SEO - Search Engine Optimization
Today I’m going to teach you how to do an SEO site audit. With this lesson, there’s going to be a lot of factors and a lot of things that we’re going to be breaking down. In addition to that, we’re going to show you how you can do this through Ubersuggest, which is an SEO tool. So that way, you don’t have to do this all manually.
You want to first find the areas that you need to fix on your website, so first off, go to Google and type in site, colon, and put in your domain .com. Once you hit search, what you’ll see is a list on Google. You’ll either see one result, which is not good, you want to see more than one. You’ll see zero results, which is not good either and if you have that, don’t worry, we’ll teach you how to fix this.
So once you know that you can be seen, you want to make sure there’s only one version of your website.
Then I want you to go to Ubersuggest, type in your domain name. It’ll take you to an overview report under the traffic analyser.
If you’re seeing more traffic over time, that’s great. If you have a new website or a website that’s barely old and you haven’t done much SEO, you’re probably going to see no results. And that’s okay as well because as you implement some of these changes that I’m going to teach you, your numbers are going to go up, you’re going to rank for more keywords which is what the bottom graph shows you, and you’re going to get more traffic from Google, which is what the top graph shows you.
And this report’s also cool because you can put in some of your competitors and it allows you to compare how you’re doing to your competition over time.
Now it’s time to go and analyze your website to see what’s wrong, what you need to fix and how you can get more traffic.
So with the SEO site audit report, it shows you an overview. Your critical errors, your warnings, your recommendations.
You have to fix your whole site.
Then you also want to look at the warnings tab and then the recommendations tab as well.
If it shows that you have thin content, that’s not good. You want to fix that. Not every page is going to be perfect and have a lot of text, but fix the ones that make sense.
Because when people search on Google for images, and the image search is very popular, especially niches like travel, if you don’t have alt tags, it’s harder for Google to decipher what that images is about.
You also want to look at internal links. Throughout Ubersuggest, once you put in your URL, assuming you’re getting more and more traffic, eventually you’ll see your top pages report load up with a ton of examples.
Backlinks, really important factor because the more sites linking to you, the better you’re going to do as well. But not all links are equal, some are bad, some are good. This report shows you all the people linking to you and the anchor text of the link.
Going back to the site audit report, you want to make sure you don’t have broken pages or broken links. It’ll point that out as well and you can fix those.
The next thing to check out is site maps. So within Google’s Search Console, you want to upload a sitemap. They report on it. You can just put in any URL, like your website .com slash robots.txt and you can see what’s being blocked or what’s not.
Remember how I showed you that top pages report? If you have a new website, you won’t see much there, but if you have an existing website and a ton of traffic, you want to make sure you’re linking to those top pages when it makes sense because it’ll even help them get more traffic, more social shares, more backlinks over time.
And of course, last but not least, I want you to check for penalties. So go to Google Search Console, look at manual actions and just make sure there’s no issues detected. Because if there are, you want to fix them.
Transcript
00:00
– [Neil] Hey everyone,
00:01
it’s Neil Patel,
00:01
and today I’m going to teach you how to do an SEO site audit.
00:06
With this lesson,
00:07
there’s going to be a lot of factors
00:09
and a lot of things that we’re going to be breaking down.
00:12
Don’t worry if it gets overwhelming or confusing
00:14
because at the end,
00:15
there’s worksheets and templates
00:17
that’ll break down how to do everything
00:19
step by step with your website.
00:22
And you can find them at neilpatel.com/training
00:25
for these worksheets and templates.
00:27
In addition to that,
00:28
we’re going to show you
00:29
how you can do this through Ubersuggest,
00:31
which is an SEO tool.
00:32
So that way,
00:33
you don’t have to do this all manually.
00:36
So let’s get started,
00:37
let’s start by applying some of the things
00:40
that I’ve taught you in all the previous lessons
00:41
to your website now.
00:44
You want to first find the areas that you need to fix
00:46
on your website,
00:47
so first off,
00:48
go to Google and type in site, colon,
00:52
and put in your domain .com.
00:55
So mine would be site, colon, nielpatel.com.
00:59
Once you hit search,
01:00
what you’ll see is a list on Google.
01:03
You’ll either see one result,
01:06
which is not good,
01:07
you want to see more than one.
01:08
You’ll see zero results,
01:10
which is not good either
01:11
and if you have that, don’t worry,
01:12
we’ll teach you how to fix this.
01:14
Or ideally, the best example
01:16
would be you’re seeing 100s if not 1000s of results.
01:19
If your website is really small
01:21
and you only have one or two pages,
01:23
you won’t see many results.
01:24
You’ll see maybe one or two,
01:26
and sometimes zero if Google hasn’t indexed you at all.
01:29
And if your website is 1,000,000 pages,
01:31
you may not see 1,000,000 results here.
01:33
You may only see 200,000 or 100,000
01:36
because Google doesn’t always index
01:38
every page on your website.
01:39
And if you have that issue as well,
01:41
don’t worry, after this lesson
01:44
when you go through the worksheets
01:45
and the lessons and the homework,
01:47
I’ll break down how to fix that as well.
01:50
So once you know that you can be seen,
01:52
you want to make sure
01:53
there’s only one version of your website.
01:55
Do you have a www,
01:56
do you have a non-www,
01:58
do you have a https or is your website not secure
02:02
and you’re only http?
