2016 SEO Best Practice Series: Lesson 5 – SEO Audit Process9.20.16

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Audit Results & FindingsOverview of SEO Audit Process Questions

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Quick Recap From Previous Lessons

• Win at SEO by focusing on your users and the actions you want them to take on your pages.• If you build it, they will come. If you build it slow, they won’t stay. • Set up a Google Search Console account and start monitoring your SERP Click Through

Rate.• Having the right data and tools can save you a lot of time.

Watch Lesson 1: https://youtu.be/NjsRQwFOvlQWatch Lesson 2: https://youtu.be/l8lc2iPqeR4Watch Lesson 3: https://youtu.be/ZPTTGMGO-Z0 Watch Lesson 4: https://youtu.be/h9csyndCdK4

Tools We Use In An SEO Audit

• Screaming Frog SEO Spider - https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/ • Google Search Console - https://www.google.com/webmasters/ • Bing Webmaster Tools - http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster/ • Moz Open Site Explorer - https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/ • Google Keyword Planner - http://adwords.google.com/keywordplanner • Google Page Speed Insights - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/• Gtmetrix – http://www.gtmetrix.com/• SEMrush (Paid) - https://www.semrush.com/ • Sharedcount - https://www.sharedcount.com/

Watch Our Webinar for an Overview of SEO Tools: https://youtu.be/h9csyndCdK4

Audit Findings for Couponscop.com

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Are all the main homepage url redirects correct?

With any audit, we like to begin by seeing if there are any duplicate live versions of the homepage. These all look to be correct!

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Crawl high-level findings

Summary Number of URLs % of Total URLTotal URL Crawled 9,060 100.00%Total URLs Blocked By Robots.txt 12,272 57.53%Success (2xx) 7,834 86.47%Redirections (3xx) 1,220 13.47%Client Error (4xx) 2 0.02%No Response 0 0.00%Missing Titles 63 1.68%Duplicate Titles 612 16.36%Long Titles 2546 68.07%Titles and H1 the same 0 0.00%Missing Descriptions 581 15.53%Duplicate Descriptions 576 15.40%Long Descriptions 109 2.91%Missing H1 71 1.90%Duplicate H1 1046 27.97%Long H1 4 0.11%Canonical Used 77 2.06%Canonicalised 0 0.00%No Canonical 3663 97.94%

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/

Three important questions we’ll want to answer:

1. Why so many blocked in robots.txt?

2. Why duplicated titles and descriptions, but no canonicalised urls?

3. Why were 1,220 Redirected Urls Crawled?

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Crawl high-level findings – Robots.txt

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/

57% of the couponscop.com’s landing pages are blocked via the robots.txt restrictions.

Crawl Budget Concern – Search engines will only devote so long to your domain, so you’ll want to help them navigate to valuable pages quicker. If every page internally links to these restricted pages, you’re wasting Google’s budget.

Possible Solutions would be to edit your template to mark these internal links as rel=nofollow.

A better solution would be to give Google access to the pages and edit them so that they provide unique value to your users.

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Canonicals / Dup Content?

We’ve learned that 15% of the site has a duplicate title tag. This can be a missed opportunity or alert you to the fact that you have duplicate content. We also know from a site:couponscop.com search, that Google has identified 6,880 pages. It’s likely that this site has many duplicate content pages.

The odd part is that most of the site doesn’t contain a canonical url to tie duplicate pages together. Canonical urls aggregate similar pages together, so this is an opportunity to field duplicate content.

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So why were so many pages identified as a redirect in the crawl?

I found two reasons: • Images are jumping through a redirect due to a line break in the source code.

An example: http://www.couponscop.com/cozbest-discount-coupon-codes.html• Another reason is that the site 302 redirects are really 404s due to pages that are

no longer found on the site a page break being written in the source.

Address Status CodeRedirect URIhttp://www.couponscop.com/style-we-discount-coupon-codes/1/blog 302 http://www.couponscop.com/application/not-found.phphttp://www.couponscop.com/hot-deals-discount-coupon-codes-c193/32/blog 302 http://www.couponscop.com/application/not-found.phphttp://www.couponscop.com/hot-deals-discount-coupon-codes-c193/32/login.html 302 http://www.couponscop.com/application/not-found.phphttp://www.couponscop.com/discount-coupon-codes/s/login.html 302 http://www.couponscop.com/application/not-found.phphttp://www.couponscop.com/hot-deals-discount-coupon-codes-c193/47/blog 302 http://www.couponscop.com/application/not-found.phphttp://www.couponscop.com/hot-deals-discount-coupon-codes-c193/47/login.html 302 http://www.couponscop.com/application/not-found.php

The overall goal would be to clean up the internal links of the site so that they only point to live urls.

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Alt Text Audit

Some of the images on the homepage don’t contain any alt text. Some of the alt text that exists can be a little more descriptive. Remember, the idea here is to describe exactly what is going on in the photo.

