By Mina Adly Younan
SEO Audit Process Flow
1- Receiving the
request from the client:
Understanding client’s objectives (increasing traffic,
restructuring the website, redesigning the pages, optimizing landing pages for
SEO and/or PPC campaigns, branding, content management, etc.)
2- Navigating the
website and examining the user experience factors
Duration: 3 hours
- Navigation and Usability
- Graphics design and in relation to client’s objectives and
- Content readability
- Ease of Navigation and interlinking
- Credibility factors
- Forms of contacts
- Speed Testing
- Browsers and platforms testing
- Social Media integration and interactivity
- Content update rate
- Content Plagiarism check-up
- Typos and grammatical mistakes checking
- Checking Redirection protocols (permanent and temporary)
- Checking Error pages (404 HTML error)
3- Search engines
visibility:
Duration: 3 hours
SEO team will then crawl the website to find out how search
engins can read the site through the following:
1- Find the indexed and un-indexed pages on top search
engines
2- Find and analyze sitemap (if existed)
3- Find and Analyze robotics.txt (if existed)
4- Scan the website to figure out the readable and the
hidden parts on search engines
4- Initial Keywords Analysis
Duration: 3 hours
A through KWs Analysis Should be made in any SEO Audit, to
find and optimize each website’s strategic keywords and Phrases. Hence, the
following factors should be taken into consideration based on an initial
keywords list (normally provided by the site owners or the client):
·
Current website ranking with respect to these
keywords
·
Study of the competition’s keywords
·
Study of the client’s products and services
·
The volume of traffic that current keywords are
bringing to the site, in addition to the potential traffic volume for the
suggested keywords
5- Keywords
suggestions
Duration: 2 hours
After analyzing the primary keywords, the SEO team generates
a secondary keywords list that believes are important for both traffic and
relevancy. These extracted keywords are then broken-down in a big list based on
relevancy, high traffic volume and low competition.
6- Organic Traffic sources
Duration: 1 Hour
If the client provides us with their Google Analytics
access, we will analyze the traffic and get deeper results on traffic sources,
if not The SEO team will use their own tools to know some vital traffic
breakdowns concerning the website.
7- On-Site
Analysis (Home Page and inner pages):
Duration: 1 Hour per page
The SEO team analyzes
the following factors and gives the right recommendations for the client:
Overall Score
Page Rank Score
SEO Structure
·
WWW Resolve
·
IP Canonicalization
·
Robots.txt
·
XML Sitemap
·
Images
·
Headings
·
Text/HTML Ratio
·
Flash
·
Frames
·
Blog
·
URL
·
Title Meta Tag
·
Description Meta Tag
·
Headings
·
Images
·
HTTP Status Code
·
Referrer
·
Link Count
·
Content-Type Header
·
4XX (Client Error)
·
5XX (Server Error)
·
Duplicate Page Title
·
URLs with Duplicate Title Tags
·
Long URL
·
Overly-Dynamic URL
·
301 (Permanent Redirect)
·
302 (Temporary Redirect)
·
Meta Refresh
·
Title Element Too Long
·
Search Engine blocked by robots.txt
·
Meta-robots Nofollow
·
Blocked by X-robots
·
Blocked by meta-robots
·
Rel-Canonical
·
Blocking All User Agents
·
Blocking Google
·
Blocking Yahoo
·
Blocking Bing
·
Internal Links
·
Linking Root Domains
·
External Links
·
Page Authority
·
Google analytics
·
Load time
User Experience
·
Favicon
·
Error 404 Page
·
Load Time (Seconds)
·
Microformats
·
Dublin Core
Mobile Optimization
·
Mobile Load Time
·
Mobile CSS
·
Meta Viewport Tag
·
Apple Icon
·
Mobile Redirection
Domain Security
·
Domain Registration
·
Domain Expiration
·
Spam Block
·
Safe Browsing
·
Directory Browsing
·
Server Signature
·
Technologies used
8- Meta Data:
Duration: 15 minutes/page
A Metadata analysis is executed on all the inner pages and
recommendations regarding the right use of them for best possible search engine
and User experience optimization. The Following Attributes are analyzed:
1-
Title
2-
Description
3-
Headers (H1, H2, H3)
4-
ALT Images
5-
Microformats (rich snippets)
9- Backlinks
Analysis
Duration: 2 hours
The SEO team will then run an inbound links analysis
regarding the following aspects (Each will have a separate detailed report):
·
Root Domain Metrics
·
Linking Domains
·
Anchor Text Analysis
10- Competitor
Analysis
Duration: 2 hours + 1 hour/competitor
The SEO team will inspect all the competing websites and
find the top relevant and industry related competitors and add them to the list
of competitors provided by the client. This list will undergo a complicated
process of in-depth analysis to evaluate the behavior of all the competitors
and give the client an overall vision of where they are compared to their
competitors as well as a benchmarking report to where they are from the best
and recommended online realization.
We will create a report analyzing the following:
1-
Search Engines Traffic Share
2-
Organic Completion
3-
Paid Advertising ads and budget by competitors
4-
On-site Competitor Analysis
5-
Off-Site Competitor analysis
11- Collecting the
data and explaining each section
Duration: 4 hours
After analyzing all the factors and revising them, the SEO
team will compile them all together in one file and add a brief explanation for
each section describing the problem, the
objectives, the metrics used, and offering the recommendations.
12- The Executive
Summary
Duration: 4 hours
The final process is to read all the audit report again and
write an executive summary recapping all the audited sections and giving the
client an overall view of the added-value provided by the audit.
13- Proofreading and
Upper management revision:
Duration: N/A
The Seo team will forward the audit to the proofreaders to check the
language and present it in a professional manner. They should send it back to
the SEO team in case they changed any technical syntax. After that, the
management should review the audit, add some observations if recommended, then
send the audit to the client.
Approximate Duration = 40 hours/Audit
Some Additional Resources:
