How far do you go down the site audit wormhole?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, mahalo for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast reporting. Got some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding over here at Wix, and I'm joined by our wonderful, fantastic, our fabulous head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hello, glorious Internet people. I hope you're having a wonderful, fantastic, incredible, top-ranking day.

Mordy Oberstein:

We are.

Crystal Carter:

We are.

Mordy Oberstein:

We just talked about the SERP's Up podcast and where we're ranking on Google and in the Google variant, the multiple carousels that show SEO podcast.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, it's a really cool carousel. And yeah, we're on there. We're very pleased. We've done some work on that. We've optimized ourselves.

Mordy Oberstein:

The SERP’s Up is up. Always important to celebrate wins in SEO.

Crystal Carter:

This is true. It's very important. I literally do a dance at my desk whenever I win, and that's cool.

Mordy Oberstein:

So you're always dancing at your desk?

Crystal Carter:

I'm always dancing. It's really good for you. It's good for the lumbar, it's good for making sure you keep everything circulating.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. All right. That's a way to optimize your life right here.

Crystal Carter:

Life hacks. Yeah. Do you know what, actually, I did give a live hack. I found one the other day and I was like, oh my God, I should post this. The world needs to know, basically, if you have something that you want to send as a gift and it's got a price tag on it, one of those little sticker price tags, take a nice hot cup of coffee or something and sit it on the price tag and it'll warm up the adhesive and then you can...

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, that's also great for when my kids put stickers on the floor, on the tile floor.

Crystal Carter:

Right, right. Like if you got a mug of coffee, it's got a flat bottom on the mug, like stick it on there.

Mordy Oberstein:

All right, SEO tips and life hacks here on the service sub podcast, which by the way is brought to you by Wix, where you can audit your site's accessibility with ease, with our very own and very novel accessibility wizard. So you can see things like where your color contrast is not suited for the visually impaired, where you're missing alt texts, which is also really important for those relying on TTS readers and more all of the accessibility wizard inside of Wix and a good thing we're talking about accessibility audits, because today's show is all about SEO audits. Wow, look at that. Totally right into that.

Crystal Carter:

Almost as if you planned it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Celebrate your wins. Celebrate your wins.

Crystal Carter:

Every day.

Mordy Oberstein:

Every time you celebrate your wins, check this one out. You might say, we're running an audible today. Get it, an audible? As in an audible, it's a terrible American football joke.

Crystal Carter:

Okay. Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

Should I celebrate a win there?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, no.

Mordy Oberstein:

Maybe not. Okay. Okay. Jokes aside, SEO audits are no joke. And for many they are no fun, but have no fear. We're all about fun here as we dive into the different types of SEO audits, how deep you should go with your site audits, how to handle all the information these audits throw your way and when to know when ignore half of all the information these audits throw your way. Don't you feel better already, don't you feel better already?

Crystal Carter:

I feel like we've done an exhaustive survey and I feel much better, and I feel like we have some actionable things that we can do…

Mordy Oberstein:

And we're telling you not to worry about half the stuff, so it's perfect. Plus, we'll look at a great tool to help you as you march towards site audit success. And of course, we have your snappy news and who you should be following on social for more SEO awesomeness as we open an investigation that is Episode 19 of the SERP'Up SEO podcast. Hooray.

Crystal Carter:

Cool. Okay, so today we're going to be talking about SEO audits. And essentially when we think about as an intro to auditing, I think it's important to think about the different kinds of SEO audit types that there are. So broadly speaking, speaking super broadly, because of course it depends because this is SEO, there tends to be three different kinds of SEO sections shall we say, so there's like on-page SEO, there's off-page SEO, and there's technical SEO just as a super broad thing so we can move forward. I know it gets very nuanced, but just stay with me here. So within each of those, there's different kinds of audits within that. So if you think about on-page SEO for instance, there are content audits. So you might do a content audit around the content quality. So you might look at the keywords and whether or not they're relevant, you might look at the performance of the pages that have the content on them.

You might also look at the visibility compared to your competitors. You might also look at the visibility compared to different SERP features and things like that. In the on-page space, there's also things like your content framework. So things like your H-1s, your H-2s, your titles, your meta descriptions, your images, whether you have images, whether you should have images, that sort of thing.

So that on-page SEO can have a lot of different audits. And even within that there are further audits that you can do drilling down into some of those things. But those two tend to be some of the main ones, the main types of audits that people will get into. We think about off-page SEO, this tends to be about backlinks and referral traffic and referrers, so those two can tend to fall into two categories. One is sort of backlink quality and quantity, which is essentially where you're looking at the number of back links that you have and you're looking at whether or not they're relevant, and you're looking at how they compare to your competitors and things like that.

