An example of an SEO website audit using SEOmoz, MajesticSEO, website auditor and Advanced Web Ranking

1. Technical audit and competitor
benchmark report
Halfords.com
Eric Muhanji

2. Contents
Technical audit................................................................................................................................................................ 2
Domain Statistics ........................................................................................................................................................ 2
Content and Structure Crawl Stats ............................................................................................................................. 2
Server Response Codes ............................................................................................................................................... 3
Load Speed ................................................................................................................................................................. 3
Duplicate Content ....................................................................................................................................................... 3
Information Architecture ............................................................................................................................................ 3
URLS ............................................................................................................................................................................ 3
Page titles ................................................................................................................................................................... 3
Competitor Benchmark Report ....................................................................................................................................... 4
Keywords Visibility Reports ........................................................................................................................................ 4
Backlink History .......................................................................................................................................................... 5
Anchor Text Distribution ............................................................................................................................................. 6
Page Metrics ............................................................................................................................................................... 7
Appendix: Keywords - Bikes & Car Maintenance/Accessories ........................................................................................ 9

3. Technical audit
Domain Statistics
Halfords.com is a 15 year old website with a good domain authority and Google page rank 5 for the homepage. The
main stats are as follows:
 The domain halfords.com has IP address 195.219.49.11 and is located in UK.
 The domain's age is 15 year(s), 2 month(s).
 Domain PR Domain Google PageRank RP PR 5
 Alexa Rank Alexa Rank 10355
 Compete Rank Compete Rank in Compete.Com 128960
 Compete Traffic Traffic according to Compete.Com 11823
 DMOZ Listing DMOZ Listing Yes
 Yahoo! Dir Listing Yahoo! Dir Listing Yes
 Rel= canonical has been implemented on all pages
 ok 0 pages have duplicate rel="canonical" code
 ok 0 pages have conflicting character encoding
Content and Structure Crawl Stats
I looked at the main SEO factors of page titles, meta description, content, graphic alt text, sitemap, robots.txtx and
URL structure. Below are the most important metrics, the best practices and what was found following an
http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test crawl of Halfords.com.
SEO Factor Best Practice Observed
Page Titles Include Keyword but make it Error: 1 page has missing or empty
appealing to click from SERP title tag.
and keep within 65 characters. Error: 362 pages have a too long
Page titles are the most title tag (> 65 chars).
important direct ranking factors. Error: 227 pages have duplicate
page title.
Meta description Have a unique sales oriented Error: 207 pages have duplicate
meta description for each page meta description.
with up to 160 characters. Meta
descriptions have no direct Warning: 28 pages have missing or
influence on rankings but can empty meta description tag.
affect click-through rates.
Content Text Aim for 200 to 400 words Warning: 2720 pages use frames.
unique content with a few We need to make sure there is
keyword and LSI synonyms. enough content to be crawled in
such pages.
Graphic alt text Include alt tag for any images. OK
Sitemap Google sitemaps can potentially Sitemap
help you include a higher proportion http://www.halfords.com/sitemap.gz OK
of your pages in the index and
potentially enable you to notify
Google of changes
Robots.txt file Use Robots.txt to control indexing of Robots.txt
pages by search engines. http://www.halfords.com/robots.txt OK
URL structure Use a descriptive and keyword rich Warning: 4439 pages have a too
URL with less than 115 characters. long URL (>115 chars). More URL
problems discussed below.

4. Server Response Codes
Crawl-ability affects the way the search engines crawl and index the site. You want to see a high number 1xx or 2xx
server response; a few 301/302 redirects and even fewer error pages indicated by 4xx and 5xx pages. A crawl test
using http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test produced 3885 pages with the following outcomes:
 2719 (70%) pages are good to crawl (their server response code is 200)
 9 (0.23%) pages redirect to other pages (their server response code is 301)
 690 (18%) pages redirect to other pages (their server response code is 302)
 1 pages have server errors (their server response code is 404)
 1 pages have server errors (their server response code is 500)
Server response 301 redirects pass link and page authority value but 302’s are meant for temporary redirects. We
would need to investigate the high number of 302 server responses to determine if they are a correct use.
Load Speed
Google has stated load speed could be a factor in ranking similar sites. The PageSpeed Score indicates how much
faster a page could be. A high score indicates little room for improvement, while a lower score indicates more room
for improvement.
Running Halfords.com in Google page speed tool got an overall PageSpeed Score of 77 (out of 100) which is fast
enough. However a crawl of the site showed a warning 2727 pages have too big size (> 100 kB) which can affect load
speed of the page and site. Main improvement recommendations are to leverage browser caching, combine images
into CSS sprites and specify a cache validator.
Duplicate Content
Some product description has been copied from elsewhere possibly the manufacturers’ catalogue. An example is
seen on the Carrera Kraken Mountain Bike page where copyscape.com has detected duplicate content with other
websites.
Information Architecture
Information architecture affects the way search engines robots navigate the site and crucially also the user
experience. Here we look at how easy it is for information top flow through Halfords site.
 Site navigation: The main departments are represented by main categories from homepage with dropdown
features detailing sections. This gives a good user experience and is search engine friendly.
 Labelling and naming conventions: The category labelling is user friendly and keyword rich and without being
over optimised.
 Directory structures: The directory structure goes from main navigation to individual products in 3 layers or
less which is what is recommended.
URLS
It is important to use a URL that includes a keyword, effectively describes its corresponding content and is not much
longer than 115 characters. The URL’s on the site are not search engine or human friendly for example:
Observed:
http://www.halfords.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/categorydisplay_storeId_10001_catalogId_10151_categoryId
_165555_langId_-1
It is better to implement a URL rewrite to get a URL like “Halfords.com/bikes”.
Page titles
Some page titles are not optimised - e.g. hybrid bikes category shows “Halfords | Hybrid Bikes | Best Hybrid Bike |
Hybrid Bikes Reviews”. The word reviews should be substituted with a “buy” term to better describe the page.

