How to Do an SEO Audit to Improve your Rankings (2021)

In this video, you’ll learn the process of doing an SEO Audit on your website in order to find technical mistakes that could negatively affect its performance.

An SEO audit of your site can provide insights and help you address common issues that may be preventing your page from ranking on Google.

An SEO Audit is a top-to-bottom examination of your website, with a focus on the factors that allow you to rank on search engines. This is an in-depth process with some very technical aspects. In this video, we are going to go over some of the basics, show you some useful tools, and also link you to some resources that will help you with some of the more technical points.

Semrush’s Site Audit tool will be a major player in your audit. With this tool, you can scan a website and receive a thorough diagnosis of your website’s health. There are other tools, including the Google Search Console, that we’ll be using as well.
The Site Audit tool scans your website and provides data about all the pages it’s able to crawl, including how many have issues, the number of redirects, the number of blocked pages, overall site performance and crawlability, and more. The report it generates will help you find a large number of technical SEO issues.

There are a few more technical issues that are checked during a site audit, so here’s a link to an article with more technical details, as well as a list of helpful SEO resources.

How to do an SEO Audit ► https://www.semrush.com/blog/technica…

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro
01:00 What’s an SEO Audit?
01:32 How can Semrush help? Site Audit tool!
02:03 Site Architecture issues
02:28 6 Signs of a well-structured website
03:40 Internal links issues
04:20 Checking problems with internal linking on Site Audit
05:35 Security of your website
06:32 Site speed issues
07:00 Core web vitals! Next Google algorithm update
07:30 How to optimize images
07:52 Mobile-friendliness
09:14 Audit your AMP pages regularly
09:39 Duplicate content issues
11:13 Compare crawls and progress tab – keep track of your issues and fixes!
12:15 Upcoming video topics
12:50 Outro

