Technical SEO is easy. Making recommendations on site structures, opportunities and technical initiatives is pretty straightforward. But the psychology, politics and processes around delivering a actions which are understood, bought into, and acted upon, is much harder. Here's the fix.

1. Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
DOING AN
AWESOME
SITE AUDIT

2. Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Closet web developer & Wordpress fanatic
Jono Alderson
Head of Insight @ Linkdex
@jonoalderson
Technical SEO, analytics & CRO geek, agency guy

3. Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Technical SEO is
hugely important

4. Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
...but everybody’s website
is really shit
has room for improvement...

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You’re hemorrhaging ROI.
Your content
marketing is running
at 20% efficiency.

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damaged
stuck
back-to-front
ugly

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Let’s do a site audit.

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The ‘Site Audit’ is a process for
periodical identification and
strategic prioritisation of issues.

11. Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Most SEO audits suck[!]

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audit graveyard

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Nobody wants an audit.
[!]

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People don’t know what
they want, or how to
communicate it.
But a site
audit’s a thing,
right?

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Your responsibility as a
consultant is to interpret,
and to deliver success.
Or is it?

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You decide.
(But if you’re responsible for results, you
need to effect change, effectively)

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So.
How do you stop your audit landing
in the graveyard?

20. Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
The problem, and the process

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Fixing things is often big
and complex
(politically, psychologically and technically)
Super-difficult Easy

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To effect change, you need to
anticipate objections and to
avoid the spiral of doom.
Spiral of doom Audit graveyard

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You have multiple
audiences with different
needs and different
super-powers

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C-level
Be in control
“one direction”
Marketing
Minimise risk
“changing priorities”
Finance
Minimise cost
“speculate to accumulate”
Third parties
& other SEOs
Defend themselves
“Challenge the status quo”
Tech & Legal
Maintain status quo
“power of veto”

25. Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Know your audience
If any one of these groups has any objections, you enter the spiral of doom
Success depends upon perfect, unquestioned, immediate consensus
"We’ll just need to run it past..." sounds like progress, but it’s is the spiral of
doom

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Tech & Legal
Maintain status quo
What’s the
business case
for this?

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Tech & Legal
Maintain status quo
What’s the
priority of
each item?

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Why should we do
this, if our
competitors aren’t?C-level
Be in control

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Tech say that this will
be really expensive
Finance
Minimise cost

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Third parties
& other SEOs
Defend themselves
We’re not KPI’d on
this.

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How do I justify
dropping other priorities
to focus on this?C-level
Be in control

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Know your audience
You need multiple flavours of deliverables to tackle this
1) Some quick wins*
2) A long-form, editorial audit
3) A spreadsheet of itemised, prioritised issues
4) Cheat sheets for each individual issue
5) A storyboard style presentation

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You will need...

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You will need...
● Exhaustive keyword & market research (actual consumer insight)
● Performance and/or commercial data (or compelling estimates/models)
● To be prepared to challenge conventional thinking on what an audit
looks like, and how long it takes
If it’s taken less than a
week, you’ve rushed it.

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1)Long-form editorial

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Long-form editorial
Required to get senior buy-in and backup to overrule other objections.
Compellingly model commercial impact/opportunity
Communicate using their language
Instill fear and/or greed (watch out for impact vs opportunity!)
Demonstrate capability
… and finally, identify and outline issues

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Long-form editorial

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Long-form editorial
There’s no
such thing
as too much
detail (12,000
words).

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2) Cheat sheet

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Summarise the issue.
Two A4 sheets, size 10 font. No more, no less. 20 minutes per sheet.
Standardisation is important.
Cheat sheet
Summary of issue
Impact (with metrics*)
Absolute priority score
Date completed & impact
Other areas (of organisational or resource) impact
Competitor context
Business World
User story
Brief for fix*
Benefits from fixing (with affected metrics)
Implications of not fixing (as above)
Possible risks
On-going maintenance or process reqs
Tech World

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3) Itemised issues

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Itemised issues

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4) Storyboard

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Storyboard
Large numbers of 404’ing product pages
What is this: People who search for our products in Google click a link to our site, and get a 404 ‘not found’ page.
So what: Poor user experience, high bounce rates, missed sales opportunities. Need to change the way that ‘out of stock’ behaviour works.

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5) Quick wins

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Quick wins
Use the ‘Cheat Sheet’ format
Focus exclusively on simple, binary issue
Pick on symptoms(!) if you need to
Use to overcome objections

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audit graveyard

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{{ DEEP BREATH }}

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The audit itself...
Brief tips

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The audit
Challenge the brief. It’s never good. Domains vs sites, geo considerations, different levels of
commercial intent, etc
Familiarise yourself with the ecosystem
Collect and group group issues as you go, but don’t start writing yet
Start with Google before you break out the tools
site: searches
inurl: (or -inurl:)
filetype: (xml, html, swf)
If you can’t say that you’re confident that you’ve found, quantified and understand the whole
ecosystem, then you’re inviting objections

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site:amazon.com filetype:xml -inurl:sitemap -
site:askville.amazon.com -
site:docs.aws.amazon.com
Typically, the first cut focuses almost
exclusively on indexation and/or
error control.
Until this is (at least partially) tackled,
it’s hard to diagnose anything else.
Manage people’s expectations around
this. You may wish to make this ‘pre-
project’.
Indexation Ctrl

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The audit
Focus on the cause, not the symptom.
Don’t focus on missing tags, broken redirects, etc. Find the why.
Group things by the why, and use the symptoms for reference + justification
Separate isolated/misc issue into line items in your line-items doc
Chase the money (and time is money, too).
100 hours of work on a broken forum, or 1 hour of work on an ecommerce
template?

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(!)

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Eyeball for patterns v.s. issues
● Discern the root cause
● Template level?
Where is the problem?
● Page/URL level?
What type of thing is it?
● Front end or back end (or other)?
What kind of skill set is needed?

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Enrich understanding with other
tools & processes
Use these to validate, quantify, and to strip back layers of the onion - NOT just to
report on #404s, etc.
Don’t be afraid to go broad; include user testing, heat-mapping, crawls - reinforce the
points you’re already making
New/extra issues can expand on existing ones, or be woven into the story
Piggyback on other people’s learnings and processes, e.g., the Moz 2015 checklist.

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Break out the processes, too.
There’s no point fixing things if they’re just going to re-occur.
Use your buy-in and lack of objections to push for process change.
Technical SEO is easy!
Start here: http://www.jonoalderson.com/resources/the-ultimate-
website-development-template-behaviour-brief/
Avoid “SEO Friendly like the plague”
Tweet me @jonoalderson!

57. Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Jono Alderson
Head of Insight @ Linkdex
@jonoalderson
Thanks!