Free SEO Analysis Report Template (PDF, Doc)

0:00 hey in this video i’m going to show you 0:01 my complete seo audit process so you can 0:04 find every opportunity possible for 0:06 improving your rankings and getting more 0:08 organic search traffic so make sure you 0:10 grab your favorite note-taking device 0:12 because i’m going to be performing an 0:14 seo audit on a real business and make 0:16 sure you watch until the end because 0:18 each step in this process builds upon 0:20 itself like a snowball let’s dive right 0:23 in hey my name is nathan gotch and i’m 0:24 the founder of gotcha seo and i’ve 0:26 personally led hundreds of successful 0:28 seo campaigns since 2013 and i’ve helped 0:32 thousands of seo professionals reach 0:34 that mastery status inside my training 0:36 program gotcha seo academy so in case 0:38 you’re new here this is video three in 0:40 this complete seo mastery training 0:43 series and there are links below this 0:44 video to watch the other two lessons 0:46 after you finish this one and one last 0:48 thing subscribe now and hit the bell 0:50 notification because you get first 0:52 access to the next video in this 0:54 training series so now let’s get super 0:57 geeky and dive into this live seo audit 0:59 demo so in this demo i’m going to 1:01 analyze 1:03 rsblawfirm.com which is a law firm based 1:05 in st louis and the first step in this 1:07 process is to audit the keyword profile Keyword audit 1:09 here’s how so once you’re in scm rush go 1:11 ahead and enter the domain that you want 1:13 to start doing this keyword audit for so 1:14 in this case like i mentioned we’ll be 1:16 doing 1:17 rsvlawfirm.com so once you’ve done that 1:19 we’re going to go to the organic 1:20 research section so right away we just 1:22 want to look at a couple things here at 1:23 a high level so first of all what is the 1:26 organic keyword trend like what does it 1:28 look like is it flat is it growing or it 1:30 hasn’t rapidly declined in any way so 1:33 looking at this overall they haven’t 1:35 grown a ton and they’ve been flat since 1:37 let’s say march 2020 but they haven’t 1:40 declined a lot either so this is 1:42 actually a really good sign initially 1:43 because it’s showing us that they 1:45 haven’t been penalized they’re likely 1:46 not dealing with some sort of link-based 1:49 issue that we have to go and fix and 1:51 they’ve been doing this for a long time 1:52 they’ve been going since about 2012 so 1:55 there’s a lot of room for improvement 1:56 already we can tell because of course 1:58 they’ve kind of flatlined here so with a 2:00 lot of things i’ll be showing you in 2:01 this audit we’re going to be able to 2:02 improve this dramatically but right now 2:03 let’s just focus on the keywords so this 2:05 is the high level analysis everything 2:07 looks good here now let’s go into the 2:08 positions now the first thing i want to 2:10 do is i just want to see if they have 2:11 any low hanging fruit keywords so these 2:13 are keywords ranking from positions 2:15 number 2 to 15 and these are absolutely 2:17 the best keywords to target at the 2:19 beginning of an seo campaign because 2:21 with just some slight adjustments some 2:23 optimization some additional coverage on 2:25 the site and maybe some additional link 2:27 building and maybe even building more 2:28 topical relevance of course which we’ll 2:30 talk about we can push these up much 2:32 faster and just by going up a couple 2:34 positions we can dramatically increase 2:36 organic search traffic so what you want 2:38 to do is go to positions here and we’re 2:39 going to do custom range and we’re going 2:41 to do 2 2 15. and then ultimately we 2:44 want to see how they’re doing with the 2:45 keywords in this range and so we see 2:47 according to scm rush they’re not doing 2:49 so well like they haven’t really 2:50 improved performance on these keywords 2:53 that are most important so looking 2:55 through these obviously anything having 2:56 to do with st louis is going to be 2:57 really important to them so we’ll go 2:59 ahead and copy that and then we’re going 3:00 to go filter by keyword and we’re just 3:02 going to enter that in because we only 3:03 want to see stuff that’s related to st 3:05 louis right we don’t want to see stuff 3:06 that’s not super relevant but it doesn’t 3:08 mean that we’re going to ignore those 3:09 keywords it just means that right now at 3:11 this point we’re thinking about what we 3:12 should prioritize we want to prioritize 3:15 the keywords that have high 3:16 transactional intent on