The aim of this session is to provide a holistic and comprehensive approach to auditing your website from an SEO perspective. Paul will reveal trial and tested methodology that has helped some of his clients over the years. This includes tools, tips and tactics that you can integrate as part of your audit to help sustain a successful SEO strategy moving forward. Paul Ngoie Head of Digital Strategy at Contrast

1. Paul Ngoie - Head of Digital Strategy @ Contrast
How to perform an in-house
SEO audit in 2020

2. 1. Introduction - Why and when to do an SEO audit
2. Past Approach - 2008 Methodology
3. In 2020 - ( Step Approach)
❖ Baseline Assessments
❖ Keyword Analysis
❖ Competitor Analysis
❖ Technical Analysis
❖ Page Level Analysis
❖ Content Analysis
❖ UX Analysis
❖ Backlinks Analysis
❖ Tracking and Reporting
1. Conclusion - What’s Next?
Outline

3. An audit has always been the first activity to tackle whenever starting a
new SEO project or engagement.
➔ Starting a new SEO project
➔ Reviewing performance for an existing website
➔ Simply trying to understand where the business currently stands
(especially vs competition)
❖ Provides answers to questions
❖ Reveals crucial information about SEO Campaigns/Strategies &
Competitors
Intro - Why & when to do an SEO audit?

4. Past Approach - 2008 Methodology
Baseline
Assessment
Keywords Analysis
Research Selection
Assess
Onsite/Offsite
Factors
Assessment of
Analytics/Goals
Definition
• SEO consultation with key
stakeholders (before you start)
• Technical audit
• Traffic history
• CMS capabilities assessment
• Internal
resources/capabilities
assessment
• Business intelligence tools
setting
• Index/backlink visibility
• Brainstorming/analysis
• Selection
• Categorisation
• Primary vs secondary keywords
to longtail
• Current ranking position
• Competitors rankings
• Baseline keyword value
• Estimate revenue performance
• Final keyword list
• Website technical architecture
• URL structure
• Analysis of meta tags in HTML
• Meta data optimisation
• Image optimisation (ALT tags,
naming etc)
• Analysis of header tags (H1)
• Content’s keywords density
• Analysis of internal linking
• BI analytics
• Current tracking and
reporting
• Tools/systems

5. Past Approach Methodology - How does it all fit together?
Foundation
Implementing the
core of SEO
Analysis,
performance tracking
& reporting
Growth Driver
Onsite SEO
Links acquisition
Accelerator
Strategic SEO
solutions
Training and
education
Likely impact: High when
Foundation in place.
Likely impact: Longer term
and sustainable growth.
Likely impact: High & core
to any SEO engagement.

6. Following the 9 steps will ensure that
you include everything you need to
cover and nothing is left out of your
audit.
A successful SEO campaign is the
product of hundreds of positive ranking
factors. That’s why it is crucial that you
examine every detail of your SEO
campaign.
You don’t have to be 100% perfect, but
that should be the ultimate goal.
SEO Audit in 2020 - 9 Step Approach

7. ● Define campaign objectives
● Align business objectives to SEO objectives
● Have clear strategic objectives to keep your campaign focused
and help achieve your goals.
● Ask yourself if your objectives are SMART
(Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely)
Step 1. Baseline Assessment - define campaign objectives

8. The objectives here is to determine whether existing keyword strategy
is aligned with business objectives.
Identify keyword opportunity as well as untapped keywords that could
result in easy wins.
Are we targeting the right set of keywords?
Step 2. Keyword Analysis

9. SEO is a dog eat dog world and the name of the game is to ‘beat the
competition’.
● Investing time in competitor research, make sure you obtain ongoing insights
on competitor ranking and overall performance.
● Identify strengths and weaknesses in competitor visibility and search tactics.
● Utilise successes and exploit areas of weakness.
Analysing competitors as part of your audit:
➔ This will help to validate your keyword analysis and find missed link
opportunities.
➔ You will also be able to understand which content is performing better for
your competitors.
Step 3. Competitors Analysis

10. Aims to identify technical issues that are hurting SEO performance.
Good news is that there are many tools out there that will effectively assist
your technical SEO analysis and will address the following:
➔ How fast your website loads
➔ Make sure to check whether your site is mobile-friendly
➔ Audit is keyword cannibalisation
➔ Redirect Issues (302, Rains, www vs non www 301ing, http not
301ing to https)
➔ Indexability of your site
➔ 404 errors and distribution of your link equity
➔ Site architecture
➔ URL structure
Step 4. Technical Analysis

11. ● Onpage optimisation
● The goal is to make sure that each keyword-targeted landing page is
optimised effectively.
● The audit should examine the quality of content and the optimisation
of every page on the site.
● Map keywords to the relevant page or the preferred landing page
(PLP)
➔ Metadata optimisation
➔ Keyword placement (content, page title & meta description)
➔ Satisfy user intent
➔ URLs SEO optimised
Step 5. Page Level Analysis

12. Objective: to determine whether or not the current content strategy is
working and what needs to be improved to get more out of your content.
➔ uniqueness and originality
➔ usefulness and informative
➔ better than your competitors
➔ Content engaging
➔ Information accurate
➔ Content long enough
➔ Grammar and/or spelling errors
➔ Broken links
➔ Have excessive ads
➔ Moderating your blog comments
Step 6. Content Analysis

13. Goal: to see how well users are interacting with your content and
website as a whole. It is impossible to know what every user thinks
about your website.
You may be wondering what is a good bounce rate?
Another key metric average time spent on site
Step 7. UX Analysis

14. ● As you know, backlinks can make or break your SEO campaign.
● 100% of your backlinks don’t have to be relevant, but the
majority should be.
● The goal of this exercise is to get a general relevancy picture of
the DOMAINS that are linking to your site.
● Diversifying your backlinks makes your profile more “natural”.
Different “types” of backlinks include:
➔ Contextual links
➔ Site-wide footer/sidebar links
➔ Directory links
➔ Resource page links
➔ Niche profile links
➔ Forum links
➔ Relevant blog comment links
Step 8. Backlinks Analysis

15. This provides a central resource combining all major data points for
informed decision-making on organic search priorities.
Benchmark against top competitors - this allows to measure the
effectiveness of the campaign vs effort of changes (implemented
tasks) and guide future efforts.
An example of some of tools you can use:
➔ Google Data Studio
➔ Google Analytics
➔ Google Search Console
➔ SEOmonitor
➔ Advanced Web Ranking
➔ Ahrefs
Step 9. Tracking and Reporting

16. ▪ Identification of areas responsible
for actions
▪ Briefing and understanding of
effort required
▪ Allocate appropriate resources for
task delivery
▪ Determine timescales for each
action
▪ Deploy a project implementation
plan
Conclusion - What’s Next
Task
Priority Complexity SEO Impact Responsibility
SSL Certificate to make the site https Very High Average High IT
Website speed Review Medium Very Average IT/SEO
Out of stock Additional features High Average Average IT/SEO
Meta Data ( titles and descriptions)
optimisation
High Low High SEO
Page heading Optimisation High Low High SEO
Content Keyword density Optimisation High Average High SEO
URLs fix - from underscore to hyphens Low Very Low IT/SEO
Add snippet of Content to category pages Medium Average High IT/SEO

17. “To organise the world’s
information and make it
universally accessible and useful”
1998 - 2020