At Brighton SEO 2015 Jonathan Alderson (Linkdex) spoke about Doing an awesome site audit. The ‘Site Audit’ is a process for identification and prioritisation of issues. Most SEO audits suck and nobody wants an audit. Yet your responsibility is to make things happen. But how? Jonathan Alderson takes you through the process step by step. 

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 geek

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

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...yet consistently terrible

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Fixing things is often big
and complex
(technically and politically)

6. Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
The ‘Site Audit’ is a process
for identification and
prioritisation of issues

7. Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
Most SEO audits suck

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audit graveyard

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Nobody wants an audit.

10. Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson

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Your responsibility is to
make things happen

12. Doing an awesome site audit @jonoalderson
The Process

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Anticipate objections

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Think about who you’re
talking to

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Consider that you have
multiple audiences with
different needs

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Know your audience
● C-Level
● Management*
● Marketing
● Tech
● Finance
● Legal
● Third parties

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Know your audience
● If any one of these groups has any objections, you enter the spiral of
doom
● People will anticipate other people’s objections (good neighbor
syndrome) and/or find reasons to defer
● 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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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
● Performance and/or commercial data
● To challenge conventional thinking on what an audit looks like, and
how long it takes*

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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
● Demonstrate capability
● Identify and outline issues
● Manage the politics
● Differentiate between commercial impact and commercial opportunity

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Long-form editorial

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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
● Overview of issue
● Summary
● Impact (with metrics)
● Absolute priority score
● Date completed & impact
● Other areas (of organisational
or resource) impact
● 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
Business World Tech World

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Itemised issues

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Itemised issues

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Storyboard

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Storyboard
Name of issue
What is this: Lorem ipsum dolar sum
So what: Lorem ipsum dolar sum

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Quick wins

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Quick wins
● Use the ‘Cheat Sheet’ format
● Focus exclusively on simple, binary issues
● Pick on symptoms if you need to

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audit graveyard

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The audit(!)
Brief tips

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Move slowly!
cook it slowly

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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).
○ 1,000 hours of work on a broken blog subdomain, or 10 hours of work on an
ecommerce template?

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The audit
● 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
● Start with Google before you break out the tools
○ site: searches
○ inurl: (or -inurl:)
○ filetype: (xml, html, swf)
○ (URL Profiler does some cool duplication stuff)

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Eyeball for patterns v.s. issues
● Discerning 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?
● Separating opportunity from issue, and fact from opinion
● Collect and sort issues as you go; iterate the documentation

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Break out the tools
● Use these to validate, quantify, and to strip back layers of the onion
● 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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(!)

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Jono Alderson
Head of Insight @ Linkdex
@jonoalderson