the local level 3:17 so in this case st louis criminal 3:19 attorney st louis criminal defense 3:21 lawyer these are their money keywords 3:23 these are the ones that we really want 3:24 to improve a couple things you can do 3:26 you can obviously sort this by volume 3:27 and see which ones have the highest 3:29 volume within this segment of keywords 3:31 so looking at this st louis criminal 3:33 defense attorney they’re sitting at 3:34 about number 13. that is a golden 3:37 opportunity they’re only about three 3:39 spots away from the first page so what 3:40 we would do is make this our number one 3:43 priority because if we improve the 3:45 optimization on this page they could see 3:47 a dramatic increase in qualified leads 3:50 right so this could be a big win for 3:52 them and it’s easy for us because 3:53 they’re so close already so we just need 3:55 to figure out what’s going to be that 3:56 next step to optimize this specific page 3:59 for this keyword phrase and all the 4:01 related variations now i should mention 4:03 these variations here st louis criminal 4:05 defense lawyer st louis criminal 4:07 attorney these should all be targeted on 4:08 the same keyword because the intent is 4:10 exactly the same now we’ll talk a little 4:12 about intent but ultimately we should 4:14 only be creating new pages if the intent 4:16 of the keyword is different someone 4:17 looking for a criminal defense attorney 4:19 that’s a very clear intent but someone 4:21 looking for a child custody lawyer that 4:24 has a totally different intent so we 4:25 need to have a totally different page to 4:27 be able to optimize for the intent of 4:29 that keyword so this is the first step 4:31 is i want to look for these low hanging 4:33 fruits because this is where most of our 4:34 time should be spent and once we’ve 4:36 really nailed these down we’re doing 4:38 really well then we can move on to the 4:40 other keywords that are outside of this 4:41 range now we’ll go ahead and exit out of 4:43 here and we’ll go to the next range of 4:45 keywords which are what i just defined 4:46 as existing keywords we’ll go from 4:49 positions 16 and then we’ll go position 4:52 50. these keywords are also very very 4:54 important but they’re just not as 4:56 important as the keywords that are 4:58 ranking very highly in those low hanging 5:00 fruit positions we’re still going to 5:01 want to attack these but ultimately 5:03 they’re kind of far back a lot of them 5:04 so ultimately if we improve these pages 5:08 that are already doing pretty well in 5:09 the low hanging fruit section it’s 5:11 probably going to improve the 5:12 performance of all these other existing 5:14 keywords that are sitting on pages two 5:16 three maybe even four and five typically 5:18 there’ll be a domino effect to improve 5:20 kind of the whole keyword profile 5:22 ultimately so the next set of keywords 5:24 are 51 through 100 and i actually define 5:26 these keywords as clustering 5:28 opportunities so typically you can find 5:30 some really good opportunities here from 5:33 51 to 100 and oftentimes if you’re 5:36 ranking from positions 51 to 100 it 5:38 means that your page probably isn’t 5:40 optimized enough to rank for that 5:42 keyword and you’re probably there just 5:45 by coincidence or just because you 5:47 mentioned it one or two times on the 5:49 page and it’s not super competitive but 5:51 at the end of the day you need to have a 5:53 focus page that 100 nails the intent of 5:56 that keyword so looking through these we 5:58 can see there’s a couple keywords here 5:59 obviously you know when we’re working on 6:01 the local level we want to try to keep 6:03 things really hyper relevant to the 6:05 location that they’re in sure there’s 6:07 some national stuff here right there’s 6:09 pdl that looks like a national term 6:11 we’re looking at no contest divorce 6:13 that’s also a national term so what i 6:16 would really be interested in more in is 6:18 the missouri-based keywords and the st 6:20 louis based keywords so let’s go ahead 6:22 and look in missouri and we’ll see if 6:24 any of these look like good clustering 6:26 opportunities and i’ll tell you what 6:27 that means in a second so looking right 6:29 here child custody in missouri the kd on 6:32 this is not super high according to 6:34 semrush it would be an easy keyword to 6:36 go after so this would be something that 6:37 we probably would want to tackle but 6:39 you’ll see here we’ll look at this page 6:41 and you’ll see that this page here is 6:43 not built for the intent of that