02:04
If you’re using an SSL certificate,
02:07
which I mention is previous lessons,
02:08
that’s very, very important
02:10
because Google’s mainly ranking sites
02:11
that have SSL certificates,
02:13
it’s for security purposes,
02:15
you should only see https version of your website.
02:18
As for the www or the non-www version,
02:23
your CMS, your content management system,
02:25
should be able to fix that for you
02:26
and throughout there
02:27
you can pick which version of your site
02:29
you want to appear.
02:31
Then I want you to go to Ubersuggest,
02:33
type in your domain name.
02:35
It’ll take you to an overview report
02:38
under the traffic analyser.
02:41
If you’re seeing more traffic over time, that’s great.
02:43
If you have a new website
02:44
or a website that’s barely old
02:46
and you haven’t done much SEO,
02:48
you’re probably going to see no results.
02:50
And that’s okay as well
02:51
because as you implement some of these changes
02:53
that I’m going to teach you,
02:55
your numbers are going to go up,
02:56
you’re going to rank for more keywords
02:58
which is what the bottom graph shows you,
03:00
and you’re going to get more traffic from Google,
03:02
which is what the top graph shows you.
03:03
And this report’s also cool
03:05
because you can put in some of your competitors
03:07
and it allows you to compare how you’re doing
03:09
to your competition over time.
03:11
Now it’s time to go and analyze your website
03:15
to see what’s wrong,
03:16
what you need to fix
03:17
and how you can get more traffic.
03:19
So within the sidebar of Ubersuggest,
03:21
I want you to click on site audit.
03:24
This is a report that’ll show you
03:25
everything that’s wrong with your website, or right.
03:28
The green stuff is good, that’s healthy,
03:31
anything that is orange or pinkish in color,
03:35
or gray or black is not good.
03:37
And you want to make sure all that stuff is fixed.
03:40
The gray stuff, for redirects,
03:42
could be okay depending on the redirect type.
03:46
So with the SEO site audit report,
03:49
it shows you an overview.
03:50
Your critical errors,
03:51
your warnings, your recommendations.
03:53
The bigger your site,
03:54
the longer it’s going to take to run this report.
03:57
You want to run your whole site,
03:59
check all your pages
04:00
to make sure you’re fixing all of them.
04:02
Because if you just fix some of your pages,
04:04
you’re not going to rank that well on Google.
04:06
You have to fix your whole site.
04:08
And on this report,
04:09
I want you to click on critical errors.
04:12
Once you click on critical errors,
04:13
you’ll see something like this.
04:14
It’ll show you all the errors and pages
04:17
that have critical issues.
04:18
Then you also want to look at the warnings tab
04:21
and then the recommendations tab as well.
04:23
Typically, when you’re doing SEO,
04:25
you want to fix the stuff on the critical errors tab first,
04:28
then warnings, then recommendations.
04:30
By going in that order,
04:32
you’re going to get the biggest bang for buck
04:33
when it comes to increasing your traffic.
04:36
Some things within the Ubersuggest site audit report
04:39
that you’ll learn
04:40
is your page title,
04:41
are they too long?
04:42
Are they duplicative?
04:44
In other words,
04:45
are they using the same title
04:47
for many, many pages?
04:48
Because that’s bad,
04:49
because it doesn’t tell Google which one’s unique.
04:51
Which ones should I rank for different keywords?
04:53
So you want to make sure your titles are all unique,
04:56
and of course,
04:57
if you’re not sure how to fix things,
04:58
like you’re seeing this error here,
05:01
there will be a little link that says,
05:02
“What is this and how do I fix it?”
05:04
You click on it,
05:05
it’ll tell you what it is
05:07
and it even breaks down how to fix it
05:09
and even links you to articles
05:10
that teach you how to fix it as well.
05:13
Redirects, same thing,
05:14
it’ll tell you if you have redirects
05:15
that are bad.
05:16
You ideally want to use 301 redirects,
05:20
anytime you’re using 302 and other types of redirects,
05:24
they’re not as good as 301s.
05:27
301s tell Google this page has moved,
05:29
transfer all the links,
05:30
transfer all the equity,
05:32
rank this page really high in Google.
05:34
302 is like,
05:35
“Hey, we’re temporarily not right here right now,
05:38
“but we don’t know when we’re coming back.”
05:40
That’s giving Google a fuzzy answer,
05:42
so you want to make sure you’re trying to use 301 redirects
05:45
instead of other types of redirects.
05:48
And redirect error codes,
05:49
there’s 301, right?
05:50
There are the major types of codes that you’ll see
05:52
throughout your research.
05:53
And 301s are okay
05:55
as long as they’re only used to redirect one page at a time.
06:00
You don’t want to keep doing redirects.
06:02
What I mean by this
06:03
is you don’t want to take one page
06:05
and redirect it to another page,
06:07
and have that page redirect back to the previous page.
06:11
That would create a loop.
06:12
If it’s a loop,
06:13
people don’t know where to go.
06:14
But one page redirecting to another page is fine,
06:17
you don’t want the other page to redirect to another page.
06:19
You just want to keep it simple
06:21
and do one redirect per page
06:23
if you ever decide to use them.
06:24
And if you’re not sure why people use redirects,
06:27
well, a lot of times,
06:28
people change their webpage URLs.
06:30
If you’re like, huh,
06:31
this article’s old,
06:32
I want to update the URL.
06:34
Well, you would redirect the old one to the new one.
