technical seo: how to perform an seo audit (step by step guide)

Digital Marketing Services that drive revenue.

Webris | [email protected] | Ryan Stewart | http://webris.org

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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SITEPROFILE

CRAWLABILITY

HTML STATUSCODES

INDEXABILITY

ON PAGE CONTENT

SECURITY AUDIT

OFF PAGEAUDIT

MOBILE AUDIT

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

GLOSSARY OFTOOLS

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22

11

16


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SITE PROFILE

The first step in any auditing process is to know the monster you

are dealing with. Are we talking about a website that was set up

only last week, and is so still a virgin in terms of content optimiza-

tion and backlinks? Or are we talking about a website that is many

years old and has been worked on by many optimizers in the past?

While the latter helps you build a great SEO audit report, the pos-

sible work in SEO could be humongous too; especially if it in-

volves removing badlinks.

Anyway, you will first want to know how old the website is, how

big it is, in terms of the number of indexed (and unindexed)

pages, the level of authority the website has, etc.

My favorite tool in this regard is a Google Chrome

extension called Open SEO stats.

It gives you a generic idea about all the SEO aspects of any given

website – like the age of the domain name, the number of in-

dexed pages on Google, the number of backlinks, the traffic trend

on third party services like Alexa and Compete, social media pres-

ence, page loading speed, web host location, etc. I like it because

you get a complete picture of everything about the website in just

a couple ofclicks.

Build A Site Profile

The first step in any S E O assignment is performing an audit of the client’s website to identify the problem areas, areas of op-

portunity and a general sense of where you are and where you need to go. In other words, an S E O audit helps you chart the road

map for the work ahead. This is true irrespective of whether this is an inbound S E O prospect, or someone you identified as a lead

and have reached out to. This is a comprehensive guidebook on what S E O auditing involves and how you should go about it. I have

also included dozens of free and paid online tools available for you to perform this auditing more efficiently. So let’s get started.



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CRAWL ABILITY AUDIT

The first thing to look at is what the robots.txt file say. For those

new to the game, this is a text file that contains information on

what kind of bots can access your several web pages. So for ex-

ample, if you have an admin panel on your website for internal

purposes that you do not want the Googlebot to access, you

could set this condition in the robots.txt file.

You could access this file by simply typing yourwebsitename.com/

robots.txt on the browser address bar. Sometimes though, what

appears okay on the robots.txt file could have unintended conse-

quences. Alternately, some robot accessibility restrictions may be

set at a page level in what are known as robots meta tags. To en-

sure you have only restricted access for pages you intended to, it

is a good idea to instead view the robot access information from

a tool like Screaming Frog SEO spider.

This is a free software that will instantly crawl through your entire

website and pull out all the HTML elements of your page. You may

however require a license if you work with large websites that have

more than 500pages.

Anyway, with this tool, you can get instant information on the

robot accessibility settings from all the pages on your website.

Use this tool to see what pages have robots set to ‘noindex’ or

‘nofollow’, and if this has been done deliberately to prevent

Google from crawling the page or if this was a mistake.

1. Robots.txt

So now you have a mental picture of the website you are dealing with, we can start with the first real step of the auditing

process which is to test the website’s accessibility features. Here, we mainly check the website settings that dictate who

can access the web page. Also, we check if the website standards are up to date and if web pages work as intended

when we request an access.

HTML STATUS CODES


Besides robots.txt, another factor that could tell you if there any accessibility

issues is the status codes. These are ‘responses’ that are delivered when a

request to access a web page is sent. The most popular one, of course, is

the ‘404 Page not found’ status. Here is a complete list of all the various

possible status codes one could receive from a web page.

You may want to know what the status code for the different

pages of your website is. The Screaming Frog SE O Spider

also gives you information on this. I typically sort the results

from S E O spider on the basis of the Status Code to be able

to see all the pages that are being redirected (301, 302), not

found (404) in one bunch.