keyword 6:46 so they do mention missouri child 6:48 custody but the problem is that this 6:50 page isn’t actually designed to satisfy 6:53 the intent of this particular keyword so 6:55 we’ll go ahead and look at the serps for 6:56 this one and then what we’ll find is 6:58 that most of the results here are not 7:00 transactional pages the pages that are 7:02 ranking are very informational in nature 7:04 and so i’m seeing some things here that 7:05 are really good right away like right 7:07 here we see 2020. that means that these 7:09 results are outdated so it means that if 7:11 we create an informational piece of 7:12 content at the top of the funnel we 7:14 should be able to rank for this keyword 7:16 pretty easily and it’s still relevant to 7:18 what we do so the way that they’re 7:19 trying to do it right now is they’re 7:20 trying to use a page that’s built for 7:22 transactional intent and they’re trying 7:24 to rank for things that have 7:25 informational intent so the way to do it 7:27 is we’re going to build out that top of 7:29 the funnel informational asset targeting 7:31 this keyword which is child custody in 7:33 missouri and once we built out an 7:35 informational asset it will start 7:36 performing well on google but ultimately 7:38 what we’re going to do is we’re going to 7:39 drive link equity and relevance to this 7:42 page here which is their transactional 7:44 page so we want to rank for st louis 7:47 child custody and visitation lawyers i’m 7:49 going to rank for this because this is 7:50 transactional nature while the other one 7:52 is informational in nature so this is 7:54 what i call an intent mismatch and this 7:56 is really really important to understand 7:57 and you’ll not believe the amount of 7:59 golden opportunities that most websites 8:01 are just sitting on right now to build 8:03 more topical authority and more topical 8:05 relevance just by splintering these 8:07 ideas onto a separate page and 8:09 ultimately creating the page based on 8:11 what the intent of the keyword is and in 8:13 this case you have a lot of 8:14 informational keywords here third degree 8:16 assault in missouri that’s informational 8:19 statute of limitations on debt in 8:20 missouri that’s informational so we 8:22 should be building out these 8:23 informational assets they’re not just 8:25 informational nature but they’re 8:26 actually geo-targeted relevant golden 8:29 opportunity here to attack these this 8:30 would be my focus here to build topical 8:32 relevance and authority so now that we 8:34 have a good understanding of what 8:35 keywords they’re targeting it’s time to 8:37 perform a technical audit here’s how to Technical audit 8:39 do it okay so while you’re in semrush go 8:41 to the site audit section and then run 8:43 the target website through their site 8:45 audit and then once that’s completed 8:46 it’s gonna look like this and this is 8:48 just the overview of all the technical 8:51 issues that semrush was ultimately able 8:53 to identify so there’s a lot of 8:54 information here don’t be overwhelmed by 8:56 it but i’m just going to kind of 8:57 identify the key things that we really 8:58 want to be looking at so a couple things 9:00 here is crawlability crawlability is by 9:02 far the most important thing that we 9:04 need to optimize for because at the end 9:06 of the day if google can’t crawl your 9:08 site well it’s not going to index it 9:10 well if you can’t index it well you’re 9:11 not going to rank well those are the 9:13 prerequisites for even ranking on 9:15 google’s you need to have a crawlable 9:16 website and it needs to have good crawl 9:19 efficiency as well you need to have all 9:21 of your pages getting indexed very 9:23 efficiently and then lastly to actually 9:25 rank the pages have to be indexed in 9:27 google so it’s critical it’s really 9:29 really critical now let’s go here we’re 9:31 gonna look at the details and we’ll look 9:32 at a few things there’s a lot of kind of 9:33 technical stuff here but there’s a 9:34 couple key points that i really like to 9:36 look at so we’ll scroll down and this is 9:38 the a really important section here is 9:40 pages crawl depth so what this means is 9:43 how many clicks from the home page do 9:45 these pages exist so the number one 9:47 target that we’re going for is that we 9:48 shouldn’t have any pages more than three 9:50 clicks deep that’s really what we should 9:52 aim for and there’s obviously some 9:53 exceptions to the rule but for a small 9:55 website like this that doesn’t have a 9:56 ton of pages there’s