In this tutorial we will show you how to run a quick SEO audit to identify major issues with your site’s SEO.

The little things are important in SEO.

But so are the big things.

And sometimes we can spend so much time sweating the small stuff, that we completely fail to see the 800 pound gorilla that’s stomping all over our google rankings.

So today I’m going to show you the process I use to get a 30,000ft view of a site – a sniff test if you will – in which we can quickly pick up on major issues that may be holding our websites back.

It’s a process you can run through on your own site.

And the good news is, it takes a grand total of 15 minutes.

So… start the clock!

 

Overview Of The SEO Audit Process (infographic)

Before we get into the meat, we’ve created this infographic which gives a quick, visual overview of the process. Feel free to download it and share it on your own site!

Ok… on to the full process!

Tools You’ll Need

This is a fairly tool lite process.

We’re not deep diving here – we will be looking for big, headline issues.

Some of this is basic SEO, but you would be amazed at how many sites I audit which suffer from a range of these issues.

Here is what you’ll need.

• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console
• Ahrefs
• Beam Us Up (or Screaming Frog)
• Barracuda Panguin Tool
• Title Tag Pixel Width Checker
• Your brain

The Site

For this walk-through, I’ll be auditing a site called ToyUniverse, an Australian E-Commerce business which specialises in kid’s toys.

I’ll explain why I’m using them at the end of this tutorial!

But for now, let’s get on with it…

Part 1: Start A Crawl

We’re going to run through a number of manual checks on the website, but while we’re busy doing that we will run a crawl in the background, which (depending on the size of the site we are auditing) should be completed by the time we are finished with the other steps.

An SEO crawler will spider the site in the same way as Google and give us some useful information on the site’s structure and current SEO setup.

I’m going to use Beam Us Up for the crawl (FREE), but you could also use Screaming Frog’s SEO Site Auditor (£99 per year) or you can access Ahrefs’ own crawl data (Crawl Report) from your Ahrefs dashboard:

If you are using Beam Us Up, just enter your site’s address in the URL field and hit ‘Start’.

The crawler will start working away in the background while we continue with the audit.

That was easy enough right?

Part 2: On-site sniff test

Let’s take a look at a few on-site fundamentals.

We’ll start by opening up the home page in a browser and right clicking to view the source.

We’re just going to have a quick check on some basic on-page SEO here, and we’ll do that by finding out the answers to a few questions…

• Does the page contain a well crafted, clickable title, which conforms to SEO best practices?
• Is there a custom meta description, which will act as our ad in the SERPs and encourage clicks?
• Is there one instance of the H1 tag and does it conform to SEO best practices?
• Are subheaders (H2, H3 etc) properly used and conforming to SEO best practices?

So how does our case site do?

Check The Title Tag

The title tag remains the single most important on-page ranking factor in 2015.

In his excellent title tag best practice guide, Shaun Anderson of Hobo Web explains

“The Page Title Tag (or more accurately the HTML Title Element) is still, however, arguably the most important on-page seo factor to address on any web page. Keywords in page titles can HELP your pages rank higher in Google results pages (SERPS). The page title is also often used by Google as the title of a search snippet link in search engine results pages. Keywords in page titles often end up as links to your web page.”

Shaun Anderson, Hobo Web

Let’s take a look at the current title tag on our case site.

<title>Buy Kids Toys Online Australia and Save | Online Toy Store | ToyUniverse</title>

There are a few (potential) issues here.

• Generally for home page I prefer to see brand first.
• I would also suggest focusing on one target phrase (which could be included in a tagline)
• I would amend title length to avoid truncation in the SERPs (title tags will truncate after 512px width)

And based on the above would perhaps suggest amending the title to something like the following: –

<title>ToyUniverse Australia: Buy Kids Toys Online and Save</title>

It looks cleaner, promotes their brand, and is more targeted to a couple of keyphrases.

We can also see that it is well within the 512px limit (we can check that using this FREE tool).

However…

Before making any changes such as this, consideration should be given to how the site is currently performing.

When starting from scratch, or if a site is not ranking particularly well, I would always recommend following best practices, however, for aged sites, sometimes there is an element of ‘if it ain’t broke… don’t fix it!’.

Certainly when making any changes such as this you want to carefully monitor any impact (positive or negative) on traffic.

