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

hi guys David of Xfinity here with a eh Refs today I'm going to run you through a process I use to give me a quick fuel for a website and hopefully identify some SEO issues in the process so you can see I've got a number of tabs open

here which will be using shortly but before I do that I'm actually just going to nip over to a program called beam us up which is basically a web crawler that'll spider the site the way Google sees it I'm using bhima's up but you could use screaming frog

or any alternative crawlers to do the same so I'm just going to start that process in the background and well that's going ahead we could net back over here and start going through the website itself okay so first things first we'll go to the the website we're going

to be auditing and this particular one is an e-commerce site called toy universe home dot EU so we're on the home page of the site and if we just quickly view the source let's take a look at some fundamental on-page factors first of all we've got the title

tag you can see the target a couple of different keywords here by kids toys online toy store etc I would personally be wanting to see the brand at the front there but that's something we can look at and they've got our Meta Description in place looks ok and

beatable places for our shipping so they've got some key points in there which is what you want to get across in your your Meta Description think of it as your advert and the search results and then we're just going to do a quick search just ctrl F of

the living cool on Windows and just check the h1 tag so again you can see there's a couple of keywords in there which is fine nothing spammy though and we've got an each to blue which is fine let's just double check this on the yup we only have

one instance of these two at then we'll check each three we've got feature products which is maybe want to perhaps move over h3 and the other ones there's an awful lot of them but I am basically it looks like they're just targets and subcategories just probably fine okay

well close that okay next we'll have a look at natural product so scroll down and we'll go for the zoo Merv's appeal of pop star so again I'll have a look at the same kind of things first of all just view the source and take a little second

to load up sorry about that so title we've got here looks like it's the name of the product then that looks like the category and then toys online which I don't really think we need there so that's probably something that can change add descriptions in place looks looks

reasonable not too bad I will look for the h1 again and just in with the product just fine h2 it seems ok NH threes yeah these are these little they're going to have to have to potentially change so that's something we can possibly have a think of it

ok so while while we're on here what we'll do is we'll actually just grab some of the text from here so we're just going to grab sentence from here and we're going to nip over to Google and in this case we'll be using Google Australia so let's just

paste in that text in quotation marks and we can see the 17 results for tonnes and in fact there's quite a lot of different sites there so yep that's that's definitely gonna be an issue common issue with e-commerce sites ok second thing we're going to look at is

search for the brand just make sure they're ranking for the brand which they are which is fine and while we're here we'll search for my kids toys online which was one of the main phrases they were targeting you can see the position for the present so they're in

the ballpark but there's definitely room for improvement okay and final thing we're we're here let's search site colon toy universe como EU which will return basically all the pages Google currently has indexed and we can see the 6119 which may be an issue I know they have about

2000 products from talking to them before so that could potentially be an issue with the Wii the catalog is currently indexing which is quite a common problem with ecommerce sites but that's something we can look out later okay so next we're going to jump over to Google search

console formerly of course Webmaster Tools and we'll just have a quick couple of checks and first of all let's just check and see if there's any crawl errors you can see this is quite a few not phone errors which is possibly the way the site's currently dealing with

overstock products or expired products but there's something can I take a look at there's some access denied errors which is maybe something really to look up to and also let's just have a quick look at HTML improvements now we'll pick most of this up on the big goal

of enrolling but it's worth having a quick look and see what Google is governesses information as well so you can see they're picking up some duplicate title tags etc which is probably something we're going to take a look at EDD short meta descriptions etc so we can take

a look at that and you do process next for today we're going to jump into Google Analytics but before we do that I'm just going to pause for a second and change the screen size so as not to give away any financial information go with me okay so

over in analytics and you can see I'm actually on the acquisition overview screen so we can just have a quick look how much traffic's currently coming from search so we can see there's as about you know 200 to 300 a day currently from search and we're looking at

peds or looking at basically August at the moment well also have a quick look at is I'm just going to run quare quite a long range here just going to go back to 2012 and view by week bear with me so I'm just looking to see if there's

any big big self peaks and drop-offs which we can see that there are actually a couple of big Peaks here but the time in the Christmas period which I would expect would be seasonal söderling ascent to concern ourselves with air we can see overall traffic's are taking a

slight increases quite stagnant at the moment it's gone up again no actually a check could be could be the build-up to Christmas as well and I'm just going to correctly change the range back to August and we'll go by day again and we're gonna have a quick look