06:36
Or if you want to change your domain name
06:37
from abcd.com to abc.com
06:40
because you’re able to knock off one letter by abc.com,
06:44
then that would be another example of using a redirect.
06:47
Again, you can use 302s
06:49
but you don’t want to use them too long.
06:51
If you’re using them for more than three months,
06:53
then that’s not good.
06:55
A 400 error means users can’t get to that page,
06:58
a 403 error means that page is not authorized,
07:01
404 page usually means it’s not found.
07:05
You want to redirect these,
07:06
use 301 redirects.
07:08
500 errors are internal errors,
07:10
like with your server or your web development.
07:12
Send it to anyone technical on your team
07:14
and they can fix those.
07:16
Thin content is something
07:17
that you’ll also find a lot within Ubersuggest.
07:19
If it shows that you have thin content,
07:21
that’s not good.
07:22
You want to fix that.
07:24
Thin content means there’s not enough text on a page,
07:26
and you won’t be able to fix every page
07:29
that’s thin in content
07:30
because some of them,
07:31
like your about page,
07:32
you’re not going to have 5000 words on your about page.
07:34
You merely have 100, 200 words,
07:36
or your contact page,
07:37
and that’s okay.
07:39
Not every page is going to be perfect and have a lot of text,
07:42
but fix the ones that make sense.
07:45
Review those pages,
07:46
make sure they have unique title tags
07:49
and unique meta descriptions as well.
07:52
You also want to makes sure
07:53
you’re not missing any image alt tags on images.
07:56
Image alt tags tell Google,
07:58
“Hey, this is what this image is about.”
08:00
If you have an article about cars
08:03
and then you have an image
08:04
breaking down a car and it’s a Mercedes car,
08:07
and a certain type,
08:07
and it’s four doors and it’s gray in color,
08:10
use the alt tag that describes that.
08:12
Because when people search on Google for images,
08:14
and the image search is very popular,
08:16
especially niches like travel,
08:18
if you don’t have alt tags,
08:20
it’s harder for Google
08:20
to decipher what that images is about.
08:24
You also want to look at internal links.
08:26
Throughout Ubersuggest,
08:27
once you put in your URL,
08:29
assuming you’re getting more and more traffic,
08:31
eventually you’ll see your top pages report load up
08:34
with a ton of examples.
08:35
If you don’t,
08:36
you can put in a competitor
08:37
and you’ll see all of their top pages.
08:39
These are all the pages on your site
08:41
or a competitor’s site
08:42
that’s getting good traffic from Google.
08:44
Again, as I mentioned,
08:45
if your site’s new,
08:46
you won’t see any results here.
08:48
But as your site gets more popular,
08:49
you’ll see results.
08:51
You can also use this report
08:52
to see what pages are popular on your competition,
08:55
and it will give you ideas
08:56
of the type of pages you should create.
08:59
And when you have pages that are popular,
09:01
you want to make sure you’re linking to them
09:03
throughout your whole site,
09:04
so that way they rank even higher
09:06
and get more links as well.
09:09
Backlinks, really important factor
09:10
because the more sites linking to you,
09:12
the better you’re going to do as well.
09:14
But not all links are equal,
09:16
some are bad,
09:17
some are good.
09:18
And Google breaks down things
09:19
like you want your links
09:20
to be unique and relevant, that’s great.
09:23
Your links should be within content,
09:25
they should be beneficial to people.
09:28
If it’s not beneficial to them,
09:30
then there’s no point of that link existing.
09:32
You don’t want to pay people for links either,
09:34
that’s really bad.
09:35
It’s short-sighted,
09:37
it can also lead to penalties and decreases in rankings
09:40
if Google finds out you’re doing that.
09:42
When you’re looking at your links within Ubersuggest,
09:45
I want you to go to the backlinks report,
09:47
which is one of the last options in the navigation,
09:51
and look at the anchor text.
09:52
This report shows you all the people linking to you
09:56
and the anchor text of the link.
09:57
That’s the keyword people are putting in the link.
10:00
The text of that link,
10:02
does it really match up to the page that they’re linking to?
10:05
If it doesn’t and it looks spammy,
10:07
you got another issue
10:09
and you want to make sure you move
10:10
your low quality, spammy links
10:12
because these links can actually
10:14
hurt your rankings as well, right?
10:17
If it’s unnatural,
10:18
it’s from a spammy site,
10:19
like if you have adult sites or casino sites linking to you
10:21
when you’re not in the adult nature.
10:23
Pharmaceutical sites linking to you,
10:25
when you’re not in the medical space,
10:27
something’s wrong, right?
10:29
You would want to clean those up and get those removed.
10:32
And the easiest way to tell, again,
10:33
is to go to Ubersuggest
10:34
and look at the sites linking to you.
10:37
Does the anchor text match what your page is about?
10:41
If it doesn’t, hmm,
10:42
something may be wrong there.
10:44
It doesn’t mean that you should remove that link right away
10:46
or try to get it removed,
10:47
it more so means you should investigate further.
10:50
Go to that page linking to you, right?
10:52
Because on the left side in that table
10:54
shows you all those URLs,
10:55
click on them.
10:56
Does it look like a legitimate site?
10:57
Is it related to your niche?
10:58
If so, great,
10:59
you don’t have anything to worry.
11:01
Does it look decent enough
11:02
where you should keep it,
11:03
you think you can potentially get customers from there?