just no excuse to 9:59 have pages more than three clicks steep 10:01 it just isn’t necessary it doesn’t need 10:02 to have that level of architecture and 10:05 ultimately what you’re doing when you 10:07 have pages that are really buried into 10:08 the architecture is you’re telling 10:10 google that these pages are not that 10:11 important right and whether that’s by 10:14 accident or on purpose it doesn’t matter 10:15 that’s just the way that it’s going to 10:16 be interpreted ultimately by the time 10:18 google finally gets down there and they 10:20 may not get down there at all actually 10:21 the crawlers may not even reach those 10:23 pages so we want google to be able to 10:24 crawl our site very efficiently and 10:27 crawl it the way that we want to so that 10:28 our website gets indexed the right way 10:30 but also typically when i see this 10:32 there’s a lot of pages that are kind of 10:33 buried in the architecture it’s 10:35 typically a signal that we’re going to 10:36 find some content that’s not super good 10:39 right because if the content was good it 10:41 wouldn’t be buried deep into the 10:42 architecture so that’s kind of the first 10:44 thing i want to look at is make sure 10:45 that the pages are no more than three 10:47 clicks deep now in this case there are 10:49 many 117 to be exact and then we also 10:52 see here that there are 67 pages blocked 10:55 from being crawled so we do want to 10:57 investigate just to see what that might 10:59 be and why these are no indexed or 11:01 difficult to crawl and so we’ll go ahead 11:02 and open this up so this is the page 11:05 that scmrush is claiming is being 11:07 blocked from being crawled so there are 11:09 two ways to basically confirm that that 11:10 is true we can go into view page source 11:14 and then we can just look for no index 11:16 and see if it’s currently here and it is 11:19 so this particular page is being no 11:21 indexed and no followed that’s just 11:23 telling google that please don’t crawl 11:25 this page ultimately and do not put it 11:26 in the index so the question we have to 11:28 ask is why is this page no index so when 11:30 we investigate a little bit further it 11:32 looks like they’re actually linking out 11:33 to sdltoday.com and this is probably 11:36 something that they were a part of and 11:38 they just don’t want this page indexed 11:40 for whatever reason so there’s nothing 11:42 really inherently wrong with this we 11:45 just don’t want to be using the no index 11:47 function to kind of hide the fact that 11:49 we have thin content because it’s much 11:50 better just to eliminate thin content 11:52 altogether if it doesn’t have any 11:54 valuable kpis so but in this case if 11:56 they’re using it as a form of social 11:58 proof or a way to build authority then 12:00 it might make sense now having a little 12:02 bit of thin content here and there is 12:03 not going to destroy your rankings but 12:05 when it starts to happen at scale it can 12:07 become problematic so you don’t want 12:08 this to get out of control but i think 12:10 in this case it’s not anything to be too 12:11 concerned about okay so i went back to 12:13 the overview section of course you can 12:15 keep digging in through all these things 12:16 but let’s also look at the issues tab 12:18 and see if there’s anything related here 12:20 that could be problematic it looks like 12:22 overall pretty good here there’s a 12:24 couple errors nothing too severe and 12:26 there’s a couple warnings and there’s 12:28 also some notices but for the most part 12:31 there’s nothing too concerning a lot of 12:33 these things are not going to really 12:34 move the needle a lot if you go and fix 12:36 them but they’re things that maybe you 12:37 should add to the list because at the 12:38 end of the day fixing these little tiny 12:40 technical issues is not really going to 12:42 drive performance because for the most 12:44 part anyone can go and fix these little 12:46 micro technical issues that it’s not 12:48 really going to move the needle what’s 12:49 really going to move the needle is first 12:50 of all targeting the right keywords 12:51 which we talked about building out the 12:53 absolute best page for that keyword then 12:55 building topical relevance around that 12:58 keyword and ultimately acquiring links 12:59 those are the high impact actions that 13:01 are really going to drive results now 13:03 this is a local business so it’s not a 13:05 huge website there’s not a ton of really 13:07 technical seo opportunities it can be 13:09 different