5. Competitor Benchmark Report
Halfords.com is effectively in three markets of bikes, car accessories and camping. I benchmarked the bikes and car
accessories keywords of Halfords.com against main competitors of each industry. The competing sites with high
keywords visibility are evanscycles.com for bikes and eurospares.com for car accessories.
The keywords I used were selected by scraping the respective parts of the Halfords.com site using Google keyword
tool. The resulting keywords for bikes and car parts can be seen in appendix 1.
Keywords Visibility Reports
In general Halfords.com has more visibility for the keywords than evanscycles.com in Google and Bing. The keywords
visibility report shows Halfords has 59 keywords in top 10 (first page) of Google and Bing compared to 36 for
evanscycles.com.
The visibility of 136 keywords related to car accessories shows Halfords.com has 102 keywords in the top 10 first of
Google and Bing compared to 37 for eurocarparts.com.

6. Backlink History
The historical backlink history report is used to demonstrate the velocity and diversity of link acquisition. It should
ideally show a steady rise in both number of links and linking domains over time.
Backlink profiles - Halfords.com/bikes vs. evanscycles.com/categories/bikes.
The historical backlink profile shows Halfords has had a higher velocity of links since October 2010 from a higher
diversity of domains than evanscycles.com.
The chart below shows rate of link acquisition and linking domains to halfords.com/car-maintenance has also
increased significantly since October 2010 whereas eurocarparts.com/car-parts has had a steady increase. It is
noticeable however that http://www.eurocarparts.com/car-parts has surpassed Halfords in its diversity of linking
domains which is a positive aspect of their profile.

7. Anchor Text Distribution
It is good to have some keyword rich anchor text links without overdoing it which can result in a Google penguin
update penalty. A good rule of thumb is that 75% of anchor texts should be brand and the rest a mixture of money
term keywords. So a high percentage of brand and other anchor text is a good indication of a healthy backlink
profile.
Halfords.com/bikes has a healthy distribution of anchor texts with only 25% being keyword rich “bikes”. The majority
of evanscycles.com/categories/bikes links (67%) are internal which do not pass as much value.
Below pie chart shows the anchor text report for eurocarparts.com/car-parts page has far more keyword rich anchor
texts such as “car parts” (54%) than halfords.com/car-maintenance. This could be considered over optimised under
the Penguin update which suggests only about 20-25% of anchor texts should be keyword rich money terms.

8. Page Metrics
A high page authority demonstrates likelihood of the page to rank well for given keywords regardless of content.
Comparison of evanscycles.com shows they have a lower page authority than Halfords.com/bikes. Although they
have more external links, Halfords have more links in total, more links to root and C blocks (diversity). Halfords also
has a better social profile in terms of likes and shares on Facebook, Twitter and Goggle +1. Evans has more external
followed links which is a positive vote in their favour.

9. The car maintenance comparison shows halfords.com/car-maintenance has a higher page authority than
eurocarparts.com/car-parts possibly as result of more links in total. This is despite eurocarparts.com/car-parts
having more followed links, more diversity in Linking, links to root domain and C blocks and social shares. There is a
better SEOmoz authority (page MozRank and MozTrust) for eurocarparts.com/car-parts due to the better link
profile.

10. Appendix: Keywords - Bikes & Car Maintenance/Accessories
Bikes car accessories
Bikes car accessories
Bicycles car parts
Cycles service parts for cars
BMX Bikes seat car accessories
Bike Shop car accessory
Mens & Womens Bikes accessories car
Ladies Bikes cars accessories
Mens Bikes cheap car parts online
Mens Cycles car parts online
Bike builds audi parts online
Mountain Bikes online car parts uk
Buy a Mountain Bike auto parts online uk
Cheap Mountain Bikes online automotive parts
Hybrid Bikes car parts uk online
Best Hybrid Bike auto parts online
Hybrid Bikes Reviews online auto parts uk
Road Bikes car parts and accessories
Buy a Road Bike ford focus parts
Cheap Road Bikes For Sale ford parts
Fixie Bikes ford fiesta parts
Fixed Gear Bikes ford spare parts
Fixed Wheel Bikes ford ranger parts
Fixies ford parts direct
Folding Bikes dab car radio
Buy a Folding Bicycle car dab radio
Fold Up Bikes dab car radios
Electric Bikes dab radio for car
Electric Bicycles car dab radios
Electric Bikes UK dab radio for cars
BMX Bikes in car dab radios
Cheap BMX Bikes dab radio for the car
BMX Bikes for Sale dab car radio fitting
Dirt Jump Bikes in car stereo
Buy a Dirt Jump Bike car stereo fitting
Dirt Jump Bikes for Sale in car stereos
Classic Bicycles car stereo
Classic Bikes car stereos
Buy a Classic Bicycle fitting a car stereo
fitting car stereo
in car radio
car radio
car radio fitting
in car radios
car radios
fitting a car radio
car radio with sat nav
car spare parts
auto spares
spares car
auto spare parts
motor spares
motorcycle spares
vehicle spares online