11:05
That’s fine, that’s no issues at all.
11:08
But if it’s not that way,
11:10
then you want to end up getting it removed,
11:13
and I’ll show you how to do that in a little bit as well.
11:16
Going back to the site audit report,
11:18
you want to make sure you don’t have broken pages
11:20
or broken links.
11:21
It’ll point that out as well and you can fix those.
11:25
You also want to reach out to websites
11:28
when you see bad links or they’re broken,
11:31
other people linking to you.
11:33
You want to message them and tell them,
11:35
“Hey, I would appreciate it
11:36
“if you removed some of the links pointing to us.”
11:38
Some people will remove it, others won’t.
11:41
And if they don’t remove it
11:43
after you’ve tried reaching out to them multiple times,
11:45
you can go to Google’s Disavow tool,
11:47
just go to the URL on this page.
11:49
And create a Disavow file,
11:51
they show you how to do it,
11:52
and remove the bad links.
11:54
In other words,
11:55
you’re telling Google,
11:56
yes, I tried getting these sites to stop linking to me,
11:58
they won’t, but please ignore these links
12:00
and don’t count it against me.
12:03
And you just choose your file and upload it
12:05
and you’re off to the races.
12:07
And you’ll notice that a lot of those links over time
12:10
won’t hurt you then.
12:11
The next factor to look at is schema markup.
12:14
You know whenever you do a Google search
12:15
for things like a recipe
12:17
and it tells you what the recipe is,
12:18
and you can see the image and the reviews,
12:20
and how long it takes to cook that recipe?
12:23
That’s example of a schema markup.
12:25
Google’s not making up that information,
12:27
they’re getting that from your website code
12:29
on how long that recipe takes to make,
12:32
the review ratings.
12:33
So that way they can bring that
12:34
to the top of the search results,
12:36
because whenever you search for something on Google
12:38
and you want to see it with the nice image
12:40
and some good reviews,
12:41
and a low cook time,
12:43
assuming you’re searching for a recipe,
12:44
what are you going to do?
12:45
You’re more likely to click on that
12:47
than someone else’s site.
12:49
And schema markup shows Google all this information
12:53
and brings it so that,
12:54
when someone’s searching,
12:55
they can see it all.
12:56
And you can use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper tool
13:00
to create that data
13:01
to bring it up for your website.
13:03
Now, you may not have the pizzazz,
13:05
as a recipe site
13:06
but that’s okay.
13:07
Every site or most sites can have structured data.
13:11
And it ends up helping you create it,
13:12
you put in your URL, elements,
13:15
and it’ll tell you what to mark it up for.
13:16
Like, hey, this is an author,
13:18
this a date,
13:19
this is an article, right?
13:21
It ends up giving them the information.
13:22
These are reviews,
13:23
you can just select it,
13:24
you don’t have to be technical.
13:26
You can do it all through their WYSIWYG editor.
13:29
Then at the end,
13:31
they give you some code and, boom,
13:33
you add that code to your site.
13:35
The next thing to check out is site maps.
13:37
So within Google’s Search Console,
13:39
you want to upload a sitemap.
13:41
A sitemap tells Google,
13:43
“Hey, here are all the pages on my website,
13:45
“make sure you index as many as you can.”
13:48
The reason I say as many as you can,
13:50
because sometimes they don’t index all of them,
13:51
it’s up to them.
13:52
Maybe they don’t like certain pieces of content,
13:55
maybe they do,
13:56
but you want to make sure you submit your sitemap
13:57
because it gives you the best chance
13:59
of getting more and more pages indexed.
14:02
Then of course,
14:03
you want to look at your robots.txt pile.
14:06
Are you blocking any specific pages?
14:08
And throughout Google,
14:10
you can end up,
14:11
through Search Console,
14:12
you can see if any pages are blocked.
14:13
They report on it.
14:15
You can just put in any URL,
14:16
like your website .com slash robots.txt
14:19
and you can see what’s being blocked or what’s not.
14:22
And if it’s important pages being blocked,
14:24
you need to fix that.
14:25
You don’t want Google
14:26
not being able to crawl pages
14:28
that you want people to find you from.
14:30
You also want to look at your site structure,
14:33
does your site flow really well?
14:34
Are you linking all the pages together
14:36
that make sense?
14:37
That internal linking
14:39
really helps boost your rankings.
14:40
If you’re not doing a ton of internal linking,
14:41
you’re not going to do as well.
14:44
Remember how I showed you that top pages report?
14:46
If you have a new website,
14:47
you won’t see much there,
14:48
but if you have an existing website and a ton of traffic,
14:51
you want to make sure you’re linking to those top pages
14:53
when it makes sense
14:54
because it’ll even help them get more traffic,
14:56
more social shares,
14:57
more backlinks over time.
14:59
And of course,
15:00
last but not least,
15:01
I want you to check for penalties.
15:03
So go to Google Search Console,
15:05
look at manual actions
15:06
and just make sure there’s no issues detected.
15:08
Because if there are,
15:09
you want to fix them.
15:11
So before we end this,
15:12
make sure you go to nielpatel.com/training,
15:15
if you’re not already there,
15:16
and download the following worksheets
15:19
so that way we can fix all your site errors.
15:21
The first one I want you to do
15:23
is download and complete your SEO audit checklist.
15:26
Then I want you to download and audit your performance,
15:29
so download that Excel sheet.