And the other one kind of going on from that is backlink gaps. So it might be that you're looking at your vertical, let's say you're in, I don't know, biking and you have a bike shop and you might see that across your vertical lots of people have backlinks from mountain bike.com or Mountain Bike Magazine or something like that. That's a backlink gap that you might need to think about and think about maybe getting on there.

So finding that information is really, really valuable going forward. And then you get into technical SEO, and technical SEO can have a couple of different audits, but I think as somebody who's done a lot of these segment SEO audits, I think you can split them into essentially two camps. And then again they get more nuanced after that, but the things that are around your tech stack, which is essentially the tools that connect to your website to make your website work all together, which they tend to be lots of different things.

So this might include your security framework, like your RSS and your server security might also have to do with your server configuration, and whether or not that works for what you need or whether you not you should be on a cloud server or that sort of thing. And also things around page feed and performance, which again can have to do with on-page things, can have to do with your infrastructure elements, things like that. Then we have within that also tech implementation, so things like schema validation and whether or not your schema is working on your site or if it should be on your site. Things like crawl management, whether pages are being indexed and that sort of thing. So from that description you can understand that there's lots of different types of audits. And within SEO you can have somebody who does a full deep dive on one thing or another depending on what's required and depending on what they see from their initial audit.

But what's really important for any kind of audit is that it gives you a broad overview of what you're looking but that also gives you actionables. One thing that I cannot stand that drives me absolutely mad is when people do an audit and they just say, "Oh, all these things are broken," an audit without recommendations is not helpful to anyone. It's really, really useful to include in an audit, you should always include some recommendation and you should always include some priorities of what to do next. And that I think is really, really valuable. And I think it's a really great thing about a good SEO audit.

Mordy Oberstein:

So the one thing about SEO audits is, by the way, that was prolific in an explanation, we should take that out and frame it somewhere.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't know how you'd frame an audio clip, but I would love to try. But I think one of the things about audits are, because there's so vast, there's so many things we can do with it that, and you get so much information back, it could be a little bit overwhelming. Even if you're running your traditional, we'll call it a "site audit." You take a tool, you take in your Semrush,  aHREFs or Lumars of the world, there's plenty of tools out there, Screaming Frog, and you can get a ton of information back. You get information back related to are you missing title tags or are you missing meta descriptions? But do you have real errors, do you have broken links? So you have duplicate content, thin content, structured, it's kind of overwhelming. And then beyond that, there's all sorts of, they're typically called "warnings" inside of the tools and the warnings, I have warnings about warnings.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, yeah. The warnings are interesting, because sometimes they can be dependent on each other. So sometimes it can say like, "Oh, you have a broken image on this." And then it'll also say like, "Oh, you have a 404 on this." So it'll say you've got two errors or warnings, but actually there's just one, there's one broken link that's an image link and it's causing, it's flagging up two errors. So it's important to understand when you're auditing what they're looking at and what they're covering.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, and then so when you look at all of that and you see these astronomical numbers, 5 million errors and 300 warnings and blah, blah, blah, blah, it's a little overwhelming, and my best advice to you is it's all about opportunity cost. You don't get a medal or a star or trophy for whatever it is for getting a zero in all these audits saying "No, no errors, no warnings. You get an award, you get an award and you get an award." It's all about what's the value to the site, and what's important to the site. And it might be that ignoring a whole bunch of warnings, even some of the errors, and writing a new piece of content or putting your blast blog post on social media and it has nothing to do with the site audit is actually more of an opportunity cost, more valuable than fixing that particular error or warning.

Crystal Carter:

I did a recent video with Google and I was talking about redirect loops that I found out on a site, and I've had people who were junior SEOs ring their hands being like, oh, I have to fix all these 404s. How do I fix all these 404s? And again, thinking about opportunity costs, and I talked about this on the Google session, was that sometimes you can just delete the link. Instead of going through and fixing all those 404s, ask yourself, do I need to have that link there anyway? If not, just delete it. If you delete it, it's not broken because it ain't there.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's a great point.

Crystal Carter:

Sometimes it's just like you don't actually need to fix it, you can just get rid of it.

Mordy Oberstein:

And a great framework for what I was asking, I talked to Ari Zilberstein about this one time on Twitter, ask why it's important. Ask like, why this like oh, oh, broken links, broken links, okay, why is that a problem?

Crystal Carter:

So I do a lot of stuff around schema and Google's rich results testing tool. I always get a lot of people who are super confused about that because it will give you warnings. It'll say, "Oh, you don't have the offer on this particular product," or "Oh, you don't have this brand," or "Oh, you don't have that," or "Oh, you don't have this." And it'll say "yellow, warning."