when you’re working with an 13:10 ecom site or a larger website where 13:12 there’s a lot of opportunity to optimize 13:14 crawl budget and build out powerful 13:16 architecture but on local level a lot of 13:18 these little kind of technical tweaks 13:19 aren’t really going to move the needle 13:20 really at all so then we’ll go to the 13:22 crawled pages tab here and this is just 13:23 a really cool way to kind of see what 13:25 the architecture looks like so you can 13:26 look at pages and then even sort it by 13:28 crawl depth and you’ll see pages that 13:30 are really buried deep into the 13:31 architecture so in this case it looks 13:33 like all their tag archives are buried 13:35 usually for us on the local level we 13:36 just basically delete all these tags 13:38 they don’t really serve any purpose and 13:40 usually they just cause duplicate 13:41 content for really small websites you 13:43 don’t need this level of depth as far as 13:45 tagging it’s just not necessary 13:47 ultimately and then also with the site 13:49 architecture you can see how everything 13:51 is laid out by folder there are some 13:53 technical issues here like having this 13:55 st louis criminal defense attorneys as a 13:57 folder and then everyone under it is 13:59 also includes that that’s going to lead 14:01 to keyword cannibalization we’ll go and 14:02 look at an example of this what i would 14:04 define is kind of dangerous is if we go 14:06 into the personal injury section here 14:08 this page here that says st louis 14:10 personal injury attorneys nothing wrong 14:12 with this this is perfectly fine but it 14:13 becomes problematic when you actually 14:15 use this as the folder for the preceding 14:18 pages so we’ll go and look at wrongful 14:19 death and you’ll see we still have st 14:21 louis personal injury attorneys in the 14:23 folder although this is a different page 14:26 and so what this is going to do is going 14:27 to cause keyword cannibalization or at 14:28 least increase the odds that it’s going 14:30 to cause it i would not do this in fact 14:32 most businesses do not need to have 14:34 especially for a local business you 14:35 don’t need to have complex folders like 14:37 this unless you’re targeting multiple 14:39 locations but in this case it would 14:40 actually be better to just do st louis 14:43 wrongful death attorneys instead of st 14:45 louis personal injury attorneys wrongful 14:47 death it’s just because we don’t want 14:49 any other pages to compete with this 14:51 primary keyword we only want this page 14:53 right here to be the only page that’s 14:55 optimized for this specific keyword and 14:57 this is very very important so i would 14:59 not do this type of url structure just 15:01 because it could cause so much keyword 15:03 cannibalization and lastly we go to the 15:04 statistics page and you’re going to see 15:06 a lot of things we already talked about 15:07 here but there’s a few things happening 15:08 obviously with crawldub we see that 33 15:10 pages are more than three clicks deep so 15:12 this is something that we need to go 15:13 through and fix sometimes it’s not even 15:14 about pushing those pages further up 15:16 into the architecture sometimes it’s 15:17 about actually deleting those pages 15:19 because they’re not serving any purpose 15:21 so sem russia’s site audit tool is a 15:23 really really good tool to give you kind 15:25 of this high level understanding of what 15:27 the page is all about and also they even 15:28 added this core web vital section here 15:30 too where you can go and see how well 15:32 it’s performing for core web vitals in 15:34 this case there’s a lot of room for 15:35 improvement right so they need to go 15:37 through and optimize for core web vitals 15:39 as well because google has said that 15:41 this is going to be a ranking factor 15:42 okay so all you need to do is open up 15:44 screaming frog put the target website 15:45 through here and then start the crawl 15:47 and once it’s done the best way to find 15:49 keyword cannibalization is to start 15:50 searching based on url or by title so 15:53 what i’ll do is i’ll just go right into 15:55 here and i’ll just start searching 15:56 things that i’m starting to see some 15:57 similarities for in this case this 16:00 client wants to rank in st louis so 16:01 let’s start looking for instances of 16:03 keyword cannibalization for st louis so 16:05 if we go ahead and sort by address 16:06 you’ll start to see and of course we’ll 16:08 never look at stuff that’s indexable but 16:09 for the most