Transcript

00:00
if you’ve been following us lately you
00:01
have noticed that we’re trying to
00:03
outline the easiest workflow you can
00:05
follow
00:06
how to create your content marketing
00:07
strategy how to evaluate the performance
00:10
of the content you’ve been writing
00:12
and today we’re going to talk about how
00:14
to fix the mistakes on your website
00:16
because
00:16
if those two previous steps still don’t
00:18
give you the results you need
00:20
there’s probably something wrong with
00:21
your website and today we’ll see what
00:24
and how to fix it
00:28
we have all been there whether you’ve
00:30
been doing seo for weeks or for decades
00:33
still there’s always something that
00:35
needs fixing
00:36
uh maybe your title isn’t following seo
00:39
best practices
00:40
maybe you have some duplicate content
00:42
anyway
00:43
all these things are keeping you from
00:46
going exactly where you need to be
00:48
and an seo audit can fix most of these
00:51
things because you need to know
00:53
in order to fix it what is wrong
00:56
but what is an seo audit an seo audit is
00:59
a top to bottom
01:00
examination of your website with a focus
01:02
on the factors that allow you to rank on
01:05
search engines
01:05
this is a very in-depth process and it
01:08
deals with incredibly technical issues
01:10
but today we’re not going to go that
01:12
much in depth we’re just going to go
01:14
over the basics and i’m going to link in
01:15
the description and above me
01:17
anywhere possible all the tools that
01:19
i’ll be mentioning and some very useful
01:21
resources that will help you
01:23
with the more technical stuff somerset’s
01:25
site audit tool will be
01:26
a major player in your audit with this
01:29
tool you can scan a website and receive
01:31
a thorough diagnosis of your website’s
01:33
health
01:34
there are other tools including google
01:36
search console that we’ll be using as
01:37
well
01:38
the site audio tool scans your website
01:40
and provides data about
01:42
all the pages it’s able to crawl
01:44
including how many have
01:45
issues the number of redirects the
01:47
number of blocked pages
01:48
overall site performance and
01:50
crawlability and much more
01:52
the report it generates will help you
01:54
find a large number of technical seo
01:56
issues
01:57
the first thing we’re going to cover is
01:59
your site’s architecture and also we’ll
02:01
see how to address the most common
02:02
issues that come with it
02:04
site structure is basically how the
02:06
website is organized
02:07
a good site structure groups content and
02:09
makes pages easy to reach
02:11
in as few clicks as possible it’s
02:13
logical and easily expanded as the
02:16
website grows
02:17
and six signs of a well-planned and
02:19
structured websites
02:20
are number one it takes only a few
02:22
clicks ideally three
02:24
for a user to find the page they want to
02:26
find starting from the home page
02:28
number two navigation menus make sense
02:30
and improve the user experience
02:32
number three pages and content are
02:34
grouped topically and in a logical way
02:36
number four url structures are
02:39
consistent
02:40
number five each page shows breadcrumbs
02:42
you have a few types of breadcrumbs to
02:44
choose from but the point is to help
02:46
website users see how they’ve navigated
02:48
to the page that they’re on
02:50
number six internal links help users
02:52
make their way through the site in an
02:54
organic way
02:55
it’s harder to navigate on a website
02:57
that is not well structured
02:59
usually in fact people get lost or
03:00
confused which is
03:02
not a good experience and it’s not what
03:04
we want when it takes 15 clicks or more
03:07
to get from the home page to the page
03:09
that you want the users to be on
03:11
then your hierarchy is way too deep
03:14
and google considers the deeper pages in
03:17
the hierarchy to be less relevant and
03:19
important they’re not going to rank high
03:22
conduct an analysis to try and regroup
03:25
the pages based on keywords
03:27
and try and flatten the hierarchy as
03:29
much as you can
03:30
just as the website structure the url
03:32
structures should be
03:33
also consistent and very easy to follow
03:36
next up we’re going to talk about
03:38
internal links
03:39
in fact as you improve your website
03:41
architecture and make it
03:42
easier both for people and search
03:44
engines to find the content that they
03:46
want
03:46
you also need to check the health and
03:48
the status of your site’s internal links
03:51
your site has two primary types of
03:53
internal links
03:54
navigational ones often found in the
03:57
header
03:57
footer or sidebar and contextual ones
04:00
included within the content of the page
04:03
a third type
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breadcrumbs is used much less often but
04:06
it can be a great addition
04:08
to your website refer back to the site
04:10
audit report and click
04:12
view details next to your internal
04:14
linking score in this report you’ll be
04:16
alerted of
04:17
two types of issue orphan pages which
04:19
are pages that have
04:20
no links leading to them this means that
04:23
you cannot
04:24
gain access to them via any other page
04:26
on the same website
04:28
and then you have pages with high click
04:30
dabs the farther away a page is from the
04:32
home page
04:33
the higher is its click depth and the
04:35
lower
04:36
is its value to search engines you also
04:39
see a breakdown of the page’s internal
04:40
link issues you’ll see errors
04:43
major issues that need to be addressed
04:45
first such as broken internal links
04:48
then you’ll see warnings problems
04:50
including broken external links and
04:52
nofollow attributes and outgoing
04:54
internal links
04:55
and then you get notices issues you
04:57
should work on after handling the errors
05:00
and warnings
05:00
including orphan pages and permanent
05:02
redirects
05:03
the site audit reports has helpful tips
05:06
for fixing
05:06
each internal linking problem your
05:09
site’s internal linking
05:10
but also the external one for that
05:12
matter needs to use the appropriate
05:14
anchor text
05:15
that uses the appropriate keywords that
05:18
let immediately users understand
05:20
where they are going what to expect when
05:23
they
05:24
click on the hyperlinked word in fact
05:27
what’s helpful for users is often if not
05:30
always
05:31
also helpful for search engines let’s
05:34
move on and talk security
05:36
data translate over http protocol is not
05:39
encrypted
05:40
which means it’s not really secure in
05:42
fact a third-party attacker
05:44
could definitely steal this information
05:46
so when on your website people should
05:48
never be asked
05:49
to perform any payment or to submit any
05:51
sensitive information
05:52
over an http protocol the solution is to
05:56
move your website on a secure server
05:58
that is on an https protocol which uses
06:02
a certificate that is called an ssl
06:04
certificate
06:05
that is from a third-party vendor that
06:07
confirms that this site is actually
06:09
legitimate
06:10
https displays a padlock next to the url
06:14
to build trust with the user
06:16
summarizes http implementation in the
06:18
site audit tool can give you an overview
06:21
of
06:21
all the problems and issues that can
