At the Engage 2017 Portland conference on March 9th, 2017, I had the pleasure of presenting a technical SEO session with Jon Henshaw from Raven Internet Marketing Tools titled “Improving SEO and User Experience – The Technical Side”. My presentation is embedded below, along with transcribed notes, courtesy of Slideshare.
1. Improving SEO and User Experience
The Technical SEO Side: Improving SEO and User Experience
2. About Me
— Senior SEO Consultant, BillHartzer.com
— Founder, DFWSEM Association (2004)
— US Brand Ambassador, Majestic.com
— Practicing Organic/Natural SEO since 1996
— Formerly Senior VP, Advice Interactive (Advice Local)
— Senior SEO Strategist, Globe Runner
— Director of SEO, Standing Dog
3. Overview
— Before You Begin
— Gather Data
— Analyze
— Present Results
4. Before You Begin – Info to Gather
— Access to site (if possible), log file data
— Google Analytics, Search Console access
— Bing Webmaster Tools access
— Prior history: What SEO was done in past?
— Prior history: Domain Names used
— List of Domain Names owned, redirected
— List of Competitors
— Ask: anything else we need to know?
5. Content – Optimize Content on Site
— Google Search Console – Search Analytics
— SEMrush.com Keyword Research
— Current Rankings
6. GSC Search Analytics Pages Trick
7. Featured Snippets Keyword Research
— http://seorave.com/find-featured-snippet-opportunities/
8. Current rankings, Focus on Pages Ranking 5th to 20th
9. Gathering Phase
— Gather the Data
— Save the Data (MS Excel, MS Word)
— Start making notes (Notepad)
10. Google Searches
— site:domain.com
— site:domain.com –site:www.domain.com
— Click last page of SERPs to get page count
11. Screaming Frog Adjust memory to crawl large site over 100k pages
12. Integrity (aka Scrutiny) What it does:
— Crawls site, reports redirects, 404 errors
— Mac only, finds more errors
13. Siteliner.com
14. Bing Webmaster Tools
15. Bing Webmaster Tools
— Spot issues to fix
16. Google Search Console
17. Google Search Console
18. SEMRush Site Audit
19. Website Log Files
— Weblog Storming, AwStats
20. Website Log Files, Crawl & Analytics
— OnCrawl combines all three
21. Audit Site Structure
— Internal Link Structure
— Manual Review of Site
— URL Hierarchy
— Grouping of Topics
— GA: In-Page Analytics
22. Gather Off-Site Data
— It’s not all about on-site and on-page.
23. Google Search Console Links
24. Ahrefs Links
25. Majestic.com Links
26. Majestic.com Topic Review
27. Majestic Trust Flow, Citation Flow
— Trust Flow = Number of clicks from a seed set of trusted sites to a given URL, or Domain
— Citation Flow = Number of citations to a given URL, or Domain
28. Majestic Anchor Text Review
29. URIValet.com
— Check Server Headers
30. WebPageTest.org
— Page Performance
31. Miscellaneous Data to Review
— All sorts of extras
32. Site Speed, DNS Health
— Tools.Pingdom.com
33. Site Speed Review – Google Analytics
34. Robots.txt Issues
— Default CMS file?
— Disallowing wrong?
— Using “allow”?
— Not specifying sitemap.xml URL
— Directives conflict with other signals
35. Sitemap Issues
— Google Search Console sitemaps
— New pages not updated on sitemap
— Issues with multiple sitemaps
— No sitemap file?
36. Subdomain Issues
— Duplicate content?
— Using subdomain rather than directory
— Wildcard subdomains turned on?
— www versus non-www issues
37. Canonical Issues
— Review canonical tags
— Not using canonical correctly
— Conflicting signals with canonical, others
— Canonical tags to help with dupe content
38. Use of Structured Data
— Taking advantage of Schema.org
— Not just for local addresses
— Reviews and Events
— Person, Place, Organization
— Products and Offers
39. Local Listings – Audit the listings
— Google My Business
— Bing Places for Business
— Yahoo! Local
40. Local Citations – Separate Audit
— Are citations correct?
— Same address, suite #, phone number?
41. Analysis Phase
— Analyze the Data
— Make Assumptions & Recommendations
— You’re Fat!
— You need to exercise!
— OK, well maybe not like that…
42. Analysis Phase
— Analyze gathered data
— Look for Obvious Issues
— Look for Odd Data Points
— More notes!
43. Analyze Google Analytics
— Changes over time, year over year data
— Conversion Data
— Bounce Rates
— Pages Per Session
— Drops in Traffic: Panda or Penguin in past few years?
44. Panda or Penguin Issues From Past?
— Verify with SEMRush, Google Analytics
— Moz Google Algorithm Change History moz.com/google-algorithm-change
— Panguin Tool barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/
45. Analyze Keyword Data, Rankings
— Look for keyword opportunities Anything ranking on 2nd page?
— Review SEMRush Keyword Data
— Review GSC Search Analytics
46. Analyze On-Site Data
— Title Tags
— Meta Descriptions
— Headings H1, H2, etc.
— Internal Anchor Text
— External Links (outgoing links)
— Google Pages Indexed vs. Crawled
47. Analyze On-Site Data
— Conflicting signals? Overall Topic focus
— Conflicting signals? Robots.txt vs. Canonical vs. Meta Robots vs. Nofollow
— Internal Duplicate Content
— Not Enough Unique Content
— Internal links within content present?
— Review Navigation
— Review Footer, footer links, copyright
48. Analyze Off-Site Data
— Link Velocity Matters (getting new links)
— Review anchor text (over optimized?)
— Diversity of anchor text
— Look for Toxic, Low Quality Links
— Run Link Risk, Link Detox report
49. Presentation Phase
— Present the Data
— Show the Results
— Make it look great!
— Action Plan
— Implementation Plan
50. Present The Results
— Use internal or formal doc needed?
— Who will implement?
— Implement changes in-house? Outsource?
— MS Word doc,
spreadsheets with data
— PowerPoint needed for presentation?
51. Present The Results – Document
— Cover Page
— Table of Contents
— Overview (summary, positives, negatives)
— Website Crawlability (404s, 301s, One Page issues)
— Content Optimization (site arch., keyword issues)
— Linking (Internal links, externals links, link profile)
— Overall Recommendations
52. Finally – Additional Lists
— List of Priority Issues
— Present Action Plan for Implementing
53. SEO Audit Toolset
— Google Page Speed Test
— Mobile Friendly Test
— Google Search Console – time downloading a page (if slower than 2 seconds to get the code, they’ll abandon the crawl)
— Webpagetest.org (diversity of testing environments is helpful… browser types, locations, connection speeds)
54. SEO Audit Toolset
— WebPageTest
— Google Search Console
— Google Analytics
— GPSi page speed insights
— G Structured Data Test
— GSC Disavow
— GSC Fetch & Render
— Marie Haynes’ Disavow Blacklist
55. SEO Audit Toolset
— Google Mobile Test
— Google AMP Test
— Bing Mobile Test
— W3c mobileOK Checker
— Deep Crawl
— Google AW Keyword Planner
— Moz Keyword Explorer
— What is my IP
56. SEO Audit Toolset
— Builtwith
— Server Software Detection
— SEO Server Header Checker Tool
— SSL Server Test powered by Qualsys SSL Labs
— Redirect Checker
— Serpstat
— semrush
— GA Code Checker
57. SEO Audit Toolset
— W3c CSS Validator
— W3c Markup Validator
— hreflang testing tool
— tracker map
— OSE, Majestic, A hrefs, Link Research Tools
— Bing Webmaster Tools
— Kerboo
— Panguin tool
— OnCrawl