15:31
Of course, last but not least,
15:33
I want you to audit your competitor’s performance
15:34
and download that Excel sheet
15:36
because it’ll breakdown how to do everything step by step.
15:39
Next week, I’m going to be covering
15:41
how you can find the right topic ideas that work every time.
15:45
So that way,
15:46
when you write content,
15:47
you actually get traffic.
15:48
And then, when you’re writing that content,
15:50
I want to make sure you don’t continually get stuck
15:52
in that loop of just saying,
15:54
“Hey, I have writer’s block,” or,
15:55
“Hey, I’ve written the content but no one’s visiting it.”
15:58
On top of that,
15:59
I’m going to break down how you can beat your competition,
16:01
which is really important
16:02
because you’re going to be competing with them
16:04
for some of the same terms.
16:05
And in addition to that,
16:07
as long as you follow my step by step approach,
16:09
you’ll know how to find and write top ranking content.
16:14
So thank you for following this lesson,
16:16
let my team and I know if you have any questions.
16:18
We’re here to help,
16:19
we want to see you succeed.
16:21
Make sure you go and do the assignments,
16:23
it doesn’t take that long.
16:24
And once you do them all,
16:25
you’ll start seeing better and better results over time,
16:28
as long as you’re following everything step by step.
16:31
If you’re confused, you’re lost,
16:32
please let us know,
16:33
we’re here to help.
– [Neil] Hey everyone,
00:01
it’s Neil Patel,
00:01
and today I’m going to teach you how to do an SEO site audit.
00:06
With this lesson,
00:07
there’s going to be a lot of factors
00:09
and a lot of things that we’re going to be breaking down.
00:12
Don’t worry if it gets overwhelming or confusing
00:14
because at the end,
00:15
there’s worksheets and templates
00:17
that’ll break down how to do everything
00:19
step by step with your website.
00:22
And you can find them at neilpatel.com/training
00:25
for these worksheets and templates.
00:27
In addition to that,
00:28
we’re going to show you
00:29
how you can do this through Ubersuggest,
00:31
which is an SEO tool.
00:32
So that way,
00:33
you don’t have to do this all manually.
00:36
So let’s get started,
00:37
let’s start by applying some of the things
00:40
that I’ve taught you in all the previous lessons
00:41
to your website now.
00:44
You want to first find the areas that you need to fix
00:46
on your website,
00:47
so first off,
00:48
go to Google and type in site, colon,
00:52
and put in your domain .com.
00:55
So mine would be site, colon, nielpatel.com.
00:59
Once you hit search,
01:00
what you’ll see is a list on Google.
01:03
You’ll either see one result,
01:06
which is not good,
01:07
you want to see more than one.
01:08
You’ll see zero results,
01:10
which is not good either
01:11
and if you have that, don’t worry,
01:12
we’ll teach you how to fix this.
01:14
Or ideally, the best example
01:16
would be you’re seeing 100s if not 1000s of results.
01:19
If your website is really small
01:21
and you only have one or two pages,
01:23
you won’t see many results.
01:24
You’ll see maybe one or two,
01:26
and sometimes zero if Google hasn’t indexed you at all.
01:29
And if your website is 1,000,000 pages,
01:31
you may not see 1,000,000 results here.
01:33
You may only see 200,000 or 100,000
01:36
because Google doesn’t always index
01:38
every page on your website.
01:39
And if you have that issue as well,
01:41
don’t worry, after this lesson
01:44
when you go through the worksheets
01:45
and the lessons and the homework,
01:47
I’ll break down how to fix that as well.
01:50
So once you know that you can be seen,
01:52
you want to make sure
01:53
there’s only one version of your website.
01:55
Do you have a www,
01:56
do you have a non-www,
01:58
do you have a https or is your website not secure
02:02
and you’re only http?
02:04
If you’re using an SSL certificate,
02:07
which I mention is previous lessons,
02:08
that’s very, very important
02:10
because Google’s mainly ranking sites
02:11
that have SSL certificates,
02:13
it’s for security purposes,
02:15
you should only see https version of your website.
02:18
As for the www or the non-www version,
02:23
your CMS, your content management system,
02:25
should be able to fix that for you
02:26
and throughout there
02:27
you can pick which version of your site
02:29
you want to appear.
02:31
Then I want you to go to Ubersuggest,
02:33
type in your domain name.
02:35
It’ll take you to an overview report
02:38
under the traffic analyser.
02:41
If you’re seeing more traffic over time, that’s great.
02:43
If you have a new website
02:44
or a website that’s barely old
02:46
and you haven’t done much SEO,
02:48
you’re probably going to see no results.
02:50
And that’s okay as well
02:51
because as you implement some of these changes
02:53
that I’m going to teach you,
02:55
your numbers are going to go up,
02:56
you’re going to rank for more keywords
02:58
which is what the bottom graph shows you,
03:00
and you’re going to get more traffic from Google,
03:02
which is what the top graph shows you.
03:03
And this report’s also cool
03:05
because you can put in some of your competitors
03:07
and it allows you to compare how you’re doing
03:09
to your competition over time.
03:11
Now it’s time to go and analyze your website
03:15
to see what’s wrong,
03:16
what you need to fix
03:17
and how you can get more traffic.
03:19
So within the sidebar of Ubersuggest,
03:21
I want you to click on site audit.
