Conducting an Advanced Audit

An audit of a project is one of the most important parts when working on any website as an SEO specialist.

During the audit, we gather all the necessary information to address the main pain points of the project and act accordingly.

And yes, I mentioned project and not website because SEO is one of the pillars of Marketing, and Marketing is one of the “departments” that every company needs to function. Obviously, as SEOs, when conducting an audit, we need to focus primarily on SEO, but also on all related branches. Simply because to do SEO effectively, we need to understand the overall intent of the website.

I recommend that you get comfortable because this will be a lengthy post due to the complexity of writing about how to conduct an advanced audit for any type of project. So, although I will present it generically, feel free to skip the sections that don't apply to your project.

Note: Although this is a collaboration with SeRanking, both SeRanking and I are committed to honesty. Tools like SeRanking are useful in the auditing process, and in this post, you'll see points where an SEO tool can save you time, but what truly matters is the “pilot,” the methodology you use to conduct the respective analyses.

Information Provided by the Client

SEO is a part of Marketing, and the foundation of Marketing is communication, so it's best to start there.
Regardless of the company, we must assume that there is poor communication within that company because this is the only way we can verify the real needs of the business.

It’s not uncommon for the sales team of a company to have a different idea of the product/service being sold than the developers themselves, not to mention the perception of the final customer. Therefore, it’s best to try to gather information from various sources to combine what is known about the website's intent with the reality of the business. If significant discrepancies are detected, we've found the first Quick Win. If we don't know what we're going to communicate, how can we communicate it correctly?

So, although this beginning of an audit may not seem related to SEO, it will provide us with the necessary information to conduct the audit professionally.

Steps to Gather the Necessary Information

Live Meeting

To work professionally, it's necessary to gather information from at least one company representative. If possible, having different representatives from various areas to obtain information from multiple perspectives is even better. If an audit is conducted through an intermediary without direct access to information, the audit will always be incomplete (except perhaps for the technical part).
From this meeting, we will gather all the possible information regarding competition, goals, strengths, and weaknesses (SWOT analysis).

It’s important to note that the competition mentioned by the client may not necessarily be the competition we face in terms of SEO, so it is additional information.

In that meeting, we also need to understand the target audience: target countries, client languages, ages, gender, interests, social class, and job positions.

Finally, if allowed, contacting someone from the sales team is crucial to gather information about the most common questions asked by customers and potential clients.

Once we have all the information, we need to ensure that what is intended to be communicated is actually being communicated.

Verification by Someone Unfamiliar with the Project

To ensure that the information intended to be communicated through the website is consistent with the internal information of the company, it’s highly recommended to have it reviewed by someone who is not familiar with the project.
I’m not saying that someone who works continuously on a project can’t conduct audits, but there is a problem.

If the person knows the project in-depth, they will understand the website with less need for information, even knowing where each section is located through mere repetition and habit.

One of the principles of usability is that an object should explain itself without external clarification and should meet generated expectations. If we know the project, it’s much harder to analyze that part, as we all have biases and subjectivities based on our knowledge.

This is why it’s recommended to conduct external audits periodically, not due to the internal team's professionalism but so that it can be analyzed by a team that does not know the project internally.

Testing the Website and Business

Another very relevant aspect of gathering information is the functionality of the website itself.
Before diving into the specifics of SEO, does the website work correctly? Is there good service?

The best approach is to treat the website as if you were a potential customer, a mystery shopper. When a website has traffic but doesn't convert, all reasons for conversion failures must be examined, as it’s surprising how often appointment calendars, contact forms, or product stocking systems fail.

Therefore, the ideal within an audit is to conduct an analysis and use a checklist to evaluate the process of: information, decision, product/service acquisition, and post-sale service. To see if the website satisfactorily covers all needs in that process. If it doesn't, it’s difficult for Google to consider our content the most relevant for the user when they can't accomplish what they came to do on the website.

