links, links

➢ Internal and external links both count

➢ PageRank Damping factor

• Feeds back to the crawler;

➢ High PR = high crawl priority

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Web Rendering Service

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/rendering

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Web Rendering Service

• Chrome 41 is the rendering engine

• Stateless;

➢ No cookies are saved

➢ Local & Session Storage is cleared

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Query Engine

• Tries to understand the intent of the search;

➢Context

➢ Synonyms

➢Entities

• Retrieves relevant pages from the index

• Ranks pages based on;

➢Content relevance

➢Authority signals

➢Freshness

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SEO Audit Model

Crawler Indexer Query Engine

Technical SEO On-Page SEO Off-Page SEO

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C-Suite

Developers / IT Marketing

SEO and Corporate Roles

Technical SEO On-Page SEO Off-Page SEO

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Writing Audit Reports

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https://www.annielytics.com/comprehensive-self-guided-site-audit-checklist/

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Only Include What Needs

The checklist should be provided as an attachment

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Omit The Trivial Stuff

.

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Concise and Light on Jargon

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it yourself

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Three Main Audiences

1. C-Suite 2. Marketers 3. Tech

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C-Suite

• Summary of key points;

➢ No jargon

• Don’t Apportion Blame;

➢ You need to keep marketing & tech on side

• Show Them The Money;

➢ Estimate the positive impact of your recommendations

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Marketing

• Your Job = Make Marketing Look Good

• SEO is a process;➢ Not a one-off activity

• Competitors aren’t doing everything right either;➢ Don’t imitate, innovate

• Give them the tools;➢ Teach a man how to fish…

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Tech

• Speak Their Language;➢ Understand their paradigm

• Basic Concepts You Need To Get Across:➢ How search engines work

➢ URLs are sacred

➢ SEO benefits Tech

• Don’t Tell Them How, Tell Them Why;➢Outcome focused – they can find their own path

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Implementation

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Turn Them In To (Novice) SEOs

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Show Them The Rewards

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Persistence

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What I’ve Learned About SEO

From 60+ SEO Audits…

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What is The Maximum

Length of a Title Tag?

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Visual limit: ± 70 characters / 512 pixels

Index limit: ?• https://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/how-many-page-title-characters-does-google-index.html

• https://moz.com/blog/title-tags-is-70-characters-the-best-practice-whiteboard-friday

• https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/title-tags/

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110 Characters

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Title Tag = Headline + Brand

110 – 3

=

107 – (# of Brand Name characters)

=

Max Headline Length in CMS

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How Up To Date are Error Reports

in Google Search Console?

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Search Console Reports

1. Crawler 2. Indexer 3. Query Engine

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Not Very Up-To-Date…

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Are XML Sitemaps for Discovery?

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Web Crawl is Supreme

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XML Sitemaps

• XML Sitemaps supplement web crawls;

➢ They never replace a crawlable site

• URLs in XML sitemap have slightly higher crawl priority;

➢ No guarantee for crawling or indexing

• Priority & Changefreq tags are ignored;

➢ Lastmod tag is taken in to account

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How Many XML Sitemaps Can

You Include in a Sitemap Index?

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However…

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Thank You

Follow me:

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Email me:

barry@polemicdigital.com