03:24
This is a report that’ll show you
03:25
everything that’s wrong with your website, or right.
03:28
The green stuff is good, that’s healthy,
03:31
anything that is orange or pinkish in color,
03:35
or gray or black is not good.
03:37
And you want to make sure all that stuff is fixed.
03:40
The gray stuff, for redirects,
03:42
could be okay depending on the redirect type.
03:46
So with the SEO site audit report,
03:49
it shows you an overview.
03:50
Your critical errors,
03:51
your warnings, your recommendations.
03:53
The bigger your site,
03:54
the longer it’s going to take to run this report.
03:57
You want to run your whole site,
03:59
check all your pages
04:00
to make sure you’re fixing all of them.
04:02
Because if you just fix some of your pages,
04:04
you’re not going to rank that well on Google.
04:06
You have to fix your whole site.
04:08
And on this report,
04:09
I want you to click on critical errors.
04:12
Once you click on critical errors,
04:13
you’ll see something like this.
04:14
It’ll show you all the errors and pages
04:17
that have critical issues.
04:18
Then you also want to look at the warnings tab
04:21
and then the recommendations tab as well.
04:23
Typically, when you’re doing SEO,
04:25
you want to fix the stuff on the critical errors tab first,
04:28
then warnings, then recommendations.
04:30
By going in that order,
04:32
you’re going to get the biggest bang for buck
04:33
when it comes to increasing your traffic.
04:36
Some things within the Ubersuggest site audit report
04:39
that you’ll learn
04:40
is your page title,
04:41
are they too long?
04:42
Are they duplicative?
04:44
In other words,
04:45
are they using the same title
04:47
for many, many pages?
04:48
Because that’s bad,
04:49
because it doesn’t tell Google which one’s unique.
04:51
Which ones should I rank for different keywords?
04:53
So you want to make sure your titles are all unique,
04:56
and of course,
04:57
if you’re not sure how to fix things,
04:58
like you’re seeing this error here,
05:01
there will be a little link that says,
05:02
“What is this and how do I fix it?”
05:04
You click on it,
05:05
it’ll tell you what it is
05:07
and it even breaks down how to fix it
05:09
and even links you to articles
05:10
that teach you how to fix it as well.
05:13
Redirects, same thing,
05:14
it’ll tell you if you have redirects
05:15
that are bad.
05:16
You ideally want to use 301 redirects,
05:20
anytime you’re using 302 and other types of redirects,
05:24
they’re not as good as 301s.
05:27
301s tell Google this page has moved,
05:29
transfer all the links,
05:30
transfer all the equity,
05:32
rank this page really high in Google.
05:34
302 is like,
05:35
“Hey, we’re temporarily not right here right now,
05:38
“but we don’t know when we’re coming back.”
05:40
That’s giving Google a fuzzy answer,
05:42
so you want to make sure you’re trying to use 301 redirects
05:45
instead of other types of redirects.
05:48
And redirect error codes,
05:49
there’s 301, right?
05:50
There are the major types of codes that you’ll see
05:52
throughout your research.
05:53
And 301s are okay
05:55
as long as they’re only used to redirect one page at a time.
06:00
You don’t want to keep doing redirects.
06:02
What I mean by this
06:03
is you don’t want to take one page
06:05
and redirect it to another page,
06:07
and have that page redirect back to the previous page.
06:11
That would create a loop.
06:12
If it’s a loop,
06:13
people don’t know where to go.
06:14
But one page redirecting to another page is fine,
06:17
you don’t want the other page to redirect to another page.
06:19
You just want to keep it simple
06:21
and do one redirect per page
06:23
if you ever decide to use them.
06:24
And if you’re not sure why people use redirects,
06:27
well, a lot of times,
06:28
people change their webpage URLs.
06:30
If you’re like, huh,
06:31
this article’s old,
06:32
I want to update the URL.
06:34
Well, you would redirect the old one to the new one.
06:36
Or if you want to change your domain name
06:37
from abcd.com to abc.com
06:40
because you’re able to knock off one letter by abc.com,
06:44
then that would be another example of using a redirect.
06:47
Again, you can use 302s
06:49
but you don’t want to use them too long.
06:51
If you’re using them for more than three months,
06:53
then that’s not good.
06:55
A 400 error means users can’t get to that page,
06:58
a 403 error means that page is not authorized,
07:01
404 page usually means it’s not found.
07:05
You want to redirect these,
07:06
use 301 redirects.
07:08
500 errors are internal errors,
07:10
like with your server or your web development.
07:12
Send it to anyone technical on your team
07:14
and they can fix those.
07:16
Thin content is something
07:17
that you’ll also find a lot within Ubersuggest.
07:19
If it shows that you have thin content,
07:21
that’s not good.
07:22
You want to fix that.
07:24
Thin content means there’s not enough text on a page,
07:26
and you won’t be able to fix every page
07:29
that’s thin in content
07:30
because some of them,
07:31
like your about page,
07:32
you’re not going to have 5000 words on your about page.
07:34
You merely have 100, 200 words,
07:36
or your contact page,
07:37
and that’s okay.
07:39
Not every page is going to be perfect and have a lot of text,
07:42
but fix the ones that make sense.
07:45
Review those pages,
07:46
make sure they have unique title tags
07:49
and unique meta descriptions as well.
07:52
You also want to makes sure
07:53
you’re not missing any image alt tags on images.