Well, the thing about yellow warning is that it's optional. It says a lot of times it'll say optional. And sometimes having something that has some of the information is better than having nothing. And sometimes if it says optional, sometimes you don't need it. Sometimes a lot of those tools will... They're great and fantastic tools and I use them all the time, but they're trying to serve everyone on the web and not everyone on the web needs every single line of schema. Sometimes they just need the essentials. And that's fine. You need to make that quality assessment and judgment.

Mordy Oberstein:

And speaking to everyone on the web, I feel like a lot of the tools are trying to speak to everybody on the web and that could be a little bit problematic. And I'm not trying to make any judgments on any of the tools out there, but one of the things that they try to do is they try to speak to everybody about all the various things on their website. And because by the way, I think historically speaking, a lot of these tools were developed during an era of SEO that was a lot more spammy-ish than it is now, I think, putting my foot on a landmine there, but there'll be things that they'll come back to you on that just aren't real. Low code to text A to HTML ratio, blah, blah, blah is not a thing. You can go on Twitter, you can find John Mueller saying, "Not a thing."

Crystal Carter:

And then sometimes I've seen it where people will flag you on duplicate content for having the same meta title, the same page title, and the same like H-1. And I'm like, "That's not really a big deal." You could argue that, you could argue that there's an opportunity to add another keyword or something to that effect. You could argue that, but it's not really that big a deal. It's not really something that you should be keeping yourself up at night about.

Mordy Oberstein:

Brace yourself. I mean, maybe you'll disagree with me, but when the tools come back and they say, "Oh, meta description too long," I say, "Snore, don't care."

Crystal Carter:

This is the reason why I think it's important to prioritize your audit findings, because there's going to be tons of those things where that are a snore or that are not a big deal, or that historically speaking, so for instance, there's sometimes tech debt on websites where they tried it one time or there's just a thing that they just can't fix because it's not a thing. And that happens on lots of websites. So somebody who knows the tech debt for instance can go, "No, we don't even want to go down that route." I know somebody who used to live in a really old house, but do you know people that have ever done remodeling where you think, "Oh, we'll just change the wallpaper and you pull the wallpaper off and half the wall comes out." That's the thing that can happen with websites, essentially.

So sometimes if you know the tech debt of the website, you can say, "No, we're just not going to poke that bear today, but we can do this other thing." Like you said, we can do this other thing. We're going to write this content, we can keep moving forward. That's what I find generally is when you do an audit, you want to find ways where you can just keep moving forward. And some of the things in your audit might be things that you can work at, work towards over a long term fixing, but you want to find things that you can prior- and this is again where the prioritizing comes from, where you say, well this thing will give us a big impact fairly quickly and then this thing will take us a little bit longer to do, but will give us a big impact after that. And so if you just keep building and keep building momentum, then that can help you to see SEO growth because Google can see that you're constantly improving the website.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's not about being perfect, it's about making progress. It's about prioritizing and scrutinizing the tools. And how deep do you have to go into your SEO audit? It depends on what you're looking to do and what you need.

Crystal Carter:

And also use multiple tools.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's true too. And there are a lot of tools out there. There are free tools out there.

Crystal Carter:

There's free tools out there. So always compare any third party tool, always compare it to the Google Search console, always check Google Search Console on another tool. If you have no money at all, if you have no budget, zero budget, you can use Google Search Console and you can use Bing Webmaster Tools and you can compare those two and see a lot of information from that. And there's a lot of tools that are freemium as well that will allow you to get some good audits.

Mordy Oberstein:

And pro tip, if you run an audit and you're like, "Something looks weird here," run it again instead of using a third party tool, because sometimes they are a little wonky, for lack of better word.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And also for a cloud configuration, sometimes when people connect to a cloud server, you might see different activity at one time or another. So run it a few times, check it a few different ways.

Mordy Oberstein:

Speaking of prioritizing your site audit recommendations, we have the wonderful Olga Zarr from SEO Sly here to share her thoughts on how do you prioritize your SEO audit recommendations.

Olga Zarr:

We need to take a lot of things into account. First, the most important thing is what type of site you are dealing with and how possible, how likely it is that all or most of your SEO recommendations will be implemented. It is of course a different case if you're dealing with a huge e-comm site and where there is five or 10 people who are going to decide whether they're okay with implementing those changes. And it is a totally different story if you are dealing with a small site over which you have a total control and you yourself can implement all of those recommendations. So in most cases we can assume that just some of them will be implemented. So the way I suggest doing that is always start with the most critical ones, then go to quick SEO wins, and then the things that are kind of nice to have.