part we’re pretty much 16:10 going to see things that are just 16:12 indexable right here and right away the 16:14 first thing i see is st louis divorce 16:16 family law so then we’ll get a little 16:18 more granular we’ll just type in divorce 16:20 and now we’re able to see is that they 16:22 have a bunch of urls that all have st 16:25 louis divorce family law attorneys in 16:28 the actual subfolder so what we’re going 16:30 to do is we need to actually fix this 16:32 because we don’t want all of these pages 16:34 to be optimized for this keyword phrase 16:36 we only want this specific page to be 16:37 optimized for this keyword phrase 16:39 otherwise we’re going to run into 16:41 keyword cannibalization issues and if we 16:42 actually look at the title over here as 16:44 well we’re going to see that if we look 16:46 at divorce lawyer saint louis and then 16:48 right below we also have divorce 16:50 attorney st louis so these are actually 16:52 the same exact keywords just slight 16:54 variations but they have the same exact 16:56 intent so these two pages are actually 16:58 competing against each other this is a 17:00 very quick way to find instances of 17:02 keyword cannibalization and you need to 17:04 go through and clean this all up and in 17:05 this case it’s just a matter of cleaning 17:07 up the url structure and probably 17:09 consolidating these pages into one 17:11 primary page which would be this one so 17:13 now that we’ve identified all possible 17:15 technical opportunities it’s time to 17:17 audit their content here’s how okay so Content audit 17:19 all you need to do is go into the 17:21 content marketing section then click on 17:23 content audit and then you need to run 17:25 your website through the content audit 17:27 tool it’s going to ask you to integrate 17:29 google analytics and google search 17:30 console so you’ll absolutely need that 17:32 data to be able to do this the right way 17:34 so they’ll give you a nice overview of 17:35 all the opportunities that exist for 17:37 your content right now but what you 17:38 could do is you can actually click on 17:40 table and then we’ll start to look 17:42 specifically at the urls that they’re 17:44 recommending that we need to either 17:45 rewrite or remove need to update maybe 17:47 review or even just filter those out 17:49 that have poor content so when it comes 17:51 to rewriting and removing we’re looking 17:53 at a few different urls this one right 17:55 here how to write a blog post this is an 17:56 old blog post here on gotcha seo the 17:59 average view duration is extremely low 18:01 which is a bad sign and there’s not 18:03 really a whole lot of traffic going to 18:04 it it’s just an indication that this 18:06 post has not really done well from an 18:08 seo perspective so we probably need to 18:11 rework it or improve it in some way to 18:14 make it perform better maybe we picked 18:15 the wrong keyword there could be a 18:16 variety of things but we need to 18:18 investigate why that post is not doing 18:20 well if we go and look at it we’ll see 18:22 and ultimately this post was not really 18:25 designed to rank it was more designed to 18:27 be a content marketing piece more than 18:29 anything looking at this we know there’s 18:31 a ton of room for improvement this is 18:33 the type of stuff you need to be doing 18:34 you need to be going page by page and 18:36 determining what’s going to be the next 18:38 course of action so based on this we can 18:40 take this specific url and then we’ll 18:43 actually go back into semrush so then 18:45 search the url up here and make sure you 18:47 do exact url we just want to see if this 18:49 page has anything valuable that we want 18:51 to retain so based on this this page 18:53 here has virtually no traffic at all it 18:55 does have some keywords that it’s 18:57 slightly ranking for but i’m going to go 18:58 ahead and suspect that they’re not very 19:00 good so based on this this post is a 19:03 losing post this is a losing page that 19:05 we need to do something with it in this 19:08 case i would probably consider upgrading 19:10 it or maybe picking a different keyword 19:12 to attack because just based on what we 19:14 did it wasn’t good enough to perform so 19:16 i would probably scratch this one and go 19:18 back to the drawing board now with that 19:20 said looking at this it does have 19:22 existing backlinks so you are going to 19:24 want to try to retain those backlinks so 19:26 if you’re going to redo this post then 19:28 it doesn’t really matter but if you’re 19:29 