at landing pages so we can see Legos Legos a big one lay by information which is a seems to be we're getting quite a lot of traffic hat it's quite a quite a lot of different line of pages 265 which suggests reasonable Sega health so that's something we

could take a bit more I'll look at a bit more detail in the future ok I'm going to pause again now and go back to full screen for the next step so we're now in each dress itself and we're just on the overview page for the domain we're

just going to have a quick look at the sakes of overall health and link profile etc you can see the 64 de ferran domains at pleasant let's just take a quick look at the anchor text distribution and anchors close and we can see number one is Niki GRL

which is good 21 percent then we've got branded search is SOE branded anchor 2 second 11 percent I have to see this quite a lot of branded anchors in there which is very good and overall this looks like a mixture of products etcetera which which is nothing to

be concerned about and all good so scrolling back up let's have a look at broken back links under inbound links this is often where you can find some quick wins so this would basically be sites that are linking to pages that no longer exists the base of the

Tollan 4 or 4s now so there's actually a few of them in there so we could set up 301 redirects all PDS or we could reach out and ask the Lincoln sakes the changes that change the links okay and no let's actually just go in and have a

look at referring the means and we'll just do a fairly quick sort of sniff test on the lincoln domains themselves okay so let's order by domain rating so we've got the most powerful links at the top and we can see these look to me these look pretty decent

any ones you're not so sure about you can obviously just pop in click on the link and have a look at it this looks absolutely fine I have scroll down nice sort of spread to your nothing that looks particularly worrying from what I can see perhaps things like

this sir something ticker click closer look at but for the moment we just wanted to make sure there is nothing particularly obviously spammy in there which that doesn't seem to be so that's all all good so far okay we're now going to jump into a tool called the

penguin tool by barracuda this is a free tool and what this does is actually just overlays Google's algorithmic updates over your search traffic so if we turn them all on we can see when the videos of these where and we can see if that corresponds to any particular

drops in traffic now there is if at some patches Topanga we can see there is a big drop-off here which does tie in with penguin but I suspect this is more to do with the seasonal spike as opposed to anything else we can see a big big increase

October and so our depth down as we get closer to customers so I don't think this is anything to worry about but you know it's something we could possibly take a closer look at that's a very very useful tool just to quickly annoys any potential penalty the site

may have incurred so just a couple more steps to go now if we nip over know what we're going to use is Google's PageSpeed and sites and we'll just have a look at the home page for Nova this is obviously you could start looking at individual pages and

really really analyzing this but for the moment we'll just take a look at the the home page so it's just going to take a few seconds just to analyze the page and it'll return for us any issues that thinks we should fix to speed up the site you

can see it's getting at the moment we're going to score of 58 over 100 for mobile which is not not amazing so there's certainly a few issues we could potentially fix here desktops giving a 73 over 100 which again there's probably some some changes we can make just

to speed the SE up of it which should help with our rankings of an else being equal and finally what we're going to do is we're going to have a quick look at structured data and just see if there's anything in here it could be causing an issue

so for this I'm going to grab a product again and I'm just going to paste the URL in here fetch and validate and again I'll just take a couple of seconds just to a nice page you can see in fact that this is returning errors at present which

looks like it's to do with reviews so this is something that we're going to have to address to make sure that the Rich Snippets are showing up in search results for the product so that says pretty much there with all the on site steps and the the 15-minute

audit air so we've got minute to spare so what we can do is just net back over to beam us up and we can see that the crawl we started at the start of this process is no completed and as 5189 urls have been phoned and this is

just going to give us information like the title links etc etc canonical URLs all information we can use it also over here actually split down things like duplicated pages duplicate titles which we can see there's quite a lot of their titles missing each one's missing etc all information

we can use to basically clean up the site and get a ranking better so that's our 50 minute audit completed and you can see that even in this short time we've picked up a number of issues we can buck upon to improve our site's SEO obviously from here

you want to really deep dive in and this is not meant to be an exhaustive process this is just to give us an overview of the site and pick up any major issues that may be holding us back it's very much a process you can run through yourself

and for most sites you'll certainly find two or three issues at least that you can walk upon and the notes below is a link to the blog post that accompanies this video where I discuss the steps in a little more detail and also link out to the various

tools we used along the way any questions or comments just leave them below I'll see you soon thanks