07:56
Image alt tags tell Google,
07:58
“Hey, this is what this image is about.”
08:00
If you have an article about cars
08:03
and then you have an image
08:04
breaking down a car and it’s a Mercedes car,
08:07
and a certain type,
08:07
and it’s four doors and it’s gray in color,
08:10
use the alt tag that describes that.
08:12
Because when people search on Google for images,
08:14
and the image search is very popular,
08:16
especially niches like travel,
08:18
if you don’t have alt tags,
08:20
it’s harder for Google
08:20
to decipher what that images is about.
08:24
You also want to look at internal links.
08:26
Throughout Ubersuggest,
08:27
once you put in your URL,
08:29
assuming you’re getting more and more traffic,
08:31
eventually you’ll see your top pages report load up
08:34
with a ton of examples.
08:35
If you don’t,
08:36
you can put in a competitor
08:37
and you’ll see all of their top pages.
08:39
These are all the pages on your site
08:41
or a competitor’s site
08:42
that’s getting good traffic from Google.
08:44
Again, as I mentioned,
08:45
if your site’s new,
08:46
you won’t see any results here.
08:48
But as your site gets more popular,
08:49
you’ll see results.
08:51
You can also use this report
08:52
to see what pages are popular on your competition,
08:55
and it will give you ideas
08:56
of the type of pages you should create.
08:59
And when you have pages that are popular,
09:01
you want to make sure you’re linking to them
09:03
throughout your whole site,
09:04
so that way they rank even higher
09:06
and get more links as well.
09:09
Backlinks, really important factor
09:10
because the more sites linking to you,
09:12
the better you’re going to do as well.
09:14
But not all links are equal,
09:16
some are bad,
09:17
some are good.
09:18
And Google breaks down things
09:19
like you want your links
09:20
to be unique and relevant, that’s great.
09:23
Your links should be within content,
09:25
they should be beneficial to people.
09:28
If it’s not beneficial to them,
09:30
then there’s no point of that link existing.
09:32
You don’t want to pay people for links either,
09:34
that’s really bad.
09:35
It’s short-sighted,
09:37
it can also lead to penalties and decreases in rankings
09:40
if Google finds out you’re doing that.
09:42
When you’re looking at your links within Ubersuggest,
09:45
I want you to go to the backlinks report,
09:47
which is one of the last options in the navigation,
09:51
and look at the anchor text.
09:52
This report shows you all the people linking to you
09:56
and the anchor text of the link.
09:57
That’s the keyword people are putting in the link.
10:00
The text of that link,
10:02
does it really match up to the page that they’re linking to?
10:05
If it doesn’t and it looks spammy,
10:07
you got another issue
10:09
and you want to make sure you move
10:10
your low quality, spammy links
10:12
because these links can actually
10:14
hurt your rankings as well, right?
10:17
If it’s unnatural,
10:18
it’s from a spammy site,
10:19
like if you have adult sites or casino sites linking to you
10:21
when you’re not in the adult nature.
10:23
Pharmaceutical sites linking to you,
10:25
when you’re not in the medical space,
10:27
something’s wrong, right?
10:29
You would want to clean those up and get those removed.
10:32
And the easiest way to tell, again,
10:33
is to go to Ubersuggest
10:34
and look at the sites linking to you.
10:37
Does the anchor text match what your page is about?
10:41
If it doesn’t, hmm,
10:42
something may be wrong there.
10:44
It doesn’t mean that you should remove that link right away
10:46
or try to get it removed,
10:47
it more so means you should investigate further.
10:50
Go to that page linking to you, right?
10:52
Because on the left side in that table
10:54
shows you all those URLs,
10:55
click on them.
10:56
Does it look like a legitimate site?
10:57
Is it related to your niche?
10:58
If so, great,
10:59
you don’t have anything to worry.
11:01
Does it look decent enough
11:02
where you should keep it,
11:03
you think you can potentially get customers from there?
11:05
That’s fine, that’s no issues at all.
11:08
But if it’s not that way,
11:10
then you want to end up getting it removed,
11:13
and I’ll show you how to do that in a little bit as well.
11:16
Going back to the site audit report,
11:18
you want to make sure you don’t have broken pages
11:20
or broken links.
11:21
It’ll point that out as well and you can fix those.
11:25
You also want to reach out to websites
11:28
when you see bad links or they’re broken,
11:31
other people linking to you.
11:33
You want to message them and tell them,
11:35
“Hey, I would appreciate it
11:36
“if you removed some of the links pointing to us.”
11:38
Some people will remove it, others won’t.
11:41
And if they don’t remove it
11:43
after you’ve tried reaching out to them multiple times,
11:45
you can go to Google’s Disavow tool,
11:47
just go to the URL on this page.
11:49
And create a Disavow file,
11:51
they show you how to do it,
11:52
and remove the bad links.
11:54
In other words,
11:55
you’re telling Google,
11:56
yes, I tried getting these sites to stop linking to me,
11:58
they won’t, but please ignore these links
12:00
and don’t count it against me.
12:03
And you just choose your file and upload it
12:05
and you’re off to the races.
12:07
And you’ll notice that a lot of those links over time
12:10
won’t hurt you then.
12:11
The next factor to look at is schema markup.
12:14
You know whenever you do a Google search
12:15
for things like a recipe
12:17
and it tells you what the recipe is,
12:18
and you can see the image and the reviews,
12:20
and how long it takes to cook that recipe?