So the critical optimizations are the ones that actually hinder the site right away, that make the site definitely not realize its full potential or even prevents it from ranking like a no index tag or something on some page where it definitely shouldn't be. Or for example, some crawlability issues where Google is not able to crawl the site or render it correctly. So these are those types of things that have to be implemented right away, and they usually can bring relatively quick effects.

For example, if the site is not indexed and the client is coming to you to fix the problem because they're not getting any impressions or any, for example, clicks. And if you just fix that usually you will be able to bring relatively of course, quick results. The second type of optimizations prioritization you should do is quick SEO wins. Again, SEO is not for quick results, but with quick SEO wins, uncovering some hidden potential you usually can bring quicker results.

What are quick SEO wins? For example, you can try to find pages which are ranking relatively highly already. For example, on the top of page two or on top of page one. And even with position one, they will actually be able to get some traffic. But because of course you have to take into account like how the SERP looks, because not always position one is going to get you traffic.

But there are cases where it's definitely worth being one or you may also try to get this featured snippet or move the site to the map pack, to the carousel, whatever. So those quick wins usually are a good idea and are usually something that will let your audit have biggest and quicker effect. Another type of those prioritizations, quick SEO optimizations is when you work on internal linking, especially if internal linking hasn't been worked on, usually this is a quick, quick SEO win. And then the third part of optimization, nice to have, which are of course will help the site or will help the site in the long run, but those two are the ones you should be paying attention to the most, the critical mistakes and the quick SEO wins.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much Olga. I totally agree. And leave SEO aside for a quick second. When you're dealing with a website and you have all these tasks, whether it be from the site art itself or whatever you're trying to work on, it can feel overwhelming and sometimes as a person, as a human being, you need to have some things that you feel like I can accomplish and do and kind of check off the box. So don't ignore that factor of it because it's so true.

Crystal Carter:

It's so valuable. And I think that when you're working with clients or you're working with a team, it's also really important to think about, because if people don't see, she talked a little bit about quick wins and about things that are beating you.

And if people can't see green shoots within the first sort of month or two of what you're doing, then people start to lose interest. And it can be tricky because if you're working on an SEO project where you want to show that the value of the SEO and things like that. So if you can identify things that are going to be able to show some results, it doesn't have to be, you don't have to set the world on fire straight away, but if you can show that it's moving things forward, that's really, really useful. And again, I think this is one of the places where somebody who has some SEO experience can be really, really of value because they can know not only what to audit and what to prioritize, but also how to evidence it after the fact as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

Totally true. So don't forget to take that advice and don't forget to follow Olga Zarr over on Twitter at O-L-G-A Z-A-R-R on Twitter. We'll link to it in the show notes. So as we're talking about site audits, obviously we're talking about site audits if you've been listening thus far. There are many, many, many tools out there and we figured out what we would do on this episode is kind of highlight just one of those tools that are out there for you. Again, there's a lot of tools, but here's one for you as we go Tool Time on the SERP's UP Podcast.

This week we're looking at a tool that used to be called DeepCrawl. It's kind of like Prince, the artist formerly known as DeepCrawl. Now it's called Lumar. So Lumar has been around, or DeepCrawl previously it's been around, they were, I would say one of the first, first really serious SEO tools that ran all kinds of audits and really deep audits. And you can kind of get lost in it because there's so many different audits that they're offering you, which is why we're recommending that you have a look at Lumar and dive into it because they do things like tell you not just on the technical side, they'll do things on the content side as well.

Again, do you have thin content? Which on the content side, again, I don't worry about meta descriptions too much, but if thin content comes back, I might want to look at that. Sometimes you just have thin content, it's a page where you sign up for a newsletter, it's going to be thin, but sometimes maybe I really do need to flush that out. And that by the way, I've personally seen where you find those kind of things, and there's a correlation between that and pages that are not indexed because they're too thin.

Crystal Carter:

What I really like about Lumar is that they get really into the details, particularly on some of the technical elements and they break it down and you can configure the crawl really easily to your tech configuration. So if you have a site that's using a lot of JavaScript for instance, and you can configure it to show that sort of thing. So they have a really good tool that talks about render count so you can see whether the links are rendered and whether that matches how many links are on the page. And these are things that get right into the details of your website. So I think that's really great, and I think thinking about how you can configure your crawl is absolutely important for any auditing session because it's so easy to pat yourself on the back for a hundred percent when you've only crawled three pages

Mordy Oberstein:

And they make it real easy on the setup to configure that crawl. It's really something with the tools. You have to dive into a settings button in order to configure the crawl. But it's right as you set up the new project, they walk you through the configuration right there. And they have a really cool internal link reporting, which I think is super valuable to tell you if you have orphan pages and so forth.

