Hello, this is John Locke, and today i want to talk with you about why SEO
audits from free tools are not that great. So, one of the misconceptions that
I run into a lot, especially with people who have tried to do their own SEO in
the past, is about SEO audits. What are they? What do they actually entail? The number
one source of this confusion: there are a lot of free, or close to free tools, out
there that spit out reports. These are usually about two pages long. These smaller SEO audits will hit
some of the bullet points of SEO. But there's a reason why they're not really SEO
audits. They're more like a quick snapshot of some top-level things that you should
be fixing. Most of the tools that are free or almost free, they will tell you a
couple things that you can find out really easily just by scanning the page.
These SEO audits will look at whether the keyword that you're trying to rank for is in the
title tag of your homepage. They might even look at
whether you have Schema markup on your site, or whether your site is
loading in less than 10 seconds. (Let's hope that it is, because ain't nobody got
time to wait 10 seconds for your page to load.) But like I'm saying, most of these
reports are one, or maybe two pages long. They merely hit the the
top-level bullet points of things that are easy to scan. [These "quick scans" do not go in depth.] It's not a big secret
but the first thing that we do in every SEO engagement with a new client is do a
full SEO audit of their site, including their competition,
their whole backlink structure, the content on all their main pages, looking
at the keywords that they want to rank for, and some of the keywords that we
think could be generating traffic for them. Then we look at what's on Page
One of Google for each of those search terms, and actually try to figure out why those
sites are up there. Now, there's a lot of things that can be missed in a so-called
audit done by free tools, that an in-depth SEO audit is going to catch.
Such as: are you competing against other smaller local brands? Are you competing
against big brands on a national or even international stage? How many years have
you been around compared to everybody else that you're trying to beat?
What does your site actually look like? Does your site look rinky-dink, like
it's a small brand? While all the other players in your space have a large
looking brand? How much press coverage do you get? Are all the players in your
space getting tons of press coverage? Do they have a hundred thousand backlinks?
And you only have twenty [back links]? Those are just some of the things that we look at in
in-depth SEO audit, including, for each individual search term, what is
the "searcher intent"? Are they trying to buy something? Are they trying to
research something? Do they just need a quick answer? Those are things that these
free little one-page reports won't tell you. It's very important to do a SEO
audit [before developing a SEO strategy]. In fact, it is so important that we will not do a long term SEO engagement until
we do an SEO audit. That's actually Step One of our long term SEO campaigns. For
some of our clients, we do a standalone SEO audit, and they can definitely get
someone else to fulfill all the stuff that's in the checklist. Because we do
give them a blueprint of what to do. Now, the most important thing of a real in-depth
SEO audit is there's going to be some substance to it. It will be substantially more
than two or three pages. Most of the SEO audits that we end up doing are in
the neighborhood of 30 to 50 pages. I definitely know SEO consultants that
work with even larger brands, and their SEO audits can be hundreds of pages long.
When you're actually getting someone to do an in-depth SEO audit of all the aspects of
your site, not just a one page drive-by, that takes three minutes to do,
the difference is like night and day. What we do, and what I know a lot of people do with these SEO audits,
is the audit becomes the blueprint for the next six months to one year of work that
we're going to do. What type of content needs to be produced to compete with the
other people in your vertical? What improvements do we need to make to the
website? What technical SEO issues are we running into? What type of web address
structure do we need to implement on the site to make it work [siloing]? What type of
backlinking strategy do we need to get in place? Lastly, what things do you
need to be doing outside of your website to build your brand, to where people are
searching for your brand and your products? If you're
finding value from our YouTube channel, there's a couple things you can do. One
is subscribe to our YouTube channel. We are growing. We give SEO tips for
manufacturing and industrial firms at least once a week. The other thing that
you can do, is if you have an SEO question that you'd like to see answered,
put it down in the comments below, and then we'll answer it for you.
This is John Locke for Lockedown Design and SEO. Peace.