Technical SEO Auditing: How healthy is your site?

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Technical SEO auditing: how
healthy is your site?
William Nye | Senior Technical Consultant | william@builtvisible.com

1. Historic performance
2. SEO issues
3. Recommendations
Today we’re going to review an affiliate
site from an organic perspective.

How do we identify SEO issues?

Technical
Crawl Efficiency
Navigation
Best Practice
Authority
Content Marketing
Outreach
Link acquisition
Relevancy
Keyword Targeting
On-page optimisation
SEO

playslotcasinos.com
Domain info
• Domain registered on 14/11/2013
• First crawled by
web.archive.org: 10/3/2014
• 343 indexed search results
• Static HTML build
• Responsive

Historic performance

Is it still ranking?

Current rankings
109 299 525
1719
11567
0
2000
4000
6000
8000
10000
12000
14000
1-5 6-10 11-15 16-20 26-30
#ofKeywords
Desktop Organic Rankings (US) – Positions 1-30
Ranking in the top 10 for 408 terms monitored by SEMrush. Ranking in the top 30 for 14219.

Search opportunity
Total opportunity only around 3k p/m for ranking keywords – but this doesn’t include long tail.
1530 1460 3900
8940
89700
0
10000
20000
30000
40000
50000
60000
70000
80000
90000
100000
1-5 6-10 11-15 16-20 26-30
SearchesPerMonth
Organic Search Opportunity (US) – Positions 1-30

Top SEO issues
• Link profile
• Site quality

Link profile

Link growth overtime
Large quantity of linking domains discovered October 2014 - Jan 2015; big increase in visibility.
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
800
Referring Domains for playslotscasinos.com

Link attrition
Only 11% of the links recorded are still alive. Low quality usually results in high attrition.

Link quality
Low quality linking root domains with low topical relevancy and commercial anchor texts.

Link quality
Unsurprisingly most linking root domains are < 10 Trust Flow (data from Majestic).
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
1-10 11-20 21-30 31-40 41-50 51-60 61-70 71-80
Trust Flow Per Domain

• Quality: Site needs better links to rank effectively, over the long
term
• Anchor Text: Commercial anchor text usage should be minimal
• Topical Relevancy: More relevant links needed
Next steps: Full link profile should be reviewed and the worst links
disavowed
Link profile recommendations

Site quality

Quality updates
Later decreases correlate highly with updates aimed at content quality and user intent.
Panda 4.2
Phantom 3
Core Update

Places an emphasis on E-A-T: expertise, authoritativeness and
trustworthiness
Signs of lowest quality pages
• Pages or websites that are created to make money with little to no
attempt to help users
• Pages or websites created with no expertise or pages which are highly
untrustworthy, unreliable, unauthoritative, inaccurate or misleading
• Violations of the Google Webmaster Quality Guidelines.
Source: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//insidesearch/howsearchworks/assets/searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf
Google quality rater guidelines

Site design
Low quality templated design doesn’t inspire trust. This leads to bad user engagement.

Link quality
Unique textual content but it’s very low in quality. Updates like Phantom have been punishing
sites were textual content doesn’t match user intent.

• Textual Content: Rewrite copy, only including text that matches the
intent of the page. Emphasis on quality of content produced
• Design: Improve the design for both mobile and desktop users with
an emphasis on trustworthiness and usability
• E-A-T: Continued focus around E-A-T throughout the site
Quality recommendations

Why should I care?

Because the opportunities are rapidly
diminishing

The elephant penguin in the room
• 85 weeks since the last refresh on
18/10/2014
• Next update is supposedly “real time”
• Apparently it’s coming soon

What should affiliates do?

Focus on producing websites that provide
real value

The best affiliate sites already do this

Link quality
Try and find a point of difference – whether it’s the quality of the site, exclusivity in what you
offer or another USP.

Whatever Google does, someone, somewhere, will always
find a way to beat the system.
However, using these tactics will always be higher risk.
Affiliates need to pick the right model for their business.
Final thoughts

Thanks!

Technical SEO Auditing: How healthy is your site?

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