How to Do an SEO Audit in 15 Minutes or Less with David McSweeney [AMS-02]

In this SEO audit tutorial, David McSweeney shows you how to conduct an SEO audit in less than 15 minutes.

This process should help you quickly identify major SEO issues that may be holding your website back from reaching its full search traffic potential (and ranking high in Google).

There are a few different tools mentioned throughout the video such as Ahrefs, Beam us up, Screaming Frog, and other reporting tools. All links are below to the various SEO tools used in the video.

– check if the content on your site is unique;
– do a search for the site’s brand;
– take a quick look at where a site currently ranks for the main targeted phrase from its homepage;
– perform a search using the site: operator to find out how many pages Google currently has indexed for the domain.

5:18 Jump over Google Search Console (https://www.google.com/webmasters/too…) to see if there are any issues with crawling the site and then take a look at the HTML Improvements report.

6:20 Run a few reports in Google Analytics, starting by looking at the site’s current search traffic.

8:37 Go to Ahrefs Site Explorer (https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer) to conduct a quick, manual audit on the site’s link profile and identify any obvious issues:

– check the Overview page for the domain to have a quick look at the site’s overall health and link profile;
– anchor text distribution in ‘Anchors Cloud’;
– take a look at the ‘Broken Backlinks’ report under ‘Inbound Links’, which can often be the source of some quick wins;
– finally, have a quick run through the site’s referring domains, to see if anything sticks out as suspicious, or low quality.

11:00 Jump in to tool called ‘Panguin’ (http://barracuda.digital/panguin-tool/) to quickly identify drops in traffic that align with Google’s algorithmic updates.

12:00 Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool (https://developers.google.com/speed/p…) for identifying major issues which may be affecting site’s speed.

12:55 The final step in your audit process will be to test any structured data that the site may contain and ensure it is properly formed using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool (https://developers.google.com/structu…).

And that is pretty much it: your 15 minute SEO audit is complete!

13:50 You might return to the crawl started initially with Beam Us Up tool and check its report with all the information you can use to clean up your site and get ranking better!

