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The 60 Minute SEO Site Audit

Posted on 22. Aug, 2009 by trittemor in SEO

Site audits are one of the most impor­tant tasks for an SEO pro­fes­sional, and some­times you need to do one quickly. Here’s how you can com­plete an audit in 60 minutes. 

You should do one of these at the start of a new SEO effort, and then fol­low that up with a more exten­sive review. This can help smoke out the major issues most affect­ing development. 

Login to Google Web­mas­ter Tools and the Web ana­lyt­ics pack­age for the site and you’re ready to go. 

1. Deter­mine When the Site Under­went Its Last Major Redesign

This includes any­thing that resulted in sig­nif­i­cant changes in URLs, nav­i­ga­tion, or con­tent. All of these can have a major impact on SEO. 

As part of this, check the his­tor­i­cal Web ana­lyt­ics data for non-branded search traf­fic. Have there been any unusual shifts in traf­fic? These are clues to poten­tial prob­lems for future exploration. 

2. Check the Num­ber of Indexed Pages

Use the “site: com­mand” in Google and record that data. Then check the index­ing stats avail­able within Google Web­mas­ter Tools (the results are often quite dif­fer­ent than what you see with the “site: com­mand”). Com­pare these num­bers to how many pages you think you have. This is another flag of a poten­tial problem. 

Given that the indexed pages data from Google is quite inac­cu­rate, don’t expect these to be any­where near equal to each other. You’re look­ing for sit­u­a­tions where you have 3,000 qual­ity pages on your site and Google is report­ing that it has indexed 117. 

3. Review the Infor­ma­tion Architecture 

To do this, take off your SEO hat for a moment and review the way the site works for you as a user. Is the struc­ture log­i­cal? Does it flow from higher level top­ics to more detailed ones in way that makes sense? 

The archi­tec­ture (and the inter­nal links) com­mu­ni­cate con­text from page to page. The more well struc­tured this is, the bet­ter it is for users and search engines. 

4. Use a Tool to Walk Through the Site

A tool like SEO Browser allows you to see the pages the way a spi­der does. Are all the nav­i­ga­tion links crawlable? Are the impor­tant con­tent ele­ments vis­i­ble? If our first and sec­ond checks flagged a prob­lem, you may end up diag­nos­ing it here. 

5. Look for Dupli­cate Content 

See if the non-www ver­sions of your pages redi­rect to the www ver­sion of your pages (or vice-versa). Next, look for pages that are referred to by more than one URL. For exam­ple, the home page on many sites is linked to using mul­ti­ple URLs (for exam­ple: http://www.example.com and http://www.example.com/index.html). 

Some sites have thou­sands of pages across the site that are referred to by more than one URL (e.g., http://www.example.com/category/product37.html and http://www.example.com/product37.html). This can lead to Google report­ing highly inflated num­bers for indexed pages. 

6. Check the Amount of Con­tent on Every Page 

E-commerce sites often have a major prob­lem with this. Hand­writ­ing copy for 20,000 prod­ucts is a non-trivial exercise. 

The prob­lem is that pages with images and nav­i­ga­tion, and lit­tle HTML text con­tent, are seen as low-quality pages by the search engines. They may even be seen as dupli­cates of one another. If you were a search engine, how would you treat a site that looked like it had 20,000 pages with­out any unique content? 

7. Look for Pages With “Tem­plate Content” 

The clas­sic exam­ple of this is a site with thou­sands of city pages where the text is the same on every page except the city name has been substituted. 

Guess what? You might as well leave the pages blank with this struc­ture. The search engines quickly rec­og­nize that there’s no unique con­tent (in the HTML text at least) on these pages. 

8. Intel­li­gent Use of Title Tags and H1 Tags 

Google Web­mas­ter Tools can give a quick report on dupli­cate title tags, miss­ing title tags, short title tags, and sim­i­lar data for your meta descrip­tions. Go to Diag­nos­tics, and then pick HTML Suggestions. 

Dupli­cate title tags can lead to “key­word can­ni­bal­iza­tion” where more than one page on your site com­pete for rank­ing on the same search term. This is closely related to the prob­lem of dupli­cate content. 

In addi­tion to look­ing for dupli­cate title tags, make sure that your key­words are the first words in the title tag (and H1 tag). Don’t lead with your brand name. 

9. Check the XML Sitemap File 

Look for signs that major sec­tions of the site aren’t included. Also make sure the file is using the canon­i­cal ver­sion of a URL. If you link to a page on the site using one URL and a dif­fer­ent URL for that page shows up in the sitemap file, you’ve just cre­ated dupli­cate content. 

10. Review the Robots.txt File

Make sure impor­tant sec­tions of con­tent aren’t excluded. Go to Google Web­mas­ter Tools and use the built-in robots.txt checker (you can find this in the Crawler Access sec­tion under Site Con­fig­u­ra­tion). This will show you pages that Google thinks are blocked off by the robots.txt file. 

11. Per­form a Quick Redi­rect Check 

Use a tool such as Live HTTP Head­ers. For exam­ple, go to http://example.com and see if it redi­rects to http://www.example.com. Then check Live HTTP Head­ers to make sure the redi­rect used was a 301 instead of some­thing else. 

Related Posts:

• Search Engine Opti­miza­tion Techniques
• The Impor­tance of Web Directory
• Search Engine Opti­miza­tion Methods
• Ten Sim­ple SEO Tips
• Choos­ing A Good SEO Com­pany Is Key To A Suc­cess­ful SEO Campaign

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