SEO Audit. Part 1. Template

This is a template of periodical (bi-weekly) SEO audits of your sites.

Tools used for SEO Audit

I personally use Botify as the (main) tool used to produce SEO audits. In principle, Botify can be used not only to produce SEO audits, but also helps:

1. Design SEO roadmap and justify projects (to decision makers)?

2. Investigate and explain a traffic drop

3. Look for a root cause of common SEO issues?

4. Prepare and deliver SEO reports to different stakeholders?

5. Identify SEO opportunities on the website?

but that's a topic for another discussion. 

SEO Audit answers to the questions

1. How is the site seen by a search engine's robots?

2. What do they actually know and "take home" (being selective)?

3. Where users land on the site?

4. Which queries (and rankings) bring users?

A Funnel view of the SEO performance

Here's the Funnel view to SEO performance of pages (all pages vs. proportion of pages that make it to each step):

1. Known pages (scope of the report)

2. Crawled pages

3. Indexed pages

4. Ranked pages

5. Convert pages

This funnel is a sequence of events that summarises the methodology suggested (here) and it relates pages, not users. 

The funnel answers the question "When the opportunities are missed?" and is premised on the following approach. Page needs to be:

1. Technically accessible to robots.

2. Found (on site) and examined by search engines.

3. Once evaluated, it needs to be accepted as worth indexing.

4. Selected for showcasing in search results as a potential appropriate answer

5. Clicked, depending on the position in SERP, how it's presented, how its matches the user search intent.

6. Generate revenue as users visit it.

The funnel approach is beneficial since it emphasises:

• The right sequence - Do right things in the right order?, e.g. why work on page quality if Google never finds a page? 

• Extra-funnel life may exist - known pages ≠ existing pages, some existing pages may not be exposed to robots

• Helps unify the understanding why pages drop out of the funnel

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Reasons why pages drop out of the funnel

1. Page that exist but are not known to robots (reasons):

1. Don't receive internal links (are accessible only by sitemaps)

2. Pages not crawled by search engines (reasons):

1. Poor website structure (hardly accessible).

2. Presumed to be not interesting (from prior experience).

3. Too much content on the website (can't index it all).

3. Pages crawled but not indexed:

1. Not-indexable (contain errors)

2. Too little content (or too similar to others)

3. Only encountered once (by chance)

4. Pages that don't rank:

1. Not enough internal links (or not enough PageRank)

2. Content quality issues

3. Are not enough optimised for keywords

5. Pages that rank but don't get visits:

1. Low position on Google SERP

2. Are not matching to user intent

3. Don't look attractive in search

Where data for a Funnel view come from?

The data for the SEO traffic Funnel view come from 4 modules:

1. Crawler data

2. Log analysis

3. Keywords, rankings and pages analysis (GSC)

4. Engagement Analytics (GA, etc)

FAQ

How can an SEO audit provide accurate insights when not all sites pages were indexed?

Analysing the upper part of the website generally provides enough insights to understand the main challenges and opportunities.

Ask your questions here and will be answered and included in the FAQ section here.

SEO Audit Structure

The SEO audit reports contains two main parts:

1. Summary and

2. SEO metrics

Summary

• High level SEO performance overview (extracted from research data)

• Action board: recommendations (with priorities and implementation roadmap).

• Opportunities and alerts

SEO metrics

I. SEO performance metrics

SEO performance metrics measure how well your site is doing vs. SEO through direct success metrics. These consist of three groups of metrics: 

• Clicks, Impressions, CTR, Average position (GSC)

• Visits (Engagement Analytics)

• Pages crawled by search engine bots, indirect success metric (log analyzer).

These are metrics that we observe in Organic Search Funnel view.

II. Website analysis metrics

These come from crawlers and we look at them to understand and explain the Performance metrics we see later in the Funnel view. If we want to improve our results, we need to make changes within the site itself.