Advanced SEO Audit

We understand SEO audit as the set of analysis prior to performing any action or SEO task.

For me, an audit is not just delivering a document with hundreds of pages and that’s it. That, experience has told me, doesn’t really contribute anything. On the other hand, auditing SEO based on checklists with comments does not add much either.

What is a real SEO audit for me?

• Analyze the technical SEO of your website by detecting those issues that impede the organic growth of the website.
• Analyze the architecture and content.
• Propose SEO growth strategies.

If we stay only in the technical SEO audit we would be making a mistake, since there we would only have a lot of “errors” to prioritize, but nothing more. With that alone we will not get the project to grow organically. An important part of this prioritization is to detect actions that can have a greater impact at the organic level and offer results to our clients.

We need to understand the basic workings of Google.

Tracking

The basics of Google start with a series of robots (spiders) that crawl the information on the Internet by visiting a website and all the links it contains, and so on to infinity.

Indexing and Crawling

The first check we submit the web to is its indexing status in Google, that is, we check that the search engine has added the urls that make up the web to its index. To do this:

• Enter in the address bar the url of the website preceded by the command site: site:albertofdez.com. The results page will tell us how many URLs Google has indexed.
• On the other hand, we will check the number of URLs indexed in Google Search Console (Google index – indexing status)
• Finally, we will crawl the web with Screaming Frog or other crawl the website under analysis.

We will make the 3 checks in order to have several reliable sources that tell us the total number of indexed URLs on the web, as well as to check if there is a great disparity in the results.

With this check, we will know how many URLs we want to position in this project, how many have already been indexed by Google, whether or not we have duplicated content that weighs down the project…

Server Response Codes

If we have executed the crawler with Screaming Frog, or another similar tool, we can take advantage of it to check the response codes thrown by the different URLs, depending on whether or not the crawl, acting as the Google bot would, has been able to access and crawl the different urls.

The most common response codes are:

• 200: OK. It identifies a correct server response.
• 3xx: Redirections. Refers to a resource that has been moved, both temporarily and permanently. For the redirection to work, it is necessary to indicate the destination URL. It is generally used in migration processes and when certain information changes its destination.
  • 301 : redirection permanently. Indicates to the search engine that the content of the specified URL has been permanently moved to another specified URL.
  • 302 : temporary redirect. The content is displayed in another URL temporarily.
• 4xx : error codes. This code is displayed when the information that has been requested from the server cannot be found or cannot be processed.
  • 404 : not found. Error 404 is the status code that indicates that the resource you want to access does not exist or has been lost, although occasionally it may indicate a communication problem between the host and the server that prevents access to the requested information. This error usually occurs when we have an indexed URL that, the next time the bot tries to access it, has changed its location without the relevant redirection, its content has been removed, it has ceased to be published temporarily, etc., so that the bot cannot find it.
  • 403: Access denied. The crawl cannot access the URL. These errors are usually reported in Google Search Console (Google index – blocked resources).
• 5xx: Server errors. The error codes beginning with 5 refer to situations where the server cannot execute the request for information made.
  • 501 : not implemented. It does not support the feature required to respond to the request for information.
  • 502 : Invalid gateway. The server, acting as a proxy, has received an invalid response from another server, thus displaying an error.
  • 503 : Service not available. It is not possible to respond to the request for information in a timely manner, usually because there are too many requests at once or maintenance work is being performed.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is one of the most common errors that directly and strongly affects the positioning of a website. When we make the effort to crawl and eliminate duplicate content, we facilitate the work of the bots, which can crawl the website more quickly and efficiently, since they do not have to distinguish between the original and duplicated content, which directly influences the improvement of indexability.

How do you identify duplicated content?

As a basis, we use Safecont in all audits for this point.

• When everything contained in two or more pages (text, images, etc.) is completely the same in both and only distinguish themselves in the URL.
• When we find the same content on a domain and one or more of its sub-domains.
• When the same title is repeated on several pages.
• Similarly, when we find the same metadescription in more than one page.
• When two URLs distinguish themselves only by the final bar (www.midominio.com/blog vs www.midominio.com/blog/) and, instead of redirecting one to the other, they both display the same content, which is known as trailing slash.
• When, on two pages aimed at audiences in different regions or countries, there is identical content written in the same language.
• When there are versions of the same website with and without www, without one redirecting to the other.
• When the http and https protocol URLs are indexed without the second redirecting to the first.
• When the session identifiers of each user visiting the website generate different URLs, which, on the other hand, will always display the same content.

How to reduce duplicate content

• Redirections 301

When we have just restructured a complete website or when there has been a migration of content (for example, http to https), it is necessary to implement 301 redirects (“RedirectPermanent”) in the .htaccess file of the website, with the aim of redirecting all the content that appears in various sites at once.

• Search operators

The use of search operators can simplify the detection of supplicant content in certain cases, such as in the case of duplicate URLs.

It is as simple as running the command site: mydomain.com inurl “keyword”, the search engine will return a list of all the URLs on the web that contain the specified keyword.

• Rel tag = “canonical”

This is a label that we must use carefully, because for Google it is a mere indication, which means that it can pay attention to it or not to what we have marked as canonicalized.

Microformats / Rich Snippets

Microformats are a common structured data vocabulary, also known as Rich Snippets, developed as an initiative of major search engines to create a standard that allows them to better understand the information. Thanks to the resulting initiative,Schema.org , webmasters can consult the microformats accepted by all search engines in one place.

In order to work properly, the microformats must

• Be correctly implemented
• Make sense within the theme of the website
• Additionally, for the results of the implementation of microformats to be seen in SERPs it is necessary for the web to have a certain authority.

Some of the most used microformats currently

• Article
• Breadcrumb
• Events
• Organizations
• Person
• Products
• Recipes
• Opinions
• Local Business
• Videos

How are microformats or Rich Snippets implemented?

When implementing Rich Snippets on our website, we can ask our programmer to perform a specific development on our CMS template. If our CMS is WordPress, it is even easier, as there are a wide variety of plugins that we can install to implement the microformats easily and automatically.

Some of the best known are WP Rich Snippets, Schema App Structured Data or All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets.

Once we have implemented the microformats, it is necessary to validate that they work correctly, using the Google Search Console test tool that analyzes the HTML code of the web.

We work to achieve the needs of our users. All search engines have a series of filters and guidelines that we must know, so that our website complies with all of them and is truly the basis of our SEO strategy.

We need to invest the initial time to have a complete vision of the business, so that we can decide what actions to take over time so that it will generate a real impact on the project.

Professional SEO Audit

Let’s forget the idea of 2005 where an SEO audit was a simple checklist. We must build and improve our methodology day by day: training, experimenting, testing and extracting our own working method for each type of client. We need to address different areas of action.

Analysis and business knowledge

• Understand the business in depth: what do we sell? what are we competitive in? where not? what is the most profitable? what is of interest? why? etc.
• Know the competition: what do they do? what do they do better? and worse? strategy?
• Analyze the history of the project: is the traffic up? down? is it stable? is there a trend?

Technical audit

• Have a wide knowledge of the information that Google (or the target search engine where we want to gain visibility) publishes.
• Detect problems: crawling, indexing, web architecture, internal linking, content quality, etc.

Prioritization of SEO factors

• Prioritize technical implementations: what has more of an impact at a lower cost?
• Prioritize business recommendations.

All of this will help us make decisions at all times. Remember that the final audit document does not specify the faults found on the website, but rather it proposes the changes necessary to achieve better visibility in search engines, always taking into account the profitability of the project.