How to be successful with your SEO audit - Made with Clipchamp
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[00:00:00] So let's talk about success again and how to be successful with your SEO audits. You have to go through all that theory to get your mindset in the right place for SEO auditing, for approaching SEO audits, because it will lay the grounds for, for your success after you complete the course. So the first thing is getting the context of the website right.
[00:00:26] So this is something that SEO tools, however smart they are, how much AI they use, cannot do and probably won't be able to do for a very long time. Only you and your human brain can get the context of the website, right? What, what do I mean by that? You browse the site as if you were its user. You crawl aside to get a lot of like technical data.
[00:00:48] You access to Google search consoles, you have that Google related data. You send a very detailed questionnaire to the clients and they get back to you. So, you know, the client's, uh, needs the client's problems, goals. So you have all those data points and having all that knowledge, now you are able to kind of set the context of the website, put it in the right place and knowing actually what the site needs, what will be the best thing for the site to happen.
[00:01:18] as a next step. Probably it won't be fixing the length of title tags, making sure they are shorter by 10 characters, something that the tool might tell you to do. So this is the most important thing and I don't believe you can automate it in any way. You just gather all that data, go through all of that data, browse the site as a user and get the context and know where to go from from that.
[00:01:46] This is something that you will be doing intuitively after you have like spent some time doing audits. The next thing, very important, is I'm talking about in depth SEO audits, so we are not just like checking 10 things and done. We are like doing an, a deep dive into all of aspects of SEO, including local SEO, on page, off page, content optimization, keyword focus, and whatnot.
[00:02:12] And very often the client will come to you saying that we got stuck, our traffic hasn't increased for two years, or we have a traffic drop. Do this audit, please analyze the site and tell us what to do. And this is where in most cases you will have to take a look at factor diversity. This is something that Ted Kobaitis is talking about a lot.
[00:02:33] Factor diversity is generally about Whether the site takes care of various factors for various groups of factors, as opposed to just exhausting one factor. So for example, you have a site, you have built some links to a page, the page improved, you built more, the page improved, you did that 10 times, and at some the site won't move or the site even drops.
[00:03:02] And this is the moment where you take a step back and analyze and realize that all the site was doing it was doing off page while on page has never been done. So you do on page the way it should be done with Quora will be teaching that and then the site skyrockets and those things you have been building start to work as well because now you have taken care of multiple factors.
[00:03:26] So factor diversity and checking whether the site has taken care of multiple factors, especially factors that are different, is a very important thing. And if you identify it, if you fix it, the site will probably grow. And the best tool for you to check that is Quora. With Quora, you can check just one keyword at a time.
[00:03:49] That's why you probably You need this fundamental SEO understanding, being able to, like, assess the sites very fast while just browsing it. And once you know the top keywords for the site, the top pages, you open Quora, you run a report for that specific keyword, and the Quora is showing you, like, all the ranking factors that matter for that keyword, and which ones matter the most for that specific page.
[00:04:16] And you can clearly see, okay, so this page has not taken care of that, that, that, that and this, so we are fixing that and the site will probably go up after you have taken care of those factors. I'll be talking about Quora and all of that, so you will know exactly what I'm talking about. I just, here I just want to convey the concepts of what can make your SEO audit successful.
[00:04:38] So. being aware of factor diversity and being aware of where the site is lacking. This is a great foundation for SEO strategy, SEO audits that will actually move the needle. The next thing that will make your SEO audit successful is actually checking in addition to of course providing insights on all the issues you identify, technical issues.
[00:05:02] Sometimes technical issues may be really fatal and unless a technical issue is fixed, the site cannot rank. So if there are such issues, We can call them quick wins. You have to like make it crystal clear that this has to be taken care of in the first place, because without that, we cannot do anything else.
[00:05:19] So putting those most important critical elements at the front of SEO of your SEO audit is also like critical. And the next things that will allow you to be successful in your SEO audit is writing clear recommendations. and at the same time making sure those recommendations are detailed enough so that the client understands what you really want.