Check The Meta Description

While not directly impacting on rankings (although see note below) a well written meta description can increase click-throughs – it is effectively your site (or page’s) advert in the search results.

Ramesh Ranjan puts it well in this article for Hubspot:

The meta description is one of your last hopes on search engine results pages (SERPs) to attract a searcher to come to your site. This is something that digital marketers constantly neglect to focus on — perhaps because they think it just doesn’t matter anymore. But if you’re not putting effort into your meta descriptions, you could be missing out on good website traffic that can bring in lots of new leads and customers.

Ramesh Ranjan, LocalTrifecta Internet Marketing

<meta name="description" content="Kids toys online at unbeatable prices with fast shipping in Australia. Toy online layby at Australia's best toy store. ">

A good meta description should communicate key USPs for the product or service you are offering.

For example, an e-commerce site could include points like ‘FREE delivery‘, ‘No quibble returns‘, ‘Cheapest prices‘ etc.

Our case site’s current meta description does a pretty decent job, but we could take a look at the meta descriptions of other competing sites for additional ideas, and we might also get some inspiration from adwords ad copy for keywords we are targeting.

Note: As google is almost certainly using click-through data in rankings, those extra clicks from a well written meta description could lead to the site moving up in the SERPs over time.

Check The Header Tags

The H1 tag is still an important on-page ranking factor, and we want to ensure that every page of the site (including the home page) has a unique, descriptive, H1 tag.

For the home page, you will generally want to communicate the site’s main purpose, and include 1 or 2 high level keywords in the process.

Here is the current H1 tag:-

<h1>AUSTRALIAS BEST RANGE OF KIDS TOYS ONLINE</h1>

The H1 gets in the location (Australia) and ‘kids toys online’, but we could maybe add in the specific buying phrase ‘buy kids toys online’ which is targeted in the page’s title.

So we might change to something like

<h1>Buy Kids Toys Online From Australia's #1 Toy Retailer</h1>

All thing being equal, including that exact phrase in there (and at the start of the tag) could help to improve rankings for the phrase.

Check Subheaders (H2, H3 etc)

Subheaders should be used in a logical way to break up each page’s content, and provide us with a good opportunity to target secondary keywords/phrases.

I would generally recommend trying to avoid using generic phrases in subheaders, instead styling them with CSS.

The homepage of the case site makes good use of subheaders and does not require amendment.

Taking A Look At Internal Pages

Next, we’ll take a look at an internal page (in this case a product) and we’ll want to start by looking at the same on-page factors as the home page – title, meta description, header tags – before taking a look at the page’s text content.

The best practices remain the same, so I’ll go straight to examples from an internal page (specifically a product called ‘vZoomer Zuppy Love – Pupstar’) and what I would recommend changing.

Check The Title Tag

<title>vZoomer Zuppy Love - Pupstar | Remote Control Robot Toys | Toys Online</title>

The title tags for the product pages appear to be templated as follows

<title>{Name of product} | {Category} | Toys Online</title>

The ‘Toys Online‘ boiler plate should definitely go, and I would recommend simplifying all product titles to: –

<title>Buy {Name of product} online at ToyUniverse</title>

Check The Meta description
The current meta description on the product is as follows:-

<meta name="Description" content="Zoomer Zuppy Love - Pupstar is the latest electronic toy. Award Winning Zoomer Zuppy Love - Pupstar is an awesome purchase.">

This meta description could sell the product better, and should be rewritten to include USPs (fast delivery, cheapest price etc).

Including the actual price in the description could also be tested.

Check The Header Tags
The H1 tag is currently set to the name of the product and no change is required.

Best practice for internal pages is to keep them simple – i.e. the name of the product, the service, or the title of the content.

There are a number of phrases included in the H2 tags at present (for example “Our Newsletter”, “How does toy layby work”) which are part of the template and therefore duplicated across all products on the site.

As before I would recommend that these generic phrases and any boiler plate (repeated across multiple pages) titles should not be include in header tags.

Part 3: Running Some Tests On Google

Now let’s nip over to Google…

Check if The Content is Unique

One of the biggest problems with E-Commerce sites in a post Panda world, is duplicated/thin content.