Transcript

00:00
[Music]00:09
Hi guys, David McSweeney here with Ahrefs.
00:13
Today, I’m going to run you through a process I use to give me a quick fuel
00:17
for a website and hopefully identify some SEO issues in the process. So, you
00:23
can see I’ve got a number of tabs open here, which we’ll be using shortly. But,
00:27
before I do that, I’m actually just going to nip over to a program called “Beam us
00:31
up,” which is basically a web crawler that’ll spider the site the way Google
00:36
sees it. I’m using “Beam us up” but you could use Screaming Frog or any
00:40
alternative crawlers to do the same. So I’m just going to start that process in
00:45
the background and while that’s going ahead we could get back over here and
00:52
start going through the website itself. Okay, so first things first. We’ll go to
00:59
the website we’re going to be auditing and this particular one is an
01:03
e-commerce site called toyuniverse.com.eu. So we’re on the home page of the
01:10
site and if we just quickly view the source, let’s take a look at some
01:15
fundamental on-page factors. First of all we’ve got the title tag you can see they’re
01:22
targeting a couple of different keywords here like ‘kids toys’, ‘online toy store’, etc. I
01:27
would personally be wanting to see the brand at the front there, but that’s
01:32
something we can look at. And they’ve got our Meta Description in place, which looks ok.
01:37
and unbeatable prices for our shipping so they’ve got some key points in there
01:41
which is what you want to get across in your Meta Description. Think of it
01:45
as your advert in the search results and then we’re just going to do a quick
01:49
search. Just ctrl + F on Windows and just check the h1 tag. So
01:56
again you can see there’s a couple of keywords in there which is fine. Nothing
02:00
spammy though. And we’ve got an H2 below it which is fine let’s just double
02:04
check that we only have one instance of these two. Then we’ll
02:09
check H3. We’ve got feature products which is maybe want to perhaps
02:13
move out of h3 and the other ones there’s an awful lot of them but I am basically
02:19
it looks like they’re just targeting subcategories. Which is probably fine. Okay,
02:25
we’ll close that. Okay, next, we’ll have a look at an actual product. So scroll down
02:32
and we’ll go for the Zoomer Zuppy Love – Pupstar. So again, I’ll have a look at
02:38
the same kind of things first of all. Just view the source, and take a little
02:48
second to load up. Sorry about that. So the title we’ve got here looks like it’s
02:52
the name of the product then that looks like the category and then toys online
02:58
which I don’t really think we need there. So, that’s probably something that can
03:02
change. Add descriptions in place, looks reasonable not too bad. I will look
03:09
for the H1 again and just in with the product just fine.
03:13
H2, it seems ok. And H3s, these look like they’re going to
03:27
have to potentially change. So that’s something we can possibly have a think
03:36
about. Ok, so while while we’re on here what we’ll do is we’ll actually just
03:42
grab some of the text from here. So we’re just going to grab a sentence from here
03:48
and we’re going to nip over to Google and in this case we’ll be using Google
03:54
Australia. So let’s just paste in that text in quotation marks and we can see
04:02
the 17 results for tons, and in fact, there’s quite a lot of different sites
04:07
there so yep, that’s definitely gonna be a common issue with
04:11
e-commerce sites. Ok, second thing, we’re going to look at is if we search for the brand,
04:19
just make sure they’re ranking for their brand, which they are which is fine.
04:25
And while we’re here we’ll search for my kids toys online which was one of the
04:31
main phrases they were targeting. You can see the position for at the present time, so
04:36
they’re in the ballpark but there’s definitely room for improvement.
04:40
Okay, and final thing while we’re here, let’s search site colon toy universe
04:48
dot com dot EU, which will return basically all the pages Google currently has indexed.
04:54
And we can see that there are 6119 results, which may be an issue. I know they have about 2000
05:01
products from talking to them before so that could potentially be an issue with
05:06
the way the catalog is currently indexing, which is quite a common problem
05:10
with ecommerce sites, but that’s something we can look at later. Okay, so
05:14
next we’re going to jump over to Google Search Console, formerly of course
05:19
Webmaster Tools and we’ll just have a quick couple of checks. First of all,
05:25
let’s just check and see if there’s any crawl errors. You can see this that there is quite a
05:34
few “not found” errors which is possibly the way the site’s currently dealing
05:41
with overstock products or expired products but that’s something we can
05:44
take a look at. There’s some access denied errors, which is maybe something
05:48
we can look at too. Also, let’s just have a quick look at HTML improvements.
05:56
Now, we’ll pick most of this up on the big crawl we’re running, but it’s worth
06:00
having a quick look and see what Google is covering this information as well, so
06:04
you can see they’re picking up some duplicate title tags etc which is
06:08
probably something we’re going to take a look at. Short meta descriptions etc
06:14
so we can take a look at that and you do process.
06:17
Next, for today we’re going to jump into Google Analytics, but before we do that
06:21
I’m just going to pause for a second and change the screen size so as to not to give
06:26
away any financial information; go with me. Okay, so over in Analytics, you can
06:32
see I’m actually on the acquisition > overview screen, so we can just have a
06:37
quick look how much traffic’s currently coming from search.
06:43
So we can see there’s as about you know 200 to 300 a day currently from search.
06:49
And we’re looking at basically August at the moment. What we’ll also
06:56
have a quick look at is, I’m just going to run quite a long range here
07:04
just going to go back to 2012 and view by week. Bear with me.
07:24
So, I’m just looking to see if there’s any big peaks and drop-offs,
07:30
which we can see that there are actually a couple of big Peaks here but the time
07:34
in the Christmas period which I would expect would be seasonal, which is not
07:39
to concern ourselves with. And we can see overall, traffic’s taking a
07:44
slight increase, but it’s quite stagnant at the moment it’s gone up again now actually. This
07:50
could be the build-up to Christmas as well and I’m just going to