200 301 302 304 404 500 503


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INDEXABILITY

So now that you have studied the “crawlability” of your website, the next step is to know if the content is getting indexed

as desired on Google. If you are just starting out on SEO, one thing you should know is that what you see is N O T what

you get. You may have a pretty looking website, but that is not how Google could potentially be seeing your website.

While Google has been getting better at it, it is always a good idea to keep things simple. So here are some things that

you should look at.

Navigability


Is the website letting Google freely navigate through all the

pages? Does the website have an XML sitemap that dynamically

generates a list of all web pages from the website? Has this been

provided to Google through the Webmaster tools? Identify these

and include them in your audit report.

Site Architecture

How is your website organized? Is it one huge mass of a thousand

pages? Or, do you have all the content properly organized into

various folders and sub-folders. There are two components to the

auditing process while looking at site architecture. The first is the

URL architecture. Traditionally, it was considered a good habit to

demonstrate the organizational structure in the URL. For instance,

if you had a directory of various hotels across the country, you

would typically have a structure like website.com/state/city/hotel-

name.html

However, from an SEO perspective, what matters more is how eas-

ily can a user navigate from the homepage to any particular web

page they want to. Evaluate how the content is organized, and

how the various folders and sub-folders in the website are organ-

ized and inter-linked. Also, make a note of whether the URL struc-

ture is consistent among all pages under one organizational

folder.

1

2


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INDEXABILITY CONT’D

Animation and Visual Content

As noted already, it is considered a bad idea to use elements like

Adobe Flash or Javascript to render content on your website.

There are modern technologies like HTML 5 that not only render

better to the visitor but is also more search engine friendly. Use a

tool like SiteCheckup to evaluate at least all the important pages

on the website for Flash elements. That website has quite a few

other useful auditing tools that you may check out.

3

4 HTML Markups

Wouldn’t you rate a news article that is full of spelling mistakes

poorly? The same goes for an HTML page that is full of syntax er-

rors and coding violations. In extreme cases, this can also impact

the indexability of your website. Run a markup validation check

using the W3C tool to identify errors that need to be fixed.



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ON PAGE CONTENT

SEO Spider does agreatGoogle understand the context of the page better. The

job in providing this information from all the pages at one place.

Typically, you will need to check for the following:

1. Identify main elements through SEO Spider

Every web page needs to have a well defined title, header information, sub-headers. This helps

The next step is to understand if all the HTML content elements are in place on your website. While it is no longer

required to have elements like meta keywords on your website, others like Title, header elements, meta descriptions

and structured data are still important. I would recommend doing this process via the following steps:

Are titles succinct and less than 65 words in length?

Is the main headline on the page marked with the H1 tag and the

subsequent sub-headers marked with H2, H3, and so on?

Is there more than one H1 tag for a page? This is a big no-no

Are titles unique? A lot of websites tend to have the same page title across the website

Is the title overtly manipulated for SEO reasons? This is again forbidden

Does the meta description provide a good summary of the page’s content?

This is the content that Google search visitors read before clicking on to your link



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ON PAGE CONTENT

2. Content Quality

The quality of content that the website delivers to its audience is paramount from an S E O perspective. But this is a pretty

subjective thing to do since what one calls ‘useful information’ is often an individual perspective.

At the outset, you will need to check for the following:


Is the content unique?

Siteliner is a good tool to help you identify content that may be

duplicate on your page. But do note that this only helps with

internal duplication. If you have plagiarized it from elsewhere,

this tool may not be of help. For such cases, you may use tools

like Copyscape.

Is it comprehensive enough?

The ideal word length is 300-500 words. But this is plainly sub-

jective and depends on your niche. No tool shall be able to give

you the right information for this question.What you could do

is do a competitive analysis of other websites in the industry and

see if your website has more in-depth analysis and information

than the others.

Does it provide useful, well-researched and verifiable information?

Again, this is subjective. A competitive analysis could give you

an idea of how good your website is compared to competition.