And it's a whole separate report. So the way they break it down is really nice. And I feel like we have to mention if you're using Wix, it's not called Lumar yet, it's still called DeepCrawl, apologies, I guess there's a DeepCrawl app. It offers you a really nice, pretty simplistic breakdown. I say "simplistic" in a good way because we don't want to get overly involved and overly caught up in the whole reporting world about site audits, if you're an SMB, if you're like, "Hey, I got this thing covered, but I do want to do an audit." It's a pretty inexpensive nice way of getting both the technical breakdown of the website and the content breakdown audit of the website as well. So definitely check out the Wix app market for the DeepCrawl app there. Nice. Lumar.

Crystal Carter:

It's great. It's a great tool.

Mordy Oberstein:

I like their design language now.

Crystal Carter:

I like their design language too. I think they've done some really great stuff. They've got a great team there as well. So I've done a webinar with their team recently actually on site audits and there's a great writeup on it and I think the deck is available there as well. So we did the webinar in the summer, so please check that out because it's really awesome. I'm not just saying that, but I mean there's a lot of, not just saying that it's awesome because of me, but also because there's a lot of good information there and their team is just so knowledgeable and they do some great …

Mordy Oberstein:

Now have featured them in Indigo in weeks past as a Follow of the Week, so full circle right there. With that, let's audit the latest in what's going on in the SEO news because it's time for the Snappy News. Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News, just one tidbit of news for you this week because although it's been relatively quiet because of the holiday season. Happy New Year's to you all from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, Google helpful content update and link spam update delayed rollout due to holidays. According to Barry, Google officially confirmed that the helpful content update needs more time to roll out, but now the link spam update is also past the two-week mark and it is not done rolling out yet either.

John Mueller of Google said these updates may take longer to complete due to the holidays and for safety reasons. So before the holidays, Google is running the helpful content update and the link spam update, the helpful content update's roll-out was prolonged. It did not finish yet, neither did the link spam update. It's going to finish sometime, I guess now-ish.

Now the holiday season is over. There were reports of elevated rank volatility as seen on tools like the December sensor and Moscas around New Year's time. That clearly is not the link spam update or the helpful content update because Google said they paused that. So you may expect to see some increase in rank volatility either happening right now as we speak, or in the coming days perhaps, who knows? But theoretically it's coming. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news on this new year, but I don't control the news. I just report on it. And with that, that is the snappiest of Snappy News. Back to the show. All right, that was the Snappiest News.

Crystal Carter:

That news was great, Mordy.

Mordy Oberstein:

Hey, I love auditing the news. I love auditing everything except for my taxes. But audits are great til the IRS The which I have been audited, it's not fun.

Crystal Carter:

Oh my God.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's not fun. I'm an expat, so my taxes are kind of complicated and by default, I didn't do anything wrong. Everything was fine in the end, but they told me I owe $10,000 dollars, "I'm like, oh my God, I cannot, I cannot..." In the end, it was fine. We're good. So audit your sites. Audit your client sites. Don't be audited by the IRS, that's not fun. Yeah, real life advice, again on the SERP's Up SEO Podcast. Anyway, before we do leave the park, we do need to talk about our Follow of the Week because that's what we do. We leave you with somebody who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness each and every week on social media. And this week your follow of the week is Dan White.

Crystal Carter:

So yeah, Dan White is a fantastic SEO, I worked with him on my previous team and he is also the president of the DMU, which is the Digital Marketers Union. And he is a great SEO. He has a fantastic article about site audits and he's incredibly knowledgeable. I've seen his work firsthand. I've seen how meticulous he is about updating and auditing websites firsthand. He's a great follow for lots of reasons. And the DMU is a fantastic resource for freelancers and for other SEOs who are involved in the SEO community. And it allows you to sort of connect with other SEOs and it allows you to share resources and share information. So yeah, he's a great follow for lots of reasons. He's also a nice guy.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's another reason to follow him. I always like following nice people.

Crystal Carter:

Obviously, of course.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, it's not so obvious in social media sometimes, but I'm glad that works out this time. All right, well, I guess that's it. We're done auditing.

Crystal Carter:

We're done. Do we have some actionables?

Mordy Oberstein:

No.

Crystal Carter:

Surely the actionable is to tune in next week for the next episode of the SERP's Up podcast...

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, I love that!

Crystal Carter:

Where you will have lots more...

Mordy Oberstein:

We're going to be covering how to adapt the changes on the SERP, look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, checking all the great content webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes we're running on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.