Executing and Delivering a Technical SEO Audit – Template Included

One of the first deliverables we work on for a new services client that is focused on inbound marketing is a technical SEO audit. This audit allows us to dig into their website, keyword strategy and metrics in a detailed and significant way in order to understand what controllable issues we can attack right from the get-go to improve website crawl-ability, indexation and performance. Many times, we’ll find four or five issues in this process that turn into specific tasks for the webmaster and/or the marketing person which can have a near immediate impact on organic visibility and traffic.

This process also helps us establish our street cred on SEO and allows us to start the process of becoming a strategic partner in their marketing program as opposed to just the SEO vendor. Much has been written about the shift in the role of an SEO resource from a channel specific tactician to a true marketing strategy partner like here and here. We’ve written about how your core content strategy is important as well, but this technical review really sets the table for working together with a client going forward on both a technical and strategic level.

To get started properly, you will need the following access or information from your client:

1. Top 5-10 keywords that THEY believe are important for their business. Used for checking rankings, visibility and to see who the real “keyword competitors” are.
2. Top 2-3 competitors. These are the client’s usual suspects in terms of who they compete against regularly. Usually, this is different than keyword competitors who are the companies that rank for high profile keywords.
3. Setup their account in Optify. This will get us rank data for the client and competitors, page analysis and page level link data + recommendations.
4. Access to their Google Analytics account. This will provide a historical perspective of traffic by source, the number of organic search landing pages and number of keywords driving traffic historically.
5. Access to or create a Google Webmaster account for their site. Webmaster tools give us very specific insight into how Google (or Bing if you set up those webmaster tools) sees the client site with data on specific types of errors and issues.
6. Social media profile names and URLs. Social media is playing a larger role in the SEO signals the search engines look at for authority and visibility.

The technical SEO audit template has a series of sections with explanations and examples in each section. Any piece of information contained within a < > is to be replaced with your specific client information including < client name >, < competitor > or < client URL >.

Here is a list of the sections included in the template:

• Domain Health
  o History
  o Authority
  o URL Structure

• Keywords
  o Focus
  o Ranking

• Page Structure
  o SEO Elements
  o Link Technology
  o Website Technology

• Site Content
  o Quantity
  o Blog Content
  o Duplicate Content

• Linking
  o Internal/On-Site Links
  o Outbound Links
  o Inbound Quantity
  o Inbound Diversity
  o Inbound Anchor Text

• Technical
  o Server Errors
  o 404 Page Errors
  o Robots Exclusion
  o Sitemap XML
  o Page Load Speed

• Social
  o Social Profiles
  o Social Sharing
  o Social Activity

Each section in the template has a description, an example and the corresponding resource to find and analyze the data. You can expand or contract this template based on your comfort level and clients needs.

Click here to request and use the technical SEO audit template. Feel free to comment on this post with any recommendations for improvements or changes to the template and we’ll build-in and share. Please also mention if you think a training session on this template would be helpful.

Now, go get ‘em!