Mastering Search Analytics

Chapter 13. An SEO Audit (On-Page Factors)

Site audits can fall under site health, as well as site maintenance.

Conducting audits of your KPIs should provide you with both a sanity check (do the numbers seem right?) and an opportunity to understand the whole of your site. Site audits should include 404s, 302s, multiple 301s, Flash, AJAX, and more. Much like you get an annual check-up at the doctor’s, your website requires similar maintenance. Depending on your site’s size you may run these audits weekly, monthly, quarterly, or at any interval you find appropriate. The point is to make the audits part of your habit, and to schedule them in. Monitoring site health is not a glamorous job, but it’s well worth the reward in the long run. With well-run site audits, you will likely never see the results of your work, as everything will run smoothly. It is only when you don’t run audits that you see the results of not maintaining site health, and this can quickly turn catastrophic.

Tools you will need in this chapter:

• Google Webmaster Tools

• Spreadsheet program (Excel or something similar)

• Web developer plug-in for Firefox

• YSlow for Firefox

• Site link checker (IIS toolkit)

Automating Issue Auditing

The more you automate, the quicker it will be to find the issues we’ll cover here. In some cases it simply won’t be possible to automate everything; in other cases there are very robust ways to automate tracking of issues. However, there should always be a human review of some sort to validate false positives ...