Well hello, and welcome back to the third and final part of our series on Fujisan’s SEO auditing process. If you haven’t already, we recommend reading parts one and two for a crash course on the benefits of SEO auditing and a rundown of our on-site audit process.
After an on-site audit, we conduct an audit of the technical aspects of your site plus one for off-site factors. Here’s how those work:
Technical Audit
Indexing
Part of the technical audit is checking externally related indexing factors like crawl errors and page exclusions.
Crawl Errors
During the crawl error portion, we check for pages indexed in Google Search Console, pages found during a site:search query on both Google and Bing, and URLs returning a 300 or 400 response code.
A common item we address is if we see any big discrepancies in pages indexed on Google or Bing, as this may indicate content that’s being blocked. Likewise, a discrepancy between the number of URLs on your website and the pages returned during a site:search or crawl means there could be issues preventing your site from being fully indexed.
Page Exclusion and Robots.txt
Other than crawl errors, we also examine issues involving page exclusion, which is when pages are intentionally blocked from being indexed in search results. Specifically, we check if your website has a robots.txt file, if there are pages included or excluded from Google and Bing searches, and if there are 404 errors in Google Search Console.
While there are reasons to exclude some pages, we recommend that you never exclude a valuable page of your website and that you include a robots.txt file on every subdomain. When to exclude pages? We recommend that you exclude from search results any pages that aren’t of value to the searcher, such as a terms of service or privacy policy page, via a noindex follow tag. This will ensure the page isn’t indexed, but the search crawlers can still follow links.
Usability
In this portion of our audit, we focus on page loading speeds and mobile usability, as those have a detrimental effect on user experience (and make them less likely to return or convert) when neglected.
Mobile Compatibility
Did you know that if the mobile version of your website provides a poor user experience, your desktop search rankings could suffer as a result? Not only is site efficacy important for desktop, but more and more, sites that are high functioning for mobile devices have a greater edge. Our audits analyze a site’s mobile usability, how well the design translates to a mobile context, and its usage of accelerated mobile pages (or AMP).
This part of the audit isn’t too complicated. It pretty much boils down to “you should have a mobile friendly website!” This is especially true as of July 2018, when Google rolled out mobile first indexing. Mobile first indexing means that — even if your desktop site is the greatest desktop site in all the land — if your site’s mobile experience is poor, then Google’s search results will favor other mobile-friendly websites over yours.
Page Loading
During the page loading portion of the SEO audit, we check for the average duration of a website on mobile and desktop, plus any factors contributing to the load time of your website.
In this regard, it’s important to always compress your images so that file sizes stay small and to use next-gen image formats. Most of the time, we find that high site load times are impacted by images that could be compressed more efficiently. Doing this ensures that your images compress well without sacrificing image quality. Also, make sure to keep external requests to a minimum by combining CSS sources and by deferring non-essential JavaScript sources after the page loads.
Site Navigation
URL Redirects
When we investigate URL redirects, we check for usage of both permanent and temporary redirects (AKA 301 redirects or 302/307 redirects, respectively). The former is preferred for any page that has permanently been moved to a new location, since this is the URL response code that passes link equity from the original page to the new page. The 302s and 307s, on the other hand, should only be used for pages that have been moved temporarily but otherwise should be limited since they don’t pass on link equity.
Duplicate Content
The next component addresses duplicate content. We check for duplicate content being served on your website, which occurs during URL variations (i.e. “http” versus “https” or “www” versus non-“www”) and for scraped content present on other sites.
Unfortunately, search engines do not like duplicate content and will penalize your site for it. Fortunately, duplicate content is a solvable issue. If you have scraped content or the same content on multiple URLs, it’s best to rewrite your content to be unique. Or for duplicate content resulting from URL variations, you can implement 301 redirects for the duplicate page to the canonical version of that page. That way, all the page content is consolidated onto one page instead of being split up between multiple pages with only minor URL variations. This works by marking the duplicate content page with a robots noindex tag and implementing the rel=“canonical” tag to identify the root page for search engines.
Sitemaps
In this last section, we want to ensure your site has XML sitemaps in place. This is basically a map of the URLs on your website in a language that allows search engines to quickly find content. In addition to normal sitemaps with all your URLs, there are other types of sitemaps as well. There are different sitemaps for static URL content, images, blog content, and videos. It’s a good practice to make sure your XML sitemaps only includes pages returning a 200 response code — no 404s! — and to make sure you submit XML sitemaps to Google Search Console.
Off-Site Audit
The off-site portion of our audit process focuses primarily on the extent to which your content is reached by social media or external linking. We cannot emphasize enough how important quality links are to your SEO health. Google sees each link to your site as an endorsement of quality. The higher the authority of the site linking to you, the higher the endorsement.
Link Root Domains
During the off-site audit, we check inbound link characteristics and analyze the sources linking to you. For the latter, we look at both the number and diversity of domains linking to you. Obviously, it’s preferable to have more sites linking to yours, but if you received 2,000 links, would you rather have one domain sending you 2,000 links, or 100 domains each sending you 20 links? The latter is preferable, and we recommend shooting for a link diversity of 10%.
Furthermore, of the domains linking to your website, the strength of each website matters. It’s generally accepted that if a strong domain links to you, it makes your site that much stronger through association as opposed to being linked to by a weaker authority domain. It’s like a popularity contest on the internet.
With these in mind, you should prioritize having a variety of different sites linking to you. Preferably, the subject of these domains should be relevant to your business, brand, or location.
Inbound Links
An audit of inbound links is similar to our audit of root domains, but more internally focused. Here, we check for the total amount of inbound links (in addition to the domains), the amount of recently new or lost links, the ratio of follow and no-follow links, and the usage of anchor text in links.
Note that follow links and no-follow links have equal value as far as directing traffic from one site to your own. Where follow links have increased value, however, is that no-follow links don’t pass link equity to your site, and thus don’t increase your long-term SEO ranking. Hence, follow links are, for SEO, more valuable.
Anchor text, meanwhile, should ideally be descriptive and include a brand name or keyword. In other words, “click here” text should be discouraged.
For growing your number of inbound links, there’s a few practices we recommend. For starters, don’t buy links! Not only are they rarely high quality, but often they’re sourced from the fringes of the web and could create a penalty for your site. Otherwise, it’s a good call to interact with others in your industry — whether via guest blogs, going on their podcast, etc. — and look out for mentions of your brand online by those that haven’t yet linked to you. Those who already endorse your brand are likely to link to you again if you ask nicely or offer something in return and establishing relationships with relevant players in your field widens your visibility.
Lastly, the strategy most in your control is to simply create quality shareable content and then promote it on your blog and social channels. People link to and share content they like, so giving them something to like will natural provide you with more organic linking.
Social Strength
The last component we check for during an off-site audit is the social strength of your brand. This is a fairly simple check on the number of shares, likes, followers, or other relevant measurements on channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Pinterest. It’s not a huge part of our audit, but it’s a helpful measuring stick to analyze against your competitors’ numbers. The other advantage to leveraging social media channels is that they’re a fantastic way to promote your content — which in itself is valuable to drive more links and traffic.
After we’ve finished the on-site, technical and off-site audits, the SEO audit process is complete! Now you’ll have the foundation upon which to further optimize your site and more efficiently grow your digital visibility.
So, are you ready to get started? Contact us today to learn more about our SEO audit services at Fujisan Marketing.
