SEO Auditing

Who should attend this course?

This session is suitable for generalist SEOs and SEOs with junior/intermediate experience.

You also might want to check out our beginners SEO training course.

Course Content

We’ll walk step-by-step through everything you should be including to deliver world-class audits to your clients or internal stakeholders.

There’s plenty to get through including (but not limited to!):

Analytics:

• Ensuring accurate data within Google Analytics
• GSC reports: performance, discover & news
• Traffic breakdown by channel
• Organic traffic over last 12-18 months
• Organic traffic breakdown by category, device, country
• Brand vs. non-brand traffic overview
• Visibility over time vs. competitors
• Assessing impact of previous algorithm updates
• Low-hanging fruit opportunities

Technical:

Crawling your site for technical insights:

• An intro to Screaming Frog
• Setting up your crawl
• Customising the crawl to pull site-relevant insights
• Maximising value from crawl exports
  • Non-200 status codes
  • Metadata
  • Image optimisation
  • Site structure
  • Thin/duplicate content
  • XML sitemap implementation
• How to present this information to maximise buy-in and implementation (including follow-up template)

Page experience signals (Page speed, Mobile usability and Core Web Vitals):

• Assessing our page experience signals vs. competitors
• Measuring page experience signals using PageSpeed Insights (and other tools)
• Most common page speed issues (Image size, compression, external JS calls)
• How to present page experience opportunities to your development team

Google Search Console:

• Checking for security issues or manual actions
• Page experience
• Mobile friendliness
• Enhancements reports
• XML sitemaps
• Crawl stats
• Using the URL inspection tool to see how Google are rendering important pages

Other:

• Ensuring mobile + desktop parity
• Reviewing legacy URLs
• Getting your robots.txt file right
• Classic tech SEO mistakes and how to fix them

Backlinks:

• The importance of backlinks
• Comparing your backlink profile vs. your competitor landscape
• Analysing your competitors’ profiles to identify opportunities
• Analysing your link data with Majestic/Ahrefs
• Top performing pages on our site (and how we use this in broader strategy)
• Handling previous negative backlinking tactics (eg. bought links or private blog networks)

Keywords & Content:

• How to audit your content vs. competitors
• Building a keyword gap vs. competitors
• How to utilise the keyword gap to identify existing and new content opportunities
• Identifying popular / high-performing content on competitor sites
• Keyword clustering to pull out broader content themes
• Building on your keyword gap with additional tools
• Identifying low-hanging fruit content opportunities
• Targeting SERP features opportunities (Featured snippets, People also ask boxes)
• Utilising the index coverage report to highlight low-value content at scale

What to expect

The process of auditing a website is one of the key SEO processes, regardless of whether you’re working for an agency, as a freelancer or in-house.

This practical and hands-on course really delves into detail on how to produce world class holistic SEO audits. These are the kinds of audits that deliver better results, that you can charge more for and that make the most of the search marketing opportunity for you or your client’s business.

The auditing process is split out into four different sections (technical, analytics, backlinks and keywords) to make for extensive 360 recommendations that truly help to move the needle and add value to your organisation.

This training course will ensure that you are up to speed with every aspect of auditing, and will offer some actionable tips on best process and documentation – including how to gain buy-in from the rest of your team.

We’ll take a walk step-by-step through everything you should be looking for and including in your SEO audits. This course should enable you to complete a holistic audit of your own site, taking into account your competitive landscape to truly add value to your organisation.

You will need to bring your laptop to the training to get the most out of the course.

If you register for one of our training courses you don’t only get a day of in-depth and practical training from some of the industry’s most respected professionals, you also get a ticket to brightonSEO, the world’s biggest specialist SEO event.