Sean Work, Director of Marketing at KISSmetrics, includes missing product descriptions in his list of 7 Critical SEO Errors of E-Commerce websites.

From my experience, this error usually is made by online gift stores (in the broad sense) and online clothing shops. Unfortunately, the complete lack of a text description of the product virtually puts an end to the chances of the page being in the top 10 of a search engine query, even in the case of low-frequency queries. So be sure to add a description to the item card; do not kill your page’s chances.

Sean Work, KISSmetrics

Often product pages contain very little unique text, or descriptions which have been provided by the manufacturer or copied from elsewhere on the web.

This is a big issue.

To allow products to rank I would recommend a minimum 150-200 word uniquely written description for each product listing on a site (although generally the longer the description the better).

If we copy a paragraph of text from the ‘Zoomer Puppy Love’ product and paste it into google we can see that our case site has this very problem.

Google Australia returns 13 results for the exact phrase (in quotation marks).

In fact, ToyUniverse doesn’t even appear within those 13 results, and only shows when we click the show omitted results link.

It is clear from this that the product will not rank at present, and indeed if the site has a high percentage of duplicate content overall, it could be subject to a site-wide algorithmic penalty (specifically Panda).

This is something that will have to be addressed as a priority, but the good news is that doing so should have an immediate positive impact on search traffic.

And while we are on Google, let’s run through a few other tests.

Search For Brand

First of all, we’ll do a search for the site’s brand.

Unless a site is very new (or the brand is a very generic phrase), I would always expect to see it rank at number 1 for a search for its brand.

If not then this is a strong indication of deeper problems, such as heavy algorithmic or manual penalties.

In ToyUniverse’s case, they rank as they should.

Search For Headline Key Phrase

It’s worth taking a quick look at where a site currently ranks for the main targeted phrase from its homepage.

In this case we’ll look at the phrase ‘toys online’.

As we can see, the site currently ranks at position 5, which is a good start but there is certainly room for improvement!

This graph from Chitika gives us an indication of just how much more traffic might be available if we can move up a couple of positions.

Their 2013 study showed that on average sites in positions 1-5 will receive the following percentages of traffic:

• Position 1: 32.5%
• Position 2: 17.6%
• Position 3: 11.4%
• Position 4: 8.1%
• Position 5: 6.1%

This tallies with data from Google Search Console (not part of this initial audit process) that shows us that ToyUniverse currently receives 101 clicks for the phrase ‘toys online’ from 1,756 impressions – a click-through rate of 5.75%.

As we have impression data, we can make a logical assumption that the site at position 1 will be receiving between 500 and 600 visits a month for the same phrase, so plenty of extra traffic to target.

Perform A Search Using The “site:” Operator

Finally we’ll perform a search using the site: operator to find out how many pages Google currently has indexed for the domain.

This can be a good early indicator of indexing issues.

The format for the search is “site:yourdomain.com” without the quotes.

We can see that there are currently 6,120 pages included in the index for this domain.

As the site currently contains around 3,000 live products, there may well be issues with pages creeping into the index that shouldn’t be there.

This is a common problem with E-Commerce sites and is often caused by systems providing multiple ways to browse the product catalog (i.e. by category, brand, size, colour etc), all of which are indexable by default.

It’s definitely something we’ll need to take a look at it when we come to conduct a deeper audit, but for now we’ll move on to Google Search Console.

Part 4: Gathering Data From Google Search Console

Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) will give us some useful data for our quick audit.

Look For Crawl Errors

First off, we’ll take a look to see if Google is reporting any issues with crawling the site (Crawl > Crawl Errors).

We can see that Google is reporting a number of 404 (not found) errors, and several 403 (access denied) errors.

On closer inspection, it appears that these 404s are thrown by old products which have been removed from the site.

In this case I would recommend that expired products are 301 redirected to either a similar product, or a parent category.

This will preserve any link equity that the pages may have acquired (from both external and internal links), which would be lost with the 404.

The pages returning 403 errors may require a little deeper digging to find out how google is finding them.

Check For HTML Improvements

We can take a look at the HTML Improvements report (Search Appearance > HTML Improvements) to get a quick overview of any on-page issues Google has found when indexing the site.

In this case Google is reporting several issues, including duplicate title tags and duplicate meta descriptions.