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Page Speed Optimizationshttps://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Webinar Lesson 2 for Site Speed Tips! https://youtu.be/l8lc2iPqeR4

Search Console Findings for Allpricetags.com

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Are all the main homepage url redirects correct?

The typical redirection plan for your homepage would be the http://www, http://, https://www, and https:// are all 301 redirected to only one version of the homepage.

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Where is Google SEO Traffic Coming from?Looking at the Google Data alone, we learn which pages we are already earning organic traffic from. From here we can fine-tune these pages to earn even more. The means by which visitors are finding this page could open up opportunities for how we phrase and position other pages.

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http://allpricetags.com/view/coupon/viotek-na32c-curved-32-inch-led-monitor-at-newegg-com/

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http://allpricetags.com/view/coupon/viotek-na32c-curved-32-inch-led-monitor-at-newegg-com/

<FilesMatch "\.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|pdf|css|js)$">Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800, public"</FilesMatch>

There are many WordPress plugins offering features that can edit Htaccess files from the WP dashboard. If you are using the SEO by yoast plugin, you can access it from SEO by yoast > Edit files settings.

Add this line into your .htaccess file! This will greatly help with caching! (Be careful with htaccess edits)

The SEO Audit Questionnaire

Part One of SEO Audit Questionnaire

• To begin, crawl the site and review the crawl overview report. What are the crawl overview high-level findings?

• What do you know about this domain? Which web server type is it using? What’s the goal of the site?

• Does the site have a Robots.txt file?

• Are there any key pages getting blocked due to Robots.txt file?

• Do any pages linked internally give a status code other than 200? i.e. 302 or 307

• Are there any 404s or soft 404 pages showing up in Google Search Console?

• Looking at the crawl and how many pages on the domain are indexed in Google, are there too many pages?

• Does the sitemap.xml contain only live 200 status level pages?

• Is the sitemap.xml submitted to both Google and Bing?

• Are all of the main homepage url redirects correct?

Part Two of SEO Audit Questionnaire

• Looking at the crawl overview, what is the percentage of canonicalised urls? Are the canonical tags correct?

• Are there any indexed duplicate staging domains or subdomains that should be marked noindex?

• Export the 25 highest traffic driving landing pages from analytics. Do these top pages have a higher number of

links and social shares? (sharedcount.com and Moz Open Site Explorer)

• How is the content? Do the top 25 highest traffic driving pages have at least 1 paragraph of text? Is the content

thin on these pages?

• Does the copy describe the products using well-known nouns or lesser-known branded terms?

• For key pages, does the content look natural?

• On the top 25 highest traffic driving pages, does the meta data look optimized?

Part Three of SEO Audit Questionnaire

• Does the site content look to be updated regularly?

• Does the site utilize structured data? What is marked up?

• In Google Search Console under HTML improvements, are there any duplicate

content issues?

• Looking at the source code for the top 25 traffic driving pages, do the images on the

pages contain optimized alt text?

• Do the filenames of images make sense?

• Looking at SEMrush, are any pages ranking in traffic gaining zone for high search

volume terms?

Part Four of SEO Audit Questionnaire

• Are their URLs short and user friendly?

• Do the URLs include relevant keywords?

• Are the urls optimized? Are they consistent?

• Do the product or service descriptions look unique from page to page?

• Do they utilize open graph, twitter card tags, or any social sharing metadata?

• Does the site HTML validate in the w3c validator? Are there any errors?

• Are the top 25 traffic driving pages clearly linked internally?

• Does the site use Breadcrumbs? Are they marked up with structured data?

Part Five of SEO Audit Questionnaire

• Does the current internal link structure make sense? Can it be improved?

• Do top competitors have their navigation laid out differently?

• Looking in Google Search Console at the “Links to Your Site” section, do the

domains that link the most look natural?

• Looking at open site explorer backlinks, are the backlinks to the top 25 traffic

driving pages look to be coming from relevant high-authority sources?

• Is the correct domain registered on Google search console and Bing

Webmaster Tools?

Part Six of SEO Audit Questionnaire

• Is the domain using analytics? Is it tracking properly? Does it utilize a tag manager?

• What are the Google page speed insights scores for the homepage?

• Based on page speed insight scores, can images be compressed?

• Based on page speed insight scores, can the html, JS, or CSS be minified?

• Based on page speed insight scores, can anything be cached with a longer expiration?

• Is this an international domain? How is it targeting users in other countries?

• Are there any alternate tags indicating that landing pages would look better for a certain width?

Part Seven of SEO Audit Questionnaire

• In Google Search Console, do the pages with the greatest internal link counts look to be the same

as pages driving traffic?

• In Google Search Console, are there any crawl errors?

• Do longer pages use rel=next or preview? Does this domain use infinite scrolling on longer pages?

• Looking at open site explorer backlinks, do the backlink destinations all give a live 200 status code?

• Are there any other optimization opportunities worth looking into?

Any Questions?

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