Is there a compelling reason why Google should rank your site

above the others? If not, note down these points in your audit

report.

Does it make for easyreading?

Depending on your audience, your content should make for

easy reading. This means that the content should not be riddled

with too many jargons and abbreviations. Generally speaking,

your website should be comprehensible to a student in the

eigth to tenth grade. You need not spend too much time on this

aspect and use a random sample of content from your website

on a tool like Rea Able to benchmark your website’s readability

factors.

Does the content seem manipulated for SEOreasons?

Self-taught website owners and amateur SEOs often place a lot

of focus on elements like keyword density. This typically ends

with a keyword-stuffed article that Google can easily make out

as a manipulated piece. Your SEO audit report should definitely

look into this aspect. The keyword analyzer from SEOBook does

a good job at this.


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ON PAGE CONTENT

Are there grammatical and typographical errors?

Finally, is your content free from grammatical errors and spelling mistakes?

There are a number of spelling and grammar checking tools online. But if

you are a native speaker of the language, you may make do with your own

knowledge and the MS Word spell-check feature.e.

Are you targeting the right keywords?

This is an extremely crucial step. The website you are auditing may be the

best in business. But without the use of relevant keywords, you may not

be able to reach out to the right audience. Use keyword planner tool on

Adwords to identify the main keywords for the niche and study if the web-

site is optimized for all these important keywords.

The quality of content that the website delivers to its audience is paramount from an SEO perspective.



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ON PAGE CONTENT

3. Image Attributes

The S E O Spider does an awesome work crawling through all the images from your site and helps you identify those images that

have not been attributed with ALT tags. ALT tag is a textual reference provided for images. This is to help website visitors who

may not be able to view the image itself for various reasons and is thus an important S E O hygiene factor.

4. Hyperlinks

It is believed that hyperlinking to contextually relevant high authority publications tend to have a positive fallout on your own

web page’s ranking. Additionally, linking contextually to others part of your own website is a healthy way to improve navigation

and usability. While auditing the hyperlinks on your web page, there are specifically a few things to look into:


Broken Links :

Use a tool like W3C Link Checker to check for broken links in

your website. Remember to tick the recursive option so that you

can check across your whole website.

Link Quality :

This is again a very subjective aspect. The thumb-rule to deter-

mine the quality of the destination website is the kind of back-

links it has, the general level of quality of the website. Ideally,

you may want to perform a site audit of each of the websites

you are linking out to. But since that may not be practically fea-

sible, a quick way to assess the destination website is to see if

it links to, or is linked from an excessive number of spammy

websites.

Nofollow :

There has been a lot of discussion over the nofollow strategy

for websites. A lot of website owners tend to be pretty defen-

sive and thus nofollow all their external links by default. This may

be unnecessary and can also be counter-productive. Use nofol-

low if any links are sponsored or if you cannot vouch for the

quality of the end link. The nofollow Chrome extension auto-

matically identifies nofollowed links on any web page and is a

good starting point to audit the hyperlinks on any web page.

Anchor Text :

Apart from nofollow, this is another aspect that has been

abused by website owners. Identify the anchor text used to

point to various internal and external links and analyze if they

are either significantly promotional in nature or are stuffed with

keywords.


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SECURITY AUDIT

Often times, websites are penalized by Google for not being secure enough. There are a few things you

may check out to evaluate how good the website is, in terms of security.

1. HTTPS

Google has recently announced that they now have HTTPS as

a ranking signal. While the non-deployment of HTTPS is not

likely to bring down your rankings anytime soon, it is a good se-

curity feature to offer your customers. Depending on what you

offer, consider the use of HTTPS on your website.

2. Malware Content

Websites are often hacked to host malware content. In some

cases, the WordPress or Joomla theme you download may con-

tain hidden malware that may be linking out to spammy niches

like casino or gambling. There are two ways to track such con-

tent. The first method is to check into your Google Webmaster


tools account to look for any malware content reported by

Google. The second method is to install the Avast Chrome ex-

tension that scans all the Google search results for spyware.