Although Google does not interact with the website, it does observe user interactions on it, as revealed in a leaked internal slideshow:

Accesses

Perhaps the most challenging part with some clients is access. To conduct an audit, we must have at least access to:

• Google Search Console
• Bing Webmaster
• Analytics tools

If GTM is used, access would also be helpful, and if it’s going to be a technical audit, access to the code and a testing environment is beneficial, but many companies are reluctant to share this, and they're not always willing. As I often say:

“Help me help you.”

Filtering the Information

Our memories change, adapt, and mold. It’s important to note down all the information gathered to ensure that the information we've obtained from the entire project is correct.
Sharing this information with the business managers and checking that there are no discrepancies is key. If there are discrepancies, the main point to highlight in the audit will be the standardization of project ideas.

If it’s unclear from within what is intended to be communicated, the information that will reach the client will be confusing.

This is where companies try to present themselves as premium-budget and other contradictions. They don't have a clear idea of their business.

For me, the key question when gathering information is:

What differentiates this business from its competitors?

If the business managers are not clear about where the value of the business lies, we have a bigger problem than any SEO issue.

But that’s why we start by analyzing the foundation before we start reviewing the website without a clear direction.

Establishing a Contact Method with Project Managers

Having doubts is normal, so even if it’s just an email, it’s important to have a way to ask about an implementation or strategic idea. Sometimes we might think something is incorrect, and we simply lack context.

Strategic Audit

Once we have all the information about the website itself, we need to ensure that the strategy aligns with the company’s vision and ideas.
SEO should adapt to the business model, not the other way around, unless we're talking about a niche business.

When writing about how to conduct a strategic audit in a post, I encounter several complications:

• Every project is unique; as I mentioned, the strategy should adapt to the company's model.
• What works strategically in one project may not work in another. Besides factors beyond our control, the reality is that even though two projects may seem identical because they sell the same thing, if there is a difference in communication style or target audience, this makes it a different business. Although some strategies can be extrapolated and adapted, the same approach won’t work for everything.
• If I list all the possibilities for each project, this post will never end.
• SEO is trial and error; it will depend a lot on the analytics and information we have about the project and our own experience to make the best decisions.
• There are more ideas than people. The beauty of a strategy is that it is differentiating and works, so it has a creative component that is difficult to represent in writing.

Strategy and problem-solving ability are “unlikely” (if not impossible) to teach; they can be trained and practiced. Winning tactics can be taught, but strategic ability will depend on the individual.
Obviously, while there is creativity and imaginative strategic ability, there are objective issues that work and do not work.

Once an SEO professional has experience, they know which paths to take and which to avoid.

However, although I believe that logic and strategic ability can be trained but not taught, the strategy being audited depends heavily on the specific project, SEO has something similar to usability, standards, or a foundation that guarantees success, as well as ideas that can ensure failure. So let’s go over some of these tips.

Strategic Standards

Categorization and Pagination

It has always been said that if you want to hide a body, the best place is on the second page of Google. (Google reintroduces pagination in its search engine). If users don’t go to the second page of the world’s most used search engine for something they are deliberately searching for, why would they do so on your website?
The ideal approach is to organize and create a structure that makes sense and is coherent for the user. If a category of products or services has too many pages, it’s always possible to rethink it and find patterns that allow for differentiation and the creation of subcategories.

CTAs

A CTA is the acronym for “Call To Action,” i.e., a call to action. These are eye-catching buttons or links that invite the user to take action, such as booking, purchasing, or contacting.
We must always assume that the user is “clueless,” so we must guide them as much as possible. It doesn’t matter if you have a giant "Contact" link in the navigation bar; if you think the user may need to contact you after reading some content, it’s best to make it easy for them to do so.

CTAs not only allow us to improve internal linking but also guide our users as if they were a flock. Additionally, these buttons will help users navigate.

Minimum Page Quantity

A website should have the necessary number of pages to achieve its objectives.
Although one-page sites are very attractive to designers, each page should meet a clear search intent. So, if too many concepts are being grouped on one page (e.g., everything on the homepage), it’s best to separate them.

