A Basic (Yet Powerful) Technical SEO Audit for Beginners

Technical SEO audits are very important.

But for a beginner to SEO, they can be extremelydaunting.

So in this video, I'm going to break downa super basic, yet powerful SEO audit that you can use to find some seriously weird technicalSEO issues on your website.

Stay tuned.

[music] What's up SEOs? Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool thathelps you grow your search traffic, research your competitors and dominate your niche.

Now, a few weeks ago, I posted a questionon our YouTube community board asking our subscribers to submit their website if theywanted us to feature it in this video.

So I dug through a bunch of your submissionsand congratulations to S Krag of centralparktutors.

com and Jim Miller of xs-stock.

co.

uk.

I found a bunch of technical SEO issues withyour websites.

Don't worry guys.

.

.

you're not alone.

A lot of popular websites, even in the marketingniche, have some seriously weird technical SEO issues.

And the only tool that you need to find and fixthese errors is Google.

Now, before we dive into the tutorial, I wantto give a huge shoutout to Glen Allsop from detailed.

com, who shared a bunch of these tips with us.

So make sure to check out his site.

.

.

seriouslysolid stuff.

Alright, so let's break down example site#1 that we're analyzing.

Central Park Tutors is a group of teachersand parents who provide private tutoring services in NYC.

According to Ahrefs Site Explorer, the websitegets around 500 organic search visitors per month and Google has indexed around 400 pages.

So the first thing I'm going to do is typein their domain in the browser.

And you can see that they're using the unsecure, non-www version of the website.

And of course, we should check for the www version too.

And it looks like the redirect is good.

So I'll check the HTTPs version now.

And it looks like this one loads without aredirect.

And I'll check the secure www version, which then redirects to the secure URL without the www.

So the first thing you're going to want todo is to create the proper redirects and choose one version.

So I would recommend consolidating to the httpsdomain version, which will be applied to every individual page on your website in additionto the homepage.

Now let's get to our search queries.

First, we'll enter in “site:centralparktutors.

com”, which will look for all indexed pages on this domain and then we'll add “inurl:www”, whichwill look for any indexed pages that contain www within the URL.

And everything looks good here.

Now, I'll modify this query a bit and changethis last part to “-inurl:https”, which will look for unsecure versions of the pages thatare indexed.

And there are around 164 results here.

So I'll click on this one and indeed, it doesnot redirect to the secure version.

In fact, this page looks a little bit strange, because it has a random link to a Money Coach, some kind of Swiss website, and a Winnipeg drivingschool.

That doesn't really make much sense to me, so I'mled to believe that your site has been hacked.

Alright, let's go back to our search query, and remove the minus sign to look for secure URLs that are in Google's index.

And testing this URL, there is no redirecteither and a bunch of interesting links here too.

Now, if you find that your website is havingsimilar issues, then I highly recommend fixing these before continuing on with this tutorial.

So I'll switch gears here and analyze anotherone of our subscribers' websites called xs-stock.

co.

uk.

Now, this is a family-run business based inScotland selling discount items.

They have an e-commerce store as well as amassive 25, 000-square foot retail warehouse.

And according to Ahrefs Site Explorer, thewebsite gets around 11, 000 organic search visitors per month and Google UK has indexedaround 6, 700 pages.

I've already tested all redirect versionsand all seem good as well as the other queries we had done before.

So this time, I'll start off with just the”site:xs-stock.

co.

uk” query.

Now from here, I'll just kind of skim throughthe results to look for potential issues.

And I actually don't even need to scroll downbecause there's one thing that I notice immediately.

Most of the pages actually have “XS-Stock.

com”in their title, when the website actually uses the .

co.

uk TLD.

Now, while this particular issue is more forbranding, it creates incongruence between the title and domain, which may affect click-throughrates.

In other times, you'll see templates thathave just gone completely wrong.

So I'll modify our query and add “intitle:xs-stock.

com”.

And you'll see hundreds of pages where thetitle tags need to be updated to reflect the correct domain.

Now the thing with technical SEO is that asyou discover one problem, you'll start to discover others.

So if we go to xs-stock.

com, you'll see thatthey've redirected the homepage to their “.

co.

uk” domain.

Great! But let's see if any pages from their .

com version are still indexed.

So I'll enter in “site:xs-stock.

com”, and you'llsee over one hundred results.

Clicking through, you'll notice that theyhaven't redirected all pages yet since this URL still loads.

Let's go back to the original Google SERPand, as we start to scroll down, you'll start seeing some other technical issues that areworth investigating like empty meta descriptions, truncated title tags, some pagination issues, and likely faceted navigation issues too.

For example, we could take the “page” parameterand change our query a bit by adding “inurl:page”.

And you'll see about one hundred pages thatare indexed here.

And there's another URL parameter called “sort, “which they probably wouldn't want indexed here either.

And the list, I'm sure, will go on, particularlysince it's an e-commerce website where it's really easy to make technical SEO mistakes.

Now, if you're using WordPress, then you cansearch for a whole bunch of common footprints like “site:yourdomain.

com”, then add “inurl:tag”, or “author”, or “page”, which will help find pages that you may want to noindex.

Or you can look for weird ones like this: site:domain.

com inurl:welcome-to-wordpressOR inurl:hello-world which will show you if a site still has thedefault pages from the initial WordPress install.

You could also do something like site:domain.

com”lorem ipsum, ” to find any pages that are indexed by Google that are still using dummytext.

To be sure, look at the meta description tosee if the whole dummy text is being used on the page.

One last tip I want to share with you is forthe privacy of your assets, employees, and clients.

And that's to do a site search for your domainand then to add “filetype:pdf” or whatever file extension you want to search.

Now the PDFs here on Ahrefs aren't that exciting, but through my research, I've found organizations that are uploading employee salaries, homeaddresses, and other personal details that are worth deleting.

As you can see, you don't need any fancy toolsto run a basic SEO audit.

So I encourage you to do this not just foryour own site, but if you're an agency, you can use these queries to find prospects fornew business.

Now, the downside to using Google alone isthat they don't always recrawl these so-called “meaningless” pages frequently and the resultscan be quite messy.

Now a few good things about using tools likeAhrefs Site Audit is that: #1.

You can get fresh data since you would runthe crawl on demand.

And #2.

Our tool automatically searches for over100 common technical SEO issues, that you can't quite find using Google alone like 301redirects or 404 broken pages, unless you want to click through to each page.

So from our Site Audit, you can see that wefound 276 300-series redirects and 30 404 pages.

#3.

You can automatically monitor the technicalSEO health of your website through scheduled weekly crawls.

And #4.

You can use Data Explorer to create your owncustom queries to find issues that wouldn't apply to every site.

For example, if I wanted to look for pagesthat include “XS-Stock.

com” in their title tag, then I could run a custom query to lookfor internal HTML pages that return a 200 response code with titles that contain “XS-Stock.

com”.

From here, I could export all of the URLsand have someone else update the affected pages or send it to a developer to fix thetemplate.

So while you might want to go and build linksor create content, make sure that your website's rankings aren't hindered by basic technicalSEO mistakes because they're super important and quite easy to fix for the most part.

Now, if you enjoyed this video, make sureto like, share, and subscribe.

And if you want to see more technical SEOvideos, then let us know in the comments.

So keep grinding away, don't ignore your technicalSEO, and I'll see you in the next tutorial.

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