07:57
quickly change the range back to August and we’ll go by day again. And
08:05
we’re gonna have a quick look at landing pages, so we can see Legos is a big
08:11
one. “Lay by information”, which seems to
08:15
be getting quite a lot of traffic. And it’s quite a quite a lot of
08:19
different landing pages (265), which suggests reasonable site health. So
08:27
that’s something we could take a bit more of a look at in a bit more detail in
08:30
the future. Ok, I’m going to pause again now and go back to full screen for the
08:34
next step. So we’re now in Ahrefs itself, and we’re just on the overview
08:40
page for the domain. We’re just going to have a quick look at the site’s
08:44
overall health and link profile etc. You can see there are 64 referring domains at
08:49
present. Let’s just take a quick look at the anchor text distribution and anchors
08:54
cloud. And we can see number one is the naked URL, which is good
08:59
(21%). Then we’ve got branded search, sorry, branded anchor, which is second at 11
09:05
percent. I see this quite a lot of branded anchors in there which is
09:09
very good and overall this looks like a mixture of products etcetera which
09:14
is nothing to be concerned about and all good. So scrolling back up, let’s have a
09:19
look at broken backlinks under inbound links. This is often where you can find
09:24
some quick wins. So this would basically be sites that are linking to pages that
09:29
no longer exists that basically are returning 404s now. So, there’s actually a few of
09:34
them in there. So we could set up 301 redirects
09:38
for those old pages or we could reach out and ask the linking sites to
09:43
change the links. Okay, and now, let’s actually just go in and have a look at
09:52
referring domains and we’ll just do a fairly quick sort of sniff test on the
09:57
linking domains themselves. Okay, so let’s order by domain rating, so
10:05
we’ve got the most powerful links at the top and we can see these look to me,
10:12
pretty decent. Any ones you’re not so sure about you can obviously just
10:17
pop in, click on the link, and have a look at. This looks absolutely fine. I have
10:29
scrolled down and there’s a nice sort of spread to your nothing that looks particularly worrying
10:36
from what I can see. Perhaps things like this are something to take a closer
10:44
look at, but for the moment we just want to make sure there is nothing
10:50
particularly, obviously spammy in there which it doesn’t seem to be. So that’s
10:55
all good so far. Okay, we’re now going to jump into a tool called the “Penguin
11:02
Tool” by Barracuda. This is a free tool and what this does is actually just
11:07
overlays Google’s algorithmic updates over your search traffic. So if we turn
11:15
them all on, we can see when the various updates were, and we can see if that
11:18
corresponds to any particular drops in traffic. Now, if I switch back to Penguin,
11:24
we can see there is a big drop-off here which does tie in with
11:28
penguin, but I suspect this is more to do with the seasonal spike as opposed to
11:35
anything else. We can see a big increase in October and so it dips down
11:40
as we get closer to Christmas, so I don’t think this is anything to worry about.
11:43
But, you know, it’s something we could possibly take a closer look. This is a
11:48
very, very useful tool just to quickly analyse any potential penalty
11:52
the site may have incurred. So just a couple more steps to go now. If we nip
11:59
over now, what we’re going to use is Google’s PageSpeed Insights, and we’ll
12:05
just have a look at the home page for now. This is obviously, you could start
12:09
looking at individual pages and really really analyzing this but for the moment
12:13
we’ll just take a look at the the home page. So, it’s just going to take a few
12:19
seconds just to analyze the page and it’ll return for us any issues that
12:24
thinks we should fix to speed up the site. You can see it’s getting at the
12:28
moment we’re going to score of 58 over 100 for mobile, which is not not amazing.
12:33
So, there’s certainly a few issues we could potentially fix here. Desktop is
12:39
giving a 73 over 100 which again, there’s probably some some changes we can make
12:44
just to speed the site up a bit, which should help with our rankings with everything else
12:48
being equal. And finally, what we’re going to do, is we’re going to have a quick
12:56
look at structured data and just see if there’s anything in here that could be
13:00
causing an issue. So for this, I’m going to grab a product again. And I’m just
13:08
going to paste the URL in here, fetch and validate, and again I’ll just take a
13:17
couple of seconds just to analyze the page. You can see in fact that this is
13:21
returning errors at present, which looks like it’s to do with reviews. So this is
13:33
something that we’re going to have to address to make sure that the Rich
13:35
Snippets are showing up in search results for the product. So that says
13:43
pretty much everything with all the on site steps and the 15-minute audit. So
13:48
we’ve got a minute to spare so what we can do is just nip back over to Beam us up
13:53
and we can see that the crawl we started at the start of this process is now
13:57
completed. And there’s 5189 URLs that have been found. And this is just going to give us
14:03
information like the title links etc etc, canonical URLs; all information
14:11
we can use. It also, over here, actually split down things like duplicated pages,
14:18
duplicate titles, which we can see there’s quite a lot of their. Titles
14:24
missing, each one’s missing etc. All information we can use to basically
14:28
clean up the site and get a ranking better. So that’s our 15 minute audit
14:33
completed and you can see that even in this short time we’ve picked up a number
14:37
of issues we can work upon to improve our site’s SEO. Obviously from here, you
14:42
want to really deep dive in and this is not meant to be an exhaustive process.
14:46
This is just to give us an overview of the site and pick up any major issues
14:50
that may be holding us back. It’s very much a process you can run through
14:54
yourself and for most sites you’ll certainly find two or three issues at
14:58
least that you can work upon. And the notes below is a link to the blog post
15:03
that accompanies this video where I discuss the steps in a little more
15:06
detail and also link out to the various tools we used along the way. Any
15:10
questions or comments, just leave them below and I’ll see you soon. Thanks.

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