Once done, use the ‘site:website.com’ search operator on

Google to get a list of all your web pages and look for any po-

tential spamreports.

3. Neighborhood Analysis

Tools like SpyOnWeb give you a list of websites that are hosted

in the same IP network as you. Identify potential spam websites

on your shared hosting neighborhood that could affect your

search ranking.


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OFF PAGE AUDIT

The off-page audit of your website has mostly got to do with backlink analysis. However, that is not all. You will also need

to benchmark the social profile of your website, local listing profile and the overall trustworthiness of your site.

Here is a brief on how you go about it:


1. Backlink analysis

This is one of the most important aspects of an SEO audit and

one could write an entire book on this topic. However, for the

sake of this article, here is a brief rundown of the various aspects

you should check out.

•Number and quality of backlinks : The Moz Open Site Explorer

is one of the most popular tools for backlink profile analysis.

This service not only gives you the tentative number of backlinks

to your website, but also provides a domain authority and page

authority rank for each of the inbound links. While this is in no

way the absolute measure of the link quality, it gives you a rough

idea of the kind of links that point to the website.

•Anchor text analysis: A natural backlink profile will have a

healthy mix of all kinds of anchor texts and not just the keyword

you are trying to rank for. BacklinkWatch is a free tool to take a

peek into the multiple backlinks that are pointed to your web-

site along with the anchor text used and nofollow parameters,

if any. Check out their raw export feature to download the back-

link file for any further processing

•Nofollow ratio: The BacklinkWatch analysis also gives you a

distribution of followed and nofollowed links. Typically, most hy-

perlinks to a website are follow in nature. However, the com-

plete absence of nofollow links can raise eyebrows. This, in

conjunction, with other parameters like anchor text keyword

stuffing, hyperlink from low trust websites, etc. is often an indi-

cator of bad backlink profile. In such cases, there is a good

chance of your website having received a penalty from Google.

Look out for any notifications on Webmaster tools for warnings

and penalty notifications.


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OFF PAGE AUDIT

•Linking Schemes: It has been more than a decade since link

exchanges and link wheels went out of use. But you won’t be-

lieve the number of websites that still do it. Even if the site you

audit does not engage in such tactics, if God forbid, the web-

sites you have earned links from engage in such tactics, it is time

to make a note of such websites and potentially disavow them

later. The same is true for sponsored links. Even if your client

does not pay for links, getting backlinks from websites that do

is a risk factor and needs to be accounted for during your site

audit.


•Relevancy : Do a thorough analysis of all the hyperlinks to

your website and identify the context for each link. Hyperlinks

that are from websites with little context are risky and could po-

tentially impact your website ranking. This is a long drawn

process but it is recommended that you do this manually with-

out relying ontools.


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OFF PAGE AUDIT

2. Local Listing Profile

If the website you are auditing is a local business, it is important

to separately audit its local listing profile. This includes the fol-

lowing things:

•Directory listings: Identify the major business listing directo-

ries for the geography the website being audited is based out

of and monitor its presence across all these listing pages.

•Local pack: Identify the major keywords that the website

should be ranking for and monitor its visibility in the local pack

of the searchresults.



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OFF PAGE AUDIT

Google+ Page :

Does your business appear verified on the Google+ local list-

ings? Also, how is the engagement on this page with respect

to the images and videos added, reviews and followers?


Local SERPs :

How does the website rank for the various keywords relating to

the business. If possible, analyze these results with and without

including the location in the keyword. For example, if you are

auditing a carpet cleaning service in Jacksonville, map the

search ranking for both ‘carpet cleaners in Jacksonville FL’ as

well as ‘carpet cleaners’ – this needs to be done from a local IP

so as to measure the precise ranking positions.

Identify duplicates:

The Google My Business page might many times have

duplicate listings of the same business. While this could be

inadvertent, this is also a popular tactic used by blackhat mar-

keters to be visible multiple times inside the local pack. Make a

note of these duplicates in the audit report.

