Subscribe to RSSSEO Audit for the Early Stages of Digital Success – Part 1
To effectively assess your website, start by removing the rose-colored spectacles that rest on the bridge of your non-digital nose and get used to this idea: your baby is ugly. That’s right. Your site isn’t perfect, nor will it ever be perfect. Perfection in SEO does not exist. It certainly doesn’t exist when it comes to conversions, either. Making your website functional for users and “findable” (aka crawlable) for the search engines is actually the second step for success in Search. Starting with introductory keyword research will give you guidelines and objectivity when trying to grade just what the website contains, as well as what is missing. It’s difficult to audit the health of your site without having some idea of where you need to build equity within its content. Understating opportunity through keyword search volume and its competitive balance turns the rose-colored lenses into a respectable pair of disposal contact lenses. Don’t worry, you’ll upgrade to a microscope – but not until you’ve read a few more posts.
What can I hope to get out of an audit?
SEO Audits can be as specific as grading every page on a 10,000-page site and inspecting each piece of content on a 20-point scale of on-site ranking factors. It doesn’t have to be so specific and granular, though, to walk away with valuable insights. That information alone makes it a priceless investment. Even in a top-line audit, you should get a sense of:
- How the search engines are viewing your website
- What changes you can make that matter right now
- Who is linking to your site
- What content you will need to add in order to rank in a traffic-driving position
If you would like to have knowledge of the four bullets above, you need to come to terms with the fact that an audit is necessary in your life. There are a few things you will need in order to effectively document and complete this process:
Prepare your browser – If you are reading this in Internet Explorer, or IE, and it is your only choice for a web browser, try giving Firefox or Chrome a try. IE doesn’t offer the same support for auditing your website that Chrome and Firefox do.
- Disable your browser cookies (How to in Firefox , in Chrome )
- Switch user agent to Googlebot (How to in Firefox)
- Disable Javascript (How to in Firefox, in Chrome)
- Open an Excel workbook (explained in Part 2 – stay tuned)
- Open a Notepad
Why so much work setting up your browser? It is a simple way to grasp how search engines see your website. This perspective will also give you visual confirmation of what indexing errors could be occurring.
For example, if you have an international audience and have taken the time to set up your website in a multi-language format, by disabling browser cookies you might learn that a primary language must first be selected in order to proceed into the main site. You might also run into a splash page requiring some specific requirements of the user to enter the main site. If either of these are the case, the search bots might not have a good index of your site.
How much trust does my site have?
The level of inclusion your website has in search engines indexes is a good gauge of trust and/or authority within that particular engine.
A simple test (you should be documenting from this point on):
VS.
In the first screen shot, you can see the number of pages our website has indexed in Google. In the second screen shot, you can see the number of pages as indicated by www.xml-sitemaps.com.
The difference between the number of pages on your site and in Google’s index can diagnose things like a crawl issue. If you are certain you have more pages than either tool calculated, you can bet these two bots are running into crawling issues because of menu navigation roadblocks or poor site architecture. If the sitemap generated has a larger list of pages than Google’s index it most likely is reflective of the quality of content or lack of inbound links. Don’t forget: A search engine is not interested in keeping content that doesn’t serve a purpose or provide value.
In our case you can see the opposite is true. The sitemap actually listed less content than Google has indexed. The cause of this could be a number of things, but primarily it has to do with duplicate content or Google indexing pieces of content stored in a blog database. Below is an example of content Google has indexed, which didn’t make it in the sitemap:
If you are experiencing major gaps, run your site with that newly stripped down web browser to see if anything major is sticking out. If not, call a pro and get some consultation.
These exercises should illuminate how search engines are able to crawl and index the pages of your site – a major component of an SEO Audit and first step to digital success. Ready yourself for Part 2 of this post, which will dig into a few ways you can improve your site.
More posts by Derek Mabie »
Author: DerekMabie
Derek Mabie is President & Co-Founder of Evolve Digital Labs, an industry leader in SEO development and consultation. Derek has contributed to blogs such as SEOMoz and STL Collective, along with being featured in the St. Louis Business Journal. Derek has collaborated with many of the top minds in the Search Marketing industry, including the 2011 Online Marketing Summit and the 2010 Integrated Marketing Summit in St. Louis where he presented along-side other industry experts on the topic of Search Engine Marketing & Optimization.
1 Comments
2012-02-22
09:48:36
[...] an earlier post, I revealed some simple tests that you can perform on your own website in order to gauge its [...]