going to scrap and start new you’re 19:31 going to want to 301 redirect this post 19:33 to the new one or just 301 redirected to 19:35 a post that already exists if you don’t 19:37 want to tackle this particular topic 19:39 again so just take advantage of scm 19:41 rush’s tool here to rewrite and remove 19:43 all of these posts that just are proven 19:45 to not be doing super well you should go 19:46 one by one and decide what is the next 19:49 best action for these pages because this 19:51 will help clean up the site make it 19:53 leaner make it better and ultimately 19:54 make these pages perform better than 19:56 they currently are and then there’s a 19:58 couple other categories you can look at 19:59 need to update once again these are 20:01 posts that are older so they probably 20:02 need some updates and ultimately they 20:04 probably need to be upgraded and 20:06 re-optimize and ultimately update it to 20:08 be based on the current situation for 20:10 these given keywords and then there’s 20:12 also quick review once again very 20:14 similar to the previous one and then 20:16 poor content these are just going to be 20:17 pages that have pretty much very little 20:19 words and likely very little traffic now 20:22 in this case of gotch seo this is why 20:23 you always need to be nuanced in your 20:25 approach because with gotcha seo we have 20:27 these dedicated story pages and these 20:29 pages are critical for us because they 20:31 actually serve as content marketing and 20:34 marketing for our seo program so these 20:37 are critical for us but when you run a 20:39 tool like this semrush or whatever tool 20:41 you’re using is going to tell you that 20:42 hey maybe you should do something about 20:43 these but in reality this is serving a 20:45 business objective so sometimes you have 20:47 to approach this differently you can’t 20:49 just look at it from an seo lens you 20:50 also need to look at it from a business 20:52 lens as well so i highly recommend 20:55 taking advantage of semrush’s content 20:56 audit tool and you can also mess around 20:58 the filters to be able to rip through 21:00 this content even more and get a little 21:02 more granular as well so at this point 21:04 we know all the possible content 21:06 opportunities now it’s time to see if On-page SEO audit 21:08 they have any on-page seo opportunities 21:10 here’s how to do that okay so while 21:12 you’re in sdm rush you’ll see over here 21:13 on the left-hand side go to on-page seo 21:15 checker and then what you’re going to do 21:17 is you’re going to click manual and then 21:18 enter the page that you want to rank and 21:20 then enter the keyword that you’re 21:21 trying to rank for and then just go 21:23 ahead and click collect ideas so once 21:26 the scan is complete sdn rush is going 21:27 to give you all kinds of ideas for 21:29 on-page seo and it will be based upon 21:32 the keywords that you input so if you 21:33 only put one keyword in one page you 21:35 only get recommendations for that but if 21:36 you put a bunch it’s going to give you 21:37 recommendations for all of this and 21:39 based on their data they think that if 21:40 we implement these changes that we’ll 21:42 see an increase of organic search 21:44 traffic by over 1 000 21:47 so that would be quite nice now what we 21:49 want to do is actually go to the one 21:50 that we wanted to analyze initially 21:52 which is the st louis personal injury 21:54 attorneys and we’ll look at eight ideas 21:56 here and see what opportunities 21:58 currently exist for this specific page 22:01 and so looking at this there are a ton 22:02 of opportunities for example we need to 22:04 add more keyword variations the actual 22:06 body of the page and we need to make the 22:09 text content more readable so there’s a 22:11 variety of things that we can do right 22:13 now to improve the performance of this 22:15 page and just follow these 22:16 recommendations and then once you’ve 22:18 made these changes update the post and 22:19 you should see an increase in 22:21 performance and if not then it probably 22:23 means that you either need to build more 22:24 topical relevance which means you build 22:26 more supporting assets to this page or 22:28 you need to go out there and acquire 22:30 more links and in this case it looks 22:31 like they do need to acquire more links 22:33 that the competitors already have so 22:35 take advantage of this on-page seo tool 22:37 can really be a game changer so now we 22:39 know all of the on-site opportunities 22:41 that exist now it’s