We won’t worry too much about the data in here just now, as we will pick up on much more detail in our deep crawl, but it’s a good early indicator that there are problems we need to address.

We can close the Google Search Console tab, and it’s on to Google Analytics!

Part 5: Analysing Traffic

Clearly the aim of any SEO audit is to identify ways to increase a website’s traffic, so it makes sense to take a look at how the site is currently performing!

We’ll run a few reports in Analytics to give us a quick overview, starting by looking at the site’s current search traffic (Acquisition > Overview > Organic Search)

The data for August shows an average of around 250 visitors a day from search.

From the same report, we can click on ‘Landing Page’ to discover which pages are currently bringing in the most search traffic.

A broad spread of landing pages (in this case there are 1,265) would suggest the site is in reasonable health.

Finally, we will set a wide range (I’m going to go back to July 2013) and view traffic by week to see if we can identify any noticeable spikes, or dips in traffic.

In this case we can see some big spikes at the end of each year, followed by drops in January, which I suspect is purely down to the seasonal nature of the product (even Santa shops online now!).

Generally traffic has been pretty stagnant over the period.

Of course, in other cases, a drop in traffic may be indicative of a Google penalty, which is something we will take a closer look at shortly.

But next, we’ll fire up Ahrefs and take a look at the site’s link profile.

Part 6: Analysing Backlink Profile

We’ll be conducting a quick, manual audit on the site’s link profile to look for any obvious issues.

Ahrefs makes this super easy for us!

Step 1: Anchor Text Distribution

Let’s start by entering the URL into Site Explorer and clicking ‘Search’

This will bring up an overview of the site.

From here, we can scroll down to ‘Anchors Cloud’, which gives us a quick, easy to digest visual of the site’s anchor text distribution.

In this case we can see that naked URLs and brand links make up almost one third of the site’s link profile.

We can also see lots of other anchors which include the Toy Universe brand name.

This is good news from an SEO perspective as branded links help to build trust.

If you were to see a large number of keyword anchors in here, then that is something you may have to take a closer look at.

But we’re all good in this case

Step 2: Broken Backlinks and Some Quick Wins

Next, we’ll take a look at the ‘Broken Backlinks’ report under ‘Inbound Links’, which can often be the source of some quick wins.

Basically, this will point out links to pages on our site that are currently returning a 404 error – effectively losing the link equity.

In this case the report has found 12 broken links to the site.

We can easily fix them (and get back the link juice) by creating 301 redirects for the old expired URLs, to relevant, related pages.

Video: check out this episode of “Oversimplified SEO” – “How To Find Broken Links And Broken Backlinks That Hurt Your SEO“.

Step 3: Quick Link Audit/Sniff Test

Finally, we will have a quick run through the site’s referring domains, to see if anything sticks out as suspicious, or low quality.

We’ll order the report by Domain Rating (DR) to show the most powerful links first.

Over time you will develop a sixth sense for spotting low quality links, and if anything looks suspicious you can simply click on ‘Backlinks’ on the right hand column, and then click-through to the linking URL to take a look.

You can spend time going through this in more detail when you conduct a full audit, but for now, look for anything that looks low quality, or purposely manipulative.

Also look out for obvious signs of ‘SEOing’ (it’s a word ok!). For example lots of directory links, or links from multiple forum profiles.

Here is a good guide to the types of links you might want to look out for.

In this case, the link profile looks relatively clean, so we can move on to the next stage of our quick SEO audit.

Part 7: Identifying Any Penalties

I mentioned earlier that we would take a closer look at drops in traffic that may be indicative of Google penalties.

Fortunately for this task there is a great (FREE) tool called ‘Panguin’ (can you see what they did there?) that will do most of the hard work for us.

Here’s how you can use the Panguin tool to quickly identify drops in traffic that align with Google’s algorithmic updates.

Step 1: Log Into Analytics

Load up the Panguin tool (here) and log in to your Google Analytics account.

Step 2: Select Your Site

Once logged in to your Analytics account, select the site you wish to review from the left hand menu.

This should be the same as your list of sites in Google Analytics.

Part 3: Identify Penalties

Once selected, you will be presented with a chart showing your organic traffic, overlayed with various colour coded lines which align with Google updates.

You can turn the various updates (Panda, Penguin etc) on or off, by toggling the buttons on the right hand side.