06:23
come up with your site security
06:24
and also advises you on how to fix them
06:27
next up
06:28
site speed site speed directly impacts
06:31
the user experience
06:33
and is also a ranking factor improve
06:35
page speed
06:36
and you will improve site speed this is
06:38
such an
06:39
important task that google even created
06:41
its own
06:42
tool to allow people to check the
06:44
website speed
06:45
which is called the pagespeed insight
06:47
analyzer
06:48
and another tool worth looking into is
06:51
the core web vital extensions on google
06:53
chrome
06:53
and by the way if you haven’t seen it we
06:55
made a video about all about
06:57
core web vitals i’ll leave it linked in
06:58
the description here
07:00
and here and just in case you didn’t
07:03
know
07:03
we added after the video actually
07:06
a core web vital specific widget inside
07:09
the site audit
07:10
so yes you can check your code virals
07:13
directly inside
07:14
audit to increase your page speed inside
07:17
score
07:18
or just in general your page speed and
07:20
your site speed you should definitely
07:22
start by optimizing
07:23
images you have a few options when it
07:26
comes to image optimization
07:27
including sizing images to their display
07:30
size which is not their actual size
07:32
and compressing them in order to avoid
07:34
forcing a page to load a one megabyte
07:36
image for example
07:38
after images focus on javascript and css
07:41
optimization
07:42
you can use minification which removes
07:44
white spaces and comments to optimize
07:46
css and js files
07:48
moving on mobile friendliness more than
07:51
half of web traffic
07:52
happens on mobile devices google plans
07:54
to implement
07:55
mobile only indexing by the end of march
07:58
2021
08:00
which in case you haven’t checked it’s
08:02
this very month
08:04
this means that at the end of march 2021
08:06
we will only see
08:07
index mobile versions of websites over
08:10
desktop ones so it’s really important
08:13
and it’s very imperative that you fix
08:15
all your mobile friendliness issues
08:18
very much right now when optimizing for
08:21
mobile
08:21
you can focus on responsive web design
08:24
which is rwd
08:26
which is basically making your website
08:28
render well on different types of
08:30
devices
08:31
or you can focus on amps which is
08:35
basically a stripped-down version of
08:37
your main website’s pages
08:39
amps run very quickly on mobile devices
08:42
because google runs them from its cache
08:44
instead of actually sending a request to
08:47
your server
08:48
amps definitely improve your mobile site
08:51
speed
08:52
but also they have a couple of downsides
08:54
for example you cannot earn any ad
08:56
revenue from them
08:57
and you usually can’t access any robust
08:59
easy to implement
09:00
analytics from them plus usually desktop
09:04
content and mobile content are different
09:06
if you use amps it’s important to audit
09:09
them regularly to make sure you’ve
09:10
implemented them correctly to boost your
09:12
website visibility
09:14
the site audit tool tests your amp pages
09:16
for 33
09:17
issues divided into three main
09:19
categories amp
09:21
html issues amp style and layout issues
09:24
and amp
09:25
templating issues in addition the tool
09:28
will also tell you if your amp tag
09:30
needs a canonical tag so again
09:33
as at the end of every category check
09:36
this
09:37
on your site audit duplicate content
09:40
if the site audit tool detects pages
09:42
with 80
09:43
identical content it will flag them as
09:45
duplicate content when you web pages
09:47
contain
09:48
identical information or nearly
09:50
identical information
09:52
a lot of issues can come up for example
09:55
an incorrect version of your page may
09:57
display in serp
09:58
or pages may not perform well in serps
10:00
or they have indexing problems
10:02
your coursesite metrics may fluctuate or
10:04
decrease
10:05
search engines may be confused about
10:07
your prioritization signals
10:09
leading them to take unexpected actions
10:11
pay attention to your content strategy
10:13
and your site’s taxonomy in the first
10:15
way so that you can
10:16
avoid creating duplicate content you can
10:19
use for example pillar pages
10:21
or topic clusters that can help you
10:23
boost your website’s authority
10:25
to improve your site’s taxonomy you need
10:27
to pay very careful attention to
10:28
categories and tags
10:30
as well as pagination and also the
10:33
sequencing of archived pages
10:35
one of the most common reasons is if a
10:37
site has an http version
10:39
an https version a www
10:42
version or a non-www version all this
10:46
may lead to duplicate content another
10:49
reason site audit might find duplicate
10:51
content is if you have
10:52
very little content on these pages in
10:55
fact if you have the same header and
10:56
footer
10:57
the tool might even flag pages that have
11:00
only one
11:01
or two sentences in the copy that’s why
11:03
you need to create and
11:04
add unique content to these pages to
11:07
actually avoid this issue coming up
11:10
compare crawl and progress tab seo
11:12
managers use spreadsheet
11:14
pivot tables a host of tools to
11:17
investigate and manage
11:19
their websites you should stay as
11:21
organized as possible
11:22
to catch unexpected changes and be ready
11:25
for the
11:26
inevitable google algorithm updates
11:29
in the site audit reports compare crawls
11:32
tab you can select specific crawls and
11:34
analyze them to compare your results
11:36
from two separate reports the progress
11:39
tab features an
11:40
interactive line graphs that showcases
11:42
your website health over time you can
11:44
select specific
11:46
errors warnings or notices to see how
11:48
your site has progressed or you can look
11:50
at just the overall stats
11:52
and believe it or not i don’t know how
11:54
long this video is going to come up but
11:56
believe it or not we have not discussed
11:58
everything
11:59
so if you really want to go in depth on
12:02
this topic i’m leaving
12:04
a ton of resources in the description
12:07
that i definitely suggest you check out
12:09
because it’s gonna be
12:10
incredibly helpful information so we’ve
12:12
been following this workflow where we’ve
12:14
been trying to understand
12:16
what to do with content how to evaluate
12:18
it how to fix the site issues and i know
12:21
that there are
12:21
tons of questions that you still have
12:24
like for example
12:25
how can you grow a blog or how can you
12:29
make a website increases organic traffic
12:32
well let me tell you that the next video
12:35
on this very channel will be about this
12:37
topic and i will not be the one
12:39
answering this question a very important
12:42
person in semrush
12:44
will actually talk about how we improved
12:47
our blog
12:47
that believe it or not was not
12:49
performing as well as it does now
12:52
if you want to know more about that and
12:54
if you want to know more about a lot of
12:56
topics like how to hire the head of an
12:58
seo team
12:59
how to outsource your seo and so on i
13:02
suggest you subscribe to this channel
13:04
and stay tuned
13:05
because there’s a lot of new formats
13:07
coming up for you
13:08
so that’s all i’ll catch you guys in the
13:10
next one have a good day

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