Avoid Indexable Low-Quality Pages

Some pages must be on the website for legal or business reasons, but they may not contain relevant content for the user.
If we identify pages that Google interprets as soft 404 or have poor content, we need to prune them. Unify content or make certain pages non-indexable to ensure a minimum quality level for the indexable pages on our website.

Crawl Depth

All pages on a website should be accessible within six clicks from the homepage, preferably fewer.
We can also use sitemaps and check if they are correctly implemented.

Keyword Stuffing

There is a belief that content should be adapted to SEO. Today, SEO should adapt to content and, at most, influence search intent and headings.
A text should never have a minimum or maximum word count or a specific keyword density in the text.

The fact that content is unnatural and appears to be made for robots is enough to lower rankings. The ideal approach is for the page to solve what the user is looking for in the most natural way possible.

Historical Check

It’s important to check that the project hasn't undergone poorly executed migrations or been penalized. If this has happened, ensure that the necessary measures have been taken, and if not, take them.

Technical Audit

This may be the most challenging part of an audit, as it requires a knowledge base with a steep learning curve.
Without a minimum understanding of programming, it’s impossible to conduct a complete and thorough technical audit.

Although tools like SeRanking can provide you with a lot of information, they give you a thread to pull on and can help prioritize the information you need to audit.

But tools today are not infallible and do not understand context. This sector is one where there are many “it depends.”

The same applies to this article. I can provide some main points to consider in an audit. But a professional audit should know how to adapt the necessary points to its project and find things “out of the list,” that is, outside the list.

As an SEO, you also need to know how to differentiate priorities depending on the project's severity and situation. However, here is a list of the main issues.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are still important; we should check that titles, indexability, follows, canonicals, descriptions, and http-equiv are correct, within the head tag, without any unreadable tags.
It’s important to understand how rendering works to know what Google is reading correctly.

Headings

Although often undervalued, Headings are still useful both for users and for search engines like Google to understand the order and hierarchy of your content.

Structured Data

It’s important not to obsess, but we must ensure that structured data is implemented correctly.
In many cases, when dealing with custom-coded projects, developers forget to prevent the export of content with quotes, which ends up breaking the structured data. So, this is something that needs to be reviewed carefully.

Mobile

We must ensure the proper implementation of mobile devices, with the correct meta viewport, and whether it’s adaptive or responsive, and how it functions.
It’s important to ensure that everything is clickable and how forms work when the keyboard appears on the mobile.

HTML

HTML is the markup language par excellence that allows all browsers to understand the structure of the web.
It’s important to audit the HTML elements that can enhance positioning because Google understands them better and to ensure that the code is relatively clean.

JavaScript

JavaScript is the only programming language that all browsers interpret. It handles the functionality of most websites. It’s important to ensure that the code is clean, how it interacts with rendering, and what actions it performs.
For example, there is a big difference between a link with its anchor tag and an action that moves the user to another page when clicking on an element.

Rendering

We must ensure that the corresponding search engines interpret the correct DOM.

Robots.txt

We need to ensure that the robots.txt codes are appropriate for the project.

Images

We must ensure that images are correct, relevant with the correct weight, that they do not perform hotlinking, that they have the corresponding alt and nomenclature according to their positioning intent, and that their size is adequate for where they are displayed on the web.

WPO

We must check that the page is fast enough according to the countries to which the project is directed.
For this, we must consider all the characteristics of a website that affect the speed of a page and that Google averages by groups of pages based on user traffic experience over the past 28 days. But only if the website already has a significant amount of traffic.

Issues such as CSS, JS, images, HTTP version, analytics implementation, preloads, and deferred loading all play a role.

Response Codes

We need to ensure that the response codes of each page are appropriate and that the redirects are correct.

Specific SEO

Depending on whether it’s an international SEO project, news site, music artist, or e-commerce, it will need additional support based on its positioning category. Therefore, we must adapt the technical section to where it needs to appear.