In the image below I have turned off all algorithmic updates with the exception of Penguin.

We can see that the Penguin updates in December 2014 align with the traffic drop, however, I suspect this is merely coincidence and that this fall is just due to the seasonal drop off.

What to look for: Traffic drops aligning with algorithmic updates.

Part 8: Checking Out Site Speed

It has long been confirmed that site speed is one of Google’s many ranking factors (although there is an interesting study here which suggests crawl speed may actually be more important than page load speed), and it is certainly the case that a fast loading site provides a better base for user experience than a slow loading site.

With this in mind, it is always good practice to ensure that your website is optimised to load as quickly as possible.

While you could probably spend days tweaking your website and server, a good starting point for identifying major issues which may be affecting speed is Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool.

Just enter your URL in the free tool, hit ‘Analyse’ and Google will return a speed ‘score’ for your site (out of 100) on both mobile and desktop, and also give you a list of areas it think you can improve upon.

In our case, the site gets a score of 57/100 for mobile and 71/100 for desktop. Not the worst I’ve seen, but definite room for improvement!

For more on the importance of site speed to SEO, and some great tips on how to optimise your site, check out this guide by Albert Costill for Search Engine Journal.

Note: You should also check that the site is mobile ready, preferably with a responsive design.

Part 9: Testing Structured Data

The final step in our audit process (before we return to the crawl we started in part #1) will be to test any structured data that the site may contain and ensure it is properly formed.

Why is Structured Data important?

Proper use of structured data can increase visibility in the search results and lead to improvement in click-through rate.

It looks like this (image from google’s structured data guide)

Examples of content that may benefit from the inclusion of structured data include:

• Reviews
• Product information
• Events

Although, you can mark up most types of content to a certain degree (just don’t spam!).

Additionally, the correct use of structured data allows google to better understand your content. Nathan Yerian puts it well here.

Structured data allows search engines to not only crawl your site, but to truly understand it. Yes, even search engines can have a tough time deciphering web page content. Some elements that seem perfectly obvious to us humans are meaningless to web crawlers.

Nathan Yerian, Adhere Creative

We can use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to test existing structured data.

Simply paste in the URL you wish to test and hit ‘Fetch & Validate’.

Google will evaluate the structured data for the page and return any errors. In this case we can see there are several errors which will need to be evaluated and fixed.

And… You’re Done!

Our 15 minute SEO audit is complete!

Even in this short time we have identified a number of changes we can make to our case site which should assist with its rankings, and for most sites this will generally be the case.

A full forensic SEO audit is clearly a much lengthier process (taking anything from a few hours to a few days, depending on the size of the site), but this process is a great way to kick start any new SEO campaign and get a feel for how a site is currently set up.

If we wanted to continue digging, we could now go back to the crawler which we started at the beginning of this process, and take a more detailed look at the site’s structure, internal linking, other on-page factors etc.

We may also return to Ahrefs at this point to more thoroughly investigate the site’s link profile.

But, in this case, we’ll leave that for another day…

Consider that 800lb gorilla well and truly banished!

Oh, and just in case you don’t believe all of this can be done in 15 minutes… here’s a real time video to prove it 😉

If you have any questions about the process, then please drop a comment below, and be sure to let us know how you get on running the 15 minute SEO audit on your own site!

Why I Chose Toy Universe For The SEO Audit

I mentioned earlier that I would explain why I chose Toy Universe for the audit…

Well, I/we have some news for you!

This post is the first in a really cool new series right here on Ahrefs

We’ve taken on 4 case study sites and over the next few months will be working live on link building and SEO to boost their rankings and increase their search traffic.

What’s In It For You?

We’ll be sharing the SEO tactics we use along the way and everything will be 100% actionable.

We will also be sharing progress (traffic growth, links acquired etc) and also any hurdles we hit in the progress (we want to be totally transparent).

The site above is an Ecommerce site, but we’ll shortly be introducing the other case study sites, which cover different types of site, at different stages of growth.

We will also be rolling out a number of different white hat link building strategies.

So there should be something for everyone

I’ll be back with another post next Thursday, which will introduce the second case site (and an interesting Google penalty issue we uncovered while conducting a link audit), so to make sure you don’t miss it, then be sure to sign up for the mailing list below!