Check penalty:

Penalty in the search results is not the only concern. A local busi-

ness website may also be penalized from being shown in the

local pack. A good way to identify such penalty is by making a

search for the primary keyword on Google Maps (example: car-

pet cleaning in Jacksonville). The results are tagged in an alpha-

bet count – if your website is tagged with one of the top letters

like A, B, C,etc. and is still absent from appearing on the local

pack, then it is most likely due to a penalty. The reasons for the

penalty is multi-fold and is not within the scope of this article.


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OFF PAGE AUDIT

Getting the categories correct:

Is your business tagged to the right category on the Google My

Business dashboard? Getting associated with the right category

is extremely crucial to ranking for the appropriate search terms.


Comprehensive profile information :

Assess the comprehensiveness of the business profile. This in-

cludes business description, right business name, address,

phone number, email, open hours, map location, photos and

videos.

Visibility on Apple and Bing Maps :

Make sure your business is listed on Apple maps and Bing maps

as well.

Structured data :

Use the Google structured data testing tool to verify that all the

important elements on your website have been marked up cor-

rectly. This includes any reviews that you may have since click

through rates are believed to be higher on the search results

when accompanies by star ratings.

While a lot of manual effort is required to accomplish all of the above auditing parameters, you could get started on this

using the BrightLocal local search report. Do note that this is a paid tool and some features are restricted to work with

USA based clients.


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MOBILE AUDIT

No S E O audit report is complete without looking into the performance and health of the website on mobile search.

Here are some things to look into:

1. Webmaster Tools Report

If the website is already linked to the Webmaster

Tools, navigate to Search Traffic → Mobile Usability

and make a note of any issues pointed out by Google.

2. Mobile URL management

With smartphones becoming mainstream and data

plans more affordable, mobile versions of websites are

no longer mandatory. However, if you still have a sep-

arate mobile URL for each of the website links, check

for the following:

Proper redirection :

Are all the URLs redirecting to the mobile link from

a mobile phone?

Canonical :

Are all the mobile links set up with proper canonical

tags to help Google identify the right source link?

View desktop version :

Do you provide visitors an easy way to view the

desktop version of the website?

Vary HTTP header :

If your website serves different HTML code and design

from different URLs to the user based on the device

they access the website from, then check for the Vary

HTTP header on the source code.



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MOBILE AUDIT

3. Responsive Design

While unique mobile version of the websites are no

longer used, it has become extremely critical to re-

place them with responsive designs instead. While au-

diting your website, make a note of how your website

renders on various mobile and tablet platforms.


4. Design Audit

Usability plays a huge part in any SEO audit report and

this is all the more vital while looking at mobile SEO.

Make sure to assess the following:

Use of Flash elements :

Most mobile phones do not run Flash. Make a note of

such elements that are deployed on the website

Use of popups & popovers :

We are not talking just about ads (which are anyway

relegated to a miniscule percentage of websites these

days). Popovers are many times used to offer better

usability on the web. However, they may fail to render

correctly on mobileplatforms.

Use of multimedia :

If you render images and videos on your website, how

are these elements displayed on a mobile device?

Modern HTML5 based video players are lightweight

and render better on mobile devices.

Validation check :

Run a validation test on W3C mobileOK checker to

make sure all the design related aspects adhere to

standard guidelines.


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COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

A thorough SEO audit includes benchmarking your website against what the competitors are doing. Typically,

one needs to assess all that we have discussed above for each of your main competitors. Broadly, this means the

following.

1. The on-page content and design audit

2. The backlink profile of the competitors

3. Their social profile and engagement

4. Performance on local SEO

5. Mobile SEO audit

This mostly completes the S E O auditing process. Is there something that I missed? Point out in the comments

and I will add them to the process above. Meanwhile, here is a brief list of different tools you can make use of

during your auditing process.



