How to perform a website audit — Björn Darko // Searchmetrics

Quotes

• “We are converting services, strategic services, as well as SEO technical services so performing a website audit, is like our bread and butter.” -Björn

• “I think this is a classic thing in SEO. We are very reactive. Sometimes its too late when they want an audit and the thing with an audit if you are working as an in-house, you should at least do a bi-annual audit. Its good for you because you will have an overview of the technical depth of the website and the potential of the page.” -Björn

• “An audit should contain three main parts. The first part of an audit is the business analysis which is to evaluate what business you are doing the audit for, how they generate revenue, which page makes the most conversion etcetera. The second part is site analysis and when you do the recommendations from here always keep in mind how the company is generating revenue.” -Björn

• “What is really important is to look at the buyer flow as well. Where do the buyers and users come from, which traffic channel and which are the important pages driving the most conversion.” -Björn

• “You also need to do a traffic and ranking analyzer within the business analyzers as well where you are looking at different channels and especially at SEO, you are looking at the top-ranking pages and the top-ranking keywords as well because you want to secure them.” -Björn

• “The first thing that you are doing is looking at the buyer journey, understanding key landing pages, and understanding what the flows are to get someone into the conversion path, understanding which pages at the bottom of your funnel are actually converting.” -Ben

• “One more important thing, if you look at rankings, you can ask people how much traffic you generate from a search engine, and they say 50% is organic traffic. But heres the thing, within the organic, you need to distinguish between a brand and non-brand traffic.” -Björn

• “If you have a big brand like IBM and Adidas, you may have 70% brand traffic and 30% non-brand traffic. As an SEO its your task to increase the non-brand traffic more than the brand traffic because this is something you cannot really influence. You can do TV advertising and you have a big buzz on social media that is somehow impacting traffic but if you think about content doing an audit to rank, the informational page is higher.” -Björn

• “In the second stage, you do an initial crawl. So, youre using a crawler and pretending to be a Google bot or smart bot and you crawl the entire page. Every URL you can find has to be crawled so you can get a full picture of everything which is linked.” -Björn

• “Everything you get from Google is not the full picture, to be honest. There might be a URL shown which is not showing any impressions anymore. What you see in Google Search Console are just URLs and keywords which have an impression on the Google SERP.” -Björn

• “I think thats an important distinction that when you are looking at Google Search Console, it is not listing everything that has been crawled, its listing everything that has gotten an impression.” -Ben

• “Click depth analysis means you can analyze how many clicks, a userneeds from a homepage or from a landing page to land on your most important page which is mostly driving into conversion.” -Björn

• “The next step is to jump in all these crawls data. Depending on the crawler you have, you already have some charts and youcan filter all the broken links, everything that is indexed that is thin content, meaning there are very few amounts of words on the page, or all the pages loading under 3 seconds.” -Björn

• “What is really important same as page speed is the internal linking especially if you have a huge site. You have to make sure that they are internal-linked properly meaning that the most important pages are connected. It is very important that all the relevant pages are really connected with each other.” -Björn

• “So you are understanding what pages are performing from a site speed perspective, you understand what pages are useless, and where the breaks in your website are.” -Ben

• “When you are conducting an SEO audit, the things that you need to think about are first and foremost analyzing your business problems, understanding not only what your revenue model is but also understanding your user journey and understanding what pages are the most important from an SEO perspective.” -Ben

• “In the last part of your audit, youre going to through an analysis phase where you are going to look at site speed as the most important factor, but you are also looking at where there are bloat, dead links and lastly when people are writing about your website when you are getting link juice passed to you and how is it being passed to the rest of the website.” -Ben

• “What we see is a lot of duplication on websites and you can easily figure this out when you look at meta-titles for example, and you see that there are a lot of new ads which are using the same meta-titles. It might be that the maintenance of meta-information is not really well done on the website and it might also be a problem where you are indexing all your filter parameters.” -Björn

• “When you are thinking about all of the information that you are gaining through an audit can be very technical and overwhelming. You need to distill everything down to some specific discreet projects. Otherwise, the information that you are getting never ends up being useful.” -Ben