How have your SEO Audits evolved over time?

[Daniel_Morgan]

Hi guys,

SEO Audits used to be so focused on the basics like title tags, meta descriptions etc. but now more than ever, SEO is a discipline which encompasses everything from content marketing to UX design.

Would be great to hear from everyone how their audit templates have evolved over time to keep up with the latest updates in SEO and algorithm changes! Which new sections have you added and which have you removed?!

Cheers,

Daniel

[AlanBleiweiss]

Moosa thank you for linking to me about this stuff!

[AlanBleiweiss]

Personally, my audits have not changed dramatically in all the years I've been performing them as far as the overwhelming majority of signals / factors to look at, because sustainable SEO has always been consistent.

User experience has always been the core of what real, sustainable SEO is all about. That has not ever changed.  Real, quality and relevant links have always been part of true sustainable SEO as well because that's an off-site consideration to the comprehensive understanding of UX across the web.

Where they have changed is in regard to other realities:

1.  As Google has gotten more and more honest about the unrealistic "let us figure it all out" message, they've consistently come out with new ranking signal points including, but in no way limited to Canonical tags, Breadcrumbs, Schema, URL Parameters, and a host of other similar "aids" they either invented, or got on board with to help their algorithms understand what's really going on.

2. That can be extended to the attempt search engines have made to better integrate real user experience signals including page processing speed, crawl efficiency (search bots are users, so user experience for bots matters more now), and also where they've worked to better integrate social signals over the years, all of these have needed to be integrated into the audit process.  Now we have mobile and what real UX means to that platform, so of course, we need to look at what the full range of signals are for mobile UX.

2. As everything has gotten more complex across multiple algorithms run by two different teams at Google, their own decisions have caused new problems.  Robots.txt files used to be a hard directive. Now, they're only a hint.  Canonical tags are supposed to be a directive (hence the word "canonical") yet now they often ignore those.  Things like that have thus become an integral part of my audit work in that cross-signal relationships are now more critical than ever.

3. I have always done my best to reevaluate how I present my findings and recommendations in my audits, and routinely have refined that as well - a stronger, clearer and more education-centric audit doc results each time.

---

Another crucial concept I try to help clients become educated in is that Google is, for the forseeable future, going to work more and more at refining and building on all of these concepts, and because of that, we as auditors need to realize that the writing on the wall type issues are almost certainly going to become ranking factors in the future, and if we can anticipate those well enough, our audits today need to address those so our clients get ahead of the Google roller coaster.

At the moment, one example of this are page speed specific to mobile - I've been advocating that to audit clients for years, and then not long ago Google Page Speed Insights came out and included speed data for mobile.  Then, this year, Google's people have stated that they will be upgrading their new Mobile testing tool in the not distant future, to show exactly how page speed is in fact, now a direct ranking factor.

Another one that's about to pop is interstitial pop-ups.  The buzz is heavily growing around user complaints about them. Google even just this week came out with a post about the harm interstitial popups did in their own testing on their own properties.  And it's been hinted by their people that this will be an upcoming ranking factor.

For someone who has been laser focused on UX, this was an obvious issue to have been advocating against for at least the past year as site owners have gotten more and more aggressive in their use, harming UX.

So audits always have, and always will need to also integrate forward-thinking recommendations.

disclaimer: I do around 80 audits a year - its my primary business.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

An interesting question

Mine have taken a huge turn towards usability and content, but I still cover off all best practices such as the titles etc. I also focus more heavily on brand strength and user metrics (data from Crazy Egg for eggsample).

Backlinks also feature more prominently now than they used to.

SEO is about so much more than just where you appear in the SERPs now.

-Andy

[MoosaHemani]

Daniel, I guess there is no straight answer to it and I totally agree with you when it comes to SEO audits, now it’s not limited to titles and meta tags only. One has to focus on UX and UI of the website, their bounce rate on the website, content creation, blog and much more.

If you personally ask me I love Alan Bleiweiss when it comes to SEO audits of the website and I highly recommend you checking this post out http://alanbleiweiss.com/professional-seo-audits/seo-audit-checklist/

It covers all the important points that one should cover when auditing the website.

Hope this helps!