SEO Audits - A Real Grind My Gears Topic!

SEO

If I see another SEO audit sent to me by a potential client that looks like a child made it I will create my own SEO agency rating platform - and not one you can "buy" a placement on.

It's 2021, if you are going to charge clients ￡3k-￡5k a month for something that I could have made in 15 minutes - that's not cool.

An SEO audit - I repeat, an SEO Audit is NOT a place to dump a load of basic shit into a spreadsheet.

I keep seeing it - again and again

SEO Audit

A report on 404s, 301s, title tag length, canonical tags and XML sitemaps -?

Yeah because those things have a dramatic impact on ranking?

NO.

Most sites that rank in most niches for most keywords will fall down on 404s, many will have re-directs, some will have duff canonical references, some will have no sitemap.

Want an SEO audit to be meaningful?

???? Show a current summary of traffic segmented by ALL traffic and then non brand / non blog

???? Perform a GSC query dump and split tabs out by brand, non brand, intent (high), intent (low)

???? Perform a cannibalisation audit - then batch group cannibalising queries by URL - remember SEO is about going after the money terms (unless brand awareness)

???? Perform a LOW quality content audit, dump out aged URLS with no clicks and low impressions - group into 0 click HIGH, MED, LOW impr?

???? Content cull list based on page value - get rid of any 0 click, LOW impr URLS that show signs of being defunct in GA (DO NOT ASSUME THAT SOMETHING WITH NO ORGANIC VALUE ISN'T GETTING TRAFFIC FROM OTHER SOURCES)

???? Perform a click gap analysis (again, groups) - click gap analysis for ALL traffic, then non brand, then non brand non blog - you can also group click GAP analysis into categories i.e. transactional terms - research intent terms (you can run a REGEX filter on GSC data based on how, why, what, where, when to pull research intent terms or use regex for ^(buy|cheap|shop|price) etc to strip out purchase intent terms

???? Audit site structure for each group - look at intent alignment, topical NLP scores, INLINKS scores (and topical chart coverage), Surfer Scores - look at SERP alignment (parent pages, root domain, categories) - are competing results using clustering??

???? Prepare content analysis with the cannibalisation in mind - score content

???? Then run a GSC segment analysis (I keep mentioning this - the video is coming I promise) - segment each URL filtering out queries, count the volume of clicks that generated a click vs 0 click queries. You need to find a pages strengths and weaknesses. During the segment analysis you will need to run topical alignment - find pages with loose query alignment - a content strategy can address this - at the same time, mark out URLS that cross compete for the same terms (I am writing a Apps Script to help automate some of this)

???? Use ALL of the data above to highlight key issues with cannibalisation, low quality content, site architecture, clustering requirements

???? HERE, You can start adding in tech stuff - page speed / CWV / page experience, page rendering, device level performance, crawl issues, canonicalisation issues, page architecture ATF/CF/LF, hreflang, indexing, omitted results, coverage issues

???? Then, provide the client with some SERP insights based on lead money terms?- how fresh are the SERPS? how often do they change, who has climbed over time? any insights to their strategy

Then you can begin the SEO journey.

SEO should be GO HARD or GO HOME.

The SEO industry has exploded in the last 2 years - COVID has shaped the world to further rely on online working, online transacting - for that reason there are a million new cooks in the kitchen.

But, sadly, agencies are on a talent grab - almost anyone can walk into an agency with little to no experience - other than dumping a website in SEMRUSH, AHREFS or Screamfrog, then spitting the data out into a branded spreadsheet.

That's not SEO.

That's data entry.

There is NOTHING WRONG with employing junior SEO's or people learning SEO, just don't be putting that stuff forward to clients who are paying.

I know this sounds brutal, and it is, in the last 6 months I have seen SEO audits and reports from some fairly big agencies and I have to say - it's ridiculous - serious ripping off is endemic.

Do SEO because you LOVE IT, don't think you'll waltz into the industry and become a pro overnight with Neil Patel Guides or Quick Win SEO guides - it's not that simple.

Love and light x

#seo #seo2021 #digitalmarketing #stateofdigital #seoconsultant #seospecialist

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