A Technical “Non-Content” Audit — Mike King / iPullRank

Quotes

• “I dont know the specifics but one of the things that we would look for is the structure. There are specific podcast mark-ups you could be using, you want to have transcripts of your podcasts so you could rank for the things that you talk about because Google is still not using a voice-detect technology, so you have to put it in front of them in the right way.” -Mike

• “We would first crawl the site and depending on the tool that we use, there are certain insights that you can get from the tool itself, and then there are insights that you can get just by looking at the pages.” -Mike

• “First go through a crawl and see what the issues are, again with that segmented approach, what are the technical items looking at things like the ACTP headers, code structure and so on, and then identifying what the issues are there.” -Mike

• “From there you want to look at each page type. I always look at tenpages of each page type just to see what the commonalities are in the problem. So I would go into the browser looking at both the code and inspect element view, looking at the differences between the two. Because one of the common issues that we will haveis somebodys content being rendered using javascript or is it being rendered service side. So what are the discrepancies between the two.” -Mike

• “So one of the things that you are talking about is looking at the overall site infrastructure and often even for enterprise brands, thats not something that they necessarily control.” -Mike

• “Its CMS-dependent and I see this a lot when I see the audits people have done on Shopify sites as an example. They will give you a bunch of recommendations about page speed and so on, but theres a lot of things in that environment that you just have no control.” -Mike

• “The first thing to do is understand theCMS you are on by understanding what your limitations are and then limit your recommendations or auditing to things that you can actually control. No one needs an audit that looks at 200 things that cant just be done in that environment.” -Mike

• “I think Wordpress is very conducive to all of those use cases you just said. Because you can get on Wordpress VIP and be on the right hosting provider that is managed where you dont have a lot of the problems that people have when they are just running Wordpress on GoDaddy or something. There is a lot of security that can make Wordpress more secure and so on.” -Mike

• “On technical components of SEO, we are looking at rendering process, what third-party scripts are taking the longest and how do we speed those up. We are also taking a look at the database where we can optimize there and its not just what is the front-end of the website doing but the backend as well. We are also digging on the internal linkings.” -Mike

• “A lot of those things are identifiable with whatever tool you are using but it is more important that you are looking at the site in a segmented structure because there are different page types that govern different components of the website.” -Mike

• “Everything starts on keyword researchfrom that point. Not only just identifying keywords, reviewing the SERPs to see what is Google surfacing for this query, and then also what are the questions that are being asked on this query, and structuring your page to match with that and to align it with the business that you are trying to accomplish.” -Mike

• “Whatever is relevant to that query then determine is there also a structured mark-up that makes sense for that as well and then incorporate than into your copy. Otherwise, you can just answerthe questions with respect to the needs of the user and that should be enough.” -Mike