12:23
That’s example of a schema markup.
12:25
Google’s not making up that information,
12:27
they’re getting that from your website code
12:29
on how long that recipe takes to make,
12:32
the review ratings.
12:33
So that way they can bring that
12:34
to the top of the search results,
12:36
because whenever you search for something on Google
12:38
and you want to see it with the nice image
12:40
and some good reviews,
12:41
and a low cook time,
12:43
assuming you’re searching for a recipe,
12:44
what are you going to do?
12:45
You’re more likely to click on that
12:47
than someone else’s site.
12:49
And schema markup shows Google all this information
12:53
and brings it so that,
12:54
when someone’s searching,
12:55
they can see it all.
12:56
And you can use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper tool
13:00
to create that data
13:01
to bring it up for your website.
13:03
Now, you may not have the pizzazz,
13:05
as a recipe site
13:06
but that’s okay.
13:07
Every site or most sites can have structured data.
13:11
And it ends up helping you create it,
13:12
you put in your URL, elements,
13:15
and it’ll tell you what to mark it up for.
13:16
Like, hey, this is an author,
13:18
this a date,
13:19
this is an article, right?
13:21
It ends up giving them the information.
13:22
These are reviews,
13:23
you can just select it,
13:24
you don’t have to be technical.
13:26
You can do it all through their WYSIWYG editor.
13:29
Then at the end,
13:31
they give you some code and, boom,
13:33
you add that code to your site.
13:35
The next thing to check out is site maps.
13:37
So within Google’s Search Console,
13:39
you want to upload a sitemap.
13:41
A sitemap tells Google,
13:43
“Hey, here are all the pages on my website,
13:45
“make sure you index as many as you can.”
13:48
The reason I say as many as you can,
13:50
because sometimes they don’t index all of them,
13:51
it’s up to them.
13:52
Maybe they don’t like certain pieces of content,
13:55
maybe they do,
13:56
but you want to make sure you submit your sitemap
13:57
because it gives you the best chance
13:59
of getting more and more pages indexed.
14:02
Then of course,
14:03
you want to look at your robots.txt pile.
14:06
Are you blocking any specific pages?
14:08
And throughout Google,
14:10
you can end up,
14:11
through Search Console,
14:12
you can see if any pages are blocked.
14:13
They report on it.
14:15
You can just put in any URL,
14:16
like your website .com slash robots.txt
14:19
and you can see what’s being blocked or what’s not.
14:22
And if it’s important pages being blocked,
14:24
you need to fix that.
14:25
You don’t want Google
14:26
not being able to crawl pages
14:28
that you want people to find you from.
14:30
You also want to look at your site structure,
14:33
does your site flow really well?
14:34
Are you linking all the pages together
14:36
that make sense?
14:37
That internal linking
14:39
really helps boost your rankings.
14:40
If you’re not doing a ton of internal linking,
14:41
you’re not going to do as well.
14:44
Remember how I showed you that top pages report?
14:46
If you have a new website,
14:47
you won’t see much there,
14:48
but if you have an existing website and a ton of traffic,
14:51
you want to make sure you’re linking to those top pages
14:53
when it makes sense
14:54
because it’ll even help them get more traffic,
14:56
more social shares,
14:57
more backlinks over time.
14:59
And of course,
15:00
last but not least,
15:01
I want you to check for penalties.
15:03
So go to Google Search Console,
15:05
look at manual actions
15:06
and just make sure there’s no issues detected.
15:08
Because if there are,
15:09
you want to fix them.
15:11
So before we end this,
15:12
make sure you go to nielpatel.com/training,
15:15
if you’re not already there,
15:16
and download the following worksheets
15:19
so that way we can fix all your site errors.
15:21
The first one I want you to do
15:23
is download and complete your SEO audit checklist.
15:26
Then I want you to download and audit your performance,
15:29
so download that Excel sheet.
15:31
Of course, last but not least,
15:33
I want you to audit your competitor’s performance
15:34
and download that Excel sheet
15:36
because it’ll breakdown how to do everything step by step.
15:39
Next week, I’m going to be covering
15:41
how you can find the right topic ideas that work every time.
15:45
So that way,
15:46
when you write content,
15:47
you actually get traffic.
15:48
And then, when you’re writing that content,
15:50
I want to make sure you don’t continually get stuck
15:52
in that loop of just saying,
15:54
“Hey, I have writer’s block,” or,
15:55
“Hey, I’ve written the content but no one’s visiting it.”
15:58
On top of that,
15:59
I’m going to break down how you can beat your competition,
16:01
which is really important
16:02
because you’re going to be competing with them
16:04
for some of the same terms.
16:05
And in addition to that,
16:07
as long as you follow my step by step approach,
16:09
you’ll know how to find and write top ranking content.
16:14
So thank you for following this lesson,
16:16
let my team and I know if you have any questions.
16:18
We’re here to help,
16:19
we want to see you succeed.
16:21
Make sure you go and do the assignments,
16:23
it doesn’t take that long.
16:24
And once you do them all,
16:25
you’ll start seeing better and better results over time,
16:28
as long as you’re following everything step by step.
16:31
If you’re confused, you’re lost,
16:32
please let us know,
16:33
we’re here to help.
Optimized Webmedia Marketing is the best SEO Vancouver company. To learn how Optimized Webmedia Marketing can help optimize your website to attract more organic visitors, book a free consultation.
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