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LIST OF TOOLS

Google Webmaster Tools

Google’s very own website auditing tool that

helps you identify the health and hygiene of

your website and SEO strategies.


Found SEO Audit

A free tool that helps you generate an audit

report for your prospects. Includes major error

and warning notifications.

MySiteAuditor

A white labelled SEO auditing service that you

may embed on your SEO agency website for

visitors to assess their websites. In turn, also

helps generate more leads.

SEOCopilot Audit Tool

Free online SEO auditing tool that scans your

website for over 50 SEO ranking factors. Also

provides side-by-side competitor assessment

report.

Zadroweb Site Auditor

Uses metrics from multiple sources including

SEMRush and Moz to prepare a well-refer-

enced SEO audit report.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

An absolute must-use for scanning all the var-

ious HTML elements on your website. Free for

analysis up to 500 pages.

UpCity SEO Report Card

Touches upon a number of significant SEO

aspects of the site. Requires user to input

email address though.

WooRank

Another must-try tool to prepare a site review.

Includes review of the mobile, social aspects

of the site. Also includes the homepage key-

words review.

FeedTheBot

Provides technical inputs on relating to HTTP

response headers, CSS and JS use along with

inputs on Google bot access, page speed and

image SEO.

Microsoft SEO Tool Kit

An important tool, simply because it’s from Mi-

crosoft. Helps you audit the website beyond just

Google guidelines and helps you look at the site

from the perspective of Bing, Yahoo and more.


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LIST OF TOOLS

Visual SEO Audit Tool

A software that requires download. Enhances

your audit by helping you visualize the crawl

process, identify conversion deterrents

through screenshot management, visual XML

sitemap editors and a site analysis suite. Free

to download.


Removeem Anchor Text analysis

A tool to study your anchor text diversity and

helps identify potential risk keywords.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth

Helps identify broken links on your website

pretty efficiently.

Copyscape

Freemium tool to identify plagiarized and du-

plicate content on any web page

Urivalet

Nifty tool to check HTTP headers and page

load time.

Pingdom Speed Test

Popular tool to measure the web page load-

ing time

SEO Bin

A pretty basic tool for title optimization. Pro-

vides inputs on various words and phrases

that may be included in your title.

Structured Data Testing Tool

A Google tool to validate the rich snippets

and schema on your web pages.

Sitemap Inspector

Helps you identify any potential issues and er-

rors with your existing XML sitemap and also

helps you generate a new one.

Fiddler

A useful tool for web developers to debug

traffic, test performance and test security.

SEOBIN

Sitemap Inspector


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LIST OF TOOLS

Open SEO Stats

A Google Chrome extension that provides a

holistic overview of the website in terms of

website authority, traffic trends, link reports,

etc. A pretty good tool to begin your SEO au-

diting process.

Flash Checker

Want to be absolutely sure about your web-

site’s use of Flash elements on the page? This

is a good tool to go to.

W3C Markup Validation

A must-use tool for designers to identify

potential markup and validation errors on the

website.

Siteliner

A useful tool to identify broken links, duplicate

content on yourwebsite

SEOBook Keyword Analyzer

Identifies keyword density to help identify

over-optimization on your web pages

Read-Able

Know the readability of content on your web-

site using indices like Flesch-Kincaid and

Coleman-Liau.

W3C Link Checker

Recursively crawl your website to identify bro-

ken links

NoFollow Chrome extension

Instantly identify nofollow links on a web

page. Useful to assess over-optimization of

your hyperlinking strategy.

SpyOnWeb

Detect other websites on the same shared

hosting as yours. Helpful to know the IP neigh-

borhood ofyour website.

OpenSite Explorer

Get comprehensive reports about yourweb-

site.Paid tool

BacklinkWatch

Free tool to get an instant list of all backlinks

pointing to the site along with information on

anchor text and nofollow use.

W3C mobileOK Checker

Check the mobile friendliness of your website

using this freetool.

SpyOnWeb

Readability



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