[00:05:44] You don't want to write a recommendation, please fix headings. Headings are not optimal for SEO. They won't know what to do with that. You have to take a screenshot of current structure of headings, explain what's wrong with that structure, and then propose a good, correct structure of headings. And if the client sees something like that, they will probably know what to do with that.
[00:06:04] So clear recommendations. and tailored specifically to the site is something that will, that will make your audit successful. We'll be diving into that in more detail later on. This is the theoretical part. You don't have to like do anything now, right now, just absorb that because I am, I just want to get your mindset in the right place.
[00:06:25] Another thing that will make your SEO successful, something I talked about in previous videos, is implementation of the audits recommendations. If they don't get implemented, your audit will be a failure, even if you are the best SEO auditor on earth. So I always choose to work with clients who are very responsive, who act fast and who I feel will be implementing the fixes fast.
[00:06:51] And one of the things you can, how you can determine that is Ask them, um, how big is their team? If they have a person dedicated to work on the websites, if they have a team of developers, uh, how busy they are. Sometimes they will have a huge team of developers, uh, who will be very fast to implement.
[00:07:11] Sometimes it may be just one person on the other side. And this person, the owner of the site may not be technical at all and they will have to look for someone to implement the changes and they may not be able to do that, they may not know how or who to connect with. So those things have to be established at the start.
[00:07:30] Sometimes if this is a website that only has like one person is responsible for that, they may ask you to do those implementations. Sometimes it is fun works. There are some SEO auditors who don't do that. They never touch the site. I do it occasionally. If the client is actually like one person with a site, and this is a CMS I know, and I am the most proficient in WordPress, then sometimes I actually do implement those changes on the website.
[00:08:02] I have two clients, like regular clients, who have WordPress sites who have given me access to their sites. And they just said, Oh, God, do whatever you want. We trust you. You don't have to run those changes, those updates with us. So this is the best client in that respect, because you have a free hand and you can implement all the changes.
[00:08:25] But on the other hand, you always have to take that into consideration, who is going to implement, because if it is going to be you, you don't want to shoot yourself in the foot. So. I'll be talking about this later on, now I just want to convey that, uh, implementation of changes is critical to the success of your site.
[00:08:44] And that brings us to, um, client education, uh, and educating the clients about how the process will look like, um, how long it will take and how fast they can expect results. Because very often the client thinks. Okay, I get an audit, you do the audits, and we see traffic go up, but unless you identify a critical technical issue, that's not going to happen, SEO audit will just form the foundation for the SEO strategy that they have to implement.
[00:09:16] They have to be implementing over months, very often, sometimes even years. So. Lastly, customize approach to every audit. You never want to do that. I know it happens. I think it happened to me as well. You don't want to like reuse the previous audits for a different client you did for this client and just swap a few things here, there, and leave out the URL of the previous client.
[00:09:44] You don't want this to happen. This happened when I was working at SEO agency in my like first years. So every Every audit, it has to be customized. You always have to put the logo of the client. So you, ideally you should have that template, which is like clear of any examples, anything. And you just, and this template is like 10 percent and 90 percent is your customized commentary, your customized recommendations.
[00:10:13] This will improve your client relationship and improve the chances of recommendations being implemented and overall, it is a success factor. So those are, I would say the top things that will let you be successful with your SEO audits. So you need to get the context of the sites, right? You need to account for factor diversity and like overall optimization of the site.
[00:10:38] I will be talking about that later on. You need to provide clear recommendations that will actually get implemented. So you have to have a customized approach to every client and every project. And with that, you can see clearly this takes a lot of time and effort on your site and on your client's sites.
[00:10:55] And this is what makes those projects so effective and so profitable because you spend a lot of time. You create something that is amazing so you can get paid for that. appropriately. So that's all regarding being successful with your SEO audit. In the next video we'll be still talking about success, but more from the angle of how you can be a successful SEO auditor and what will make you a successful SEO auditor.
