Welcome to this new video by SEO Forest Academy where I will teach you how to
perform a quick SEO Audit in just 4 minutes so firstly when we look at what
the SEO audit is all about. It helps you to do 3 things. Firstly it helps you
to identify the SEO problems and shortcomings that are hurting your
organic traffic which is why you should do SEO audits frequently for your
website and for your business. Most of the times, businesses tend to forget that
their website is very important especially being an important touch
point for customers. When customers visit your store, they usually tend to search
your business online before visiting your store. Therefore it's very important
that you have the most relevant information as well as allow search
engines to properly index and crawl your website such that it's able to display the most
relevant results and then your website appears on the first page on Google. So
before I dive straight on why we should do SEO audits, I want you to hit the
SUBSCRIBE button and the LIKE button right now so that it will help us to
produce even more meaningful SEO videos in the future. So when we look at an SEO
audit, it will show you technical problems with your website that are
restricting search engines to crawl our site. This will help you to see why Google or
other search engines are penalizing your site and why your site is not ranking
despite you having the best content or some quality content on your website. If
you are a freelancer or working in an agency, it will show the client your
credibility within minutes and help you to secure a contract fast. So it's
important that you learn how to do SEO audits from scratch instead of relying on
a lot of free tools out there that can help you with this. These free tools you
can find them in Moz, Ahrefs, SEMRush, Majestic SEO, Alexa SEO and so on
and the problem the most marketers and SEO professionals face is this -- how do
you interpret these SEO Audits? This video will show you how to do this
it takes just five minutes for an SEO professional to know if your website is
on point you need some practice to be efficient at this but it's not a
difficult process and you can learn this on your own so you need to start every
SEO audit right where matters the home page of a website here you want to right
click inspect elements and check for a title tag, you need to make sure that
in a title tag, there's the primary keyword and the name of the business.
More importantly for local SEO, it's important to have something called the
NAP - basically your name address and phone number. We need to make sure that information is
visible and accurate because consumers must be able to find this on your
website so that they can contact you and from the SEO perspective, this
information is needed when you register your website on Google My Business which
is free. This is how a listing on Google my business looks like when a customer
googles your business.
Next, you want to see whether there is only one H1 tag. If there is more, delete the
rest because you only want 1 H1 tag. Having more than one H1 tag
will confuse Google because the H1 tag usually tells Google in more detail what this
website is all. Thirdly, you need to see whether there's any H2 Tags and how many
there are. Make sure that in H2 tags, there's secondary keywords inside which
must be relevant to the primary keyword. More often than not, this is where you
add in your long tail keywords or the longer search terms which are relevant to
your primary keyword. We need to check if the images on your
page have the proper alternate text association. Here you can do in this code
on how to check whether this alternate text and ideally these alternate text should
contain your business name and also some keywords
Note that the Alt text should be less than 30 characters because Google doesn't
really crawl anymore characters after that. You want to have a quick look at the
home page content - you want to look at the overall presentation of the website
when you need to see if this website has a good user experience. If the website
looks crappy, people will not stay for long much less buy anything from your
website so you need to make sure that your website looks professional and
ideally, it has to have the branding guidelines of your business. So let's say
you're e-commerce website that wants to convey a fun vibe selling a lot of Beach
related stuff, you definitely want to have bright colours that
consistent throughout your entire website. This is what is known as the
navigation or the UX/UI design of your website. You might also want to take a
look and whether there's some sort of internal linking between the pages of
each website ideally for any website be an e-commerce website informational
website, transactional website on whatever website, ideally there should be
a blog inside because having a blog helps you to add the word count and at the
same time helps your website to rank for keywords. A pro tip if you are dealing
with an important client - you need to repeat this process of looking at a page
for all the important pages of their website, for example, to look at their sub
pages as well as their landing pages as well as their product descriptions.
Even for big companies out there, there's always something in SEO that these
clients are missing and you can tell the client that the page is missing a title
tag, some metadata and some other important information that's important for search
engines. This helps you to position you to the client in an authoritative way
and you will definitely help you to get the project.
The next phase will be looking at the backlink profile audit - here you will
want to use the SEO tool of a choice but I prefer to use the AHREFs free backlinks
checker. There are two things that we want to
look at - first will be domain rating as well as the number of backlinks at this
website has. These two metrics are correlated because the lower the number of
backlinks, the lower the number of domain rating. Ideally you want to increase the
domain rating of a website by doing two things-
making sure that your website churns on quality content and helping the website
build backlinks by going to citation websites as well as doing guest posting.
Here it's very easy to tell if the website brand new, does it rank for any keywords,
are there any backlinks, which page on Google does your clients website rank on?
Moving on to stage 3 in this five minute SEO audit which I think has exceeded
time, but it's okay, let's continue! We want to look in the Google My Business.
Firstly, is your clients website on your website on Google My Business? This
is how a common GMB looks like. If your website does not have such a
listing, you can create a free Google my business account where usually Google
will want to verify your website by postcard. This means that Google will
send a postcard to your physical business location and you need to key in
the code on this postcard on your Google my business account. It's that easy and
very important because because having this listing on Google my business plays
a big part of rankings in SEO, especially for local SEO. This is very
important because this is a first impression for your potential customer
and the first touch point before they even visit your store. So 66% of
customers polled stated that they will look up a business online
before they went down to the store. So you need to make sure that the
information on your Google my business thinking is accurate
such as your business name phone number and address
Next, you need to look in the reviews - are you responding to the reviews and are there
negative reviews that affect your website? It doesn't
matter if your business has long negative reviews
you just need to improve your business as well as to make sure that you respond to
these reviews because some of these reviews may be fake and may be generated
by our competitors. Google my business is different for bigger companies with
multiple locations because Google takes a longer time to make sure that these
businesses are legitimate and they take a longer time for them to verify the physical
business locations with postcards. At the same time, you do not want to include
random keywords into your title because it's easy for your competitors or anyone
in general to report what's wrong with your keyword title which will affect
your rankings. So time's up! Once you're familiar with this SEO audit process you
will be able to have an understanding of the quick SEO issues that our website
faces. Ideally you want to get access to the clients Google search console
because this will show you the crawling errors of a website. You also want to
look at the site map as well as the robots.txt file because these shows you
which pages are more likely to be indexed on Google and which pages are
more likely to be indexed on Google.
The website may have accidentally added the nofollow tag that prevents Google or
search engines from crawling this particular page. Also note that in big
companies, the duplication of content duplication of title tags and meta
descriptions are very common. You also want to look at the domain age
of a website where generally speaking, the older the website, the easier it is for
it to rank. So now we have come to the end of this SEO audit and I want you to
click the button below to the SUBSCRIBE for more SEO audits in the future but
before we leave, here'ssome bonus content for you, where we have this free
downloadable with the link in description below where you can look at
the ultimate 20-point checklist for 2020 so what do you think of this
SEO audit? Did I miss out anything? I want to hear your thoughts in the comment
section below and make sure to subscribe and
like this video for even more content in the future
so until the next video, happy SEO!