time to audit their Backlink audit 22:43 backlink and anchor text profile on both 22:45 the domain and page level here’s how to 22:48 do that so all you need to do is go into 22:50 semrush’s backlink audit tool and then 22:52 just put the domain in here that you 22:53 want to analyze the link profile for and 22:56 then hit start backlink audit and i 22:58 recommend doing the root domain that way 22:59 you can get access to all of the links 23:01 that are linking to the entire website 23:03 now all the audits going you can 23:04 actually go right into the domain 23:05 overview section just click on backlinks 23:08 and then you can literally just go 23:09 through here and start to analyze these 23:11 links and see if there’s anything that 23:12 looks abnormal or ultimately anything 23:15 that’s going to cause problems so right 23:17 away the first one i notice here is this 23:19 web 2.0 link and so we’ll go ahead and 23:21 take a look and see what it looks like 23:22 it looks like it’s been deleted but 23:24 ultimately these types of links are 23:26 extremely toxic these are just your 23:27 classic web 2.0 links and they’re really 23:30 not going to do you any favors they 23:31 should pretty much be avoided at all 23:33 costs now you do need to know the 23:36 nuances of analyzing a link profile 23:38 which can be tough and that’s why 23:39 semrush is going to make it much easier 23:41 once this analysis is done it’s actually 23:43 going to tell you which links are what 23:45 they would consider to be toxic or 23:47 dangerous but as you go through here you 23:49 can start to see the ones that are gonna 23:51 cause some problems because ultimately 23:52 if they don’t look natural if they look 23:54 spammy then they’re not really a link 23:56 that we’re gonna want so we’ll have to 23:57 figure out if that’s a link that we 23:59 actually just want to keep maybe it’s 24:00 not causing a whole lot of problems or 24:02 is it one that we’re going to need to 24:03 remove or even possibly disavow now you 24:05 pretty much almost never need to disavow 24:08 unless it’s a really nasty link and 24:10 typically that would be because of 24:11 negative seo but sometimes you will get 24:13 some really spammy links but for the 24:15 most part you’re not going to need to 24:17 use a disavow tool i just like to look 24:18 through here real quick scan if i don’t 24:20 see anything too alarming then we should 24:22 be good to go but when i see this when 24:24 there’s ultimately a home page link it’s 24:26 typically an indication of some sort of 24:28 public blog network which is quite 24:30 common but overall this link profile 24:32 looks pretty clean and you can actually 24:34 sort it by follow just to be safe and 24:36 then we’ll put it on active just to make 24:38 sure we’re only really looking at links 24:39 that are currently active now this isn’t 24:42 always 100 accurate for example we just 24:45 checked this one and there was nothing 24:47 sem rush has to recrawl all these links 24:50 and they’re crawling millions and 24:51 millions of websites and links at any 24:53 given time so this will take time to 24:55 update but overall if you can scan 24:57 through here and you don’t see anything 24:58 too alarming you don’t see any 24:59 aggressive exact match anchor text or 25:02 anything of that nature which we can go 25:03 over here and look at the anchors we can 25:05 go over here and look at the anchor text 25:06 and we’ll see that the majority of their 25:08 anchor text is branded or generic and 25:10 this is really good nothing too alarming 25:12 they do have a missouri divorce lawyer 25:14 but ultimately as long as it’s not the 25:16 majority of their anchor text profile 25:17 they’ll probably be pretty good for the 25:19 most part overall this link profile 25:21 looks pretty good it’s a good foundation 25:22 now at this point they need to go out 25:24 there and start acquiring really high 25:26 quality editorial links and then based 25:28 on the backlink audit sem rush has 25:31 declared that the really the majority of 25:33 their link profile is actually really 25:34 good so they’re doing a nice job as far 25:37 as not being super aggressive with link 25:38 building they haven’t done anything in 25:40 the past that’s going to hurt them now 25:41 so at this point just a matter of 25:43 getting continually acquiring high 25:45 quality editorial links that are super 25:47 relevant to what they do so whether 25:49 that’s relevant on the geo targeted 25:50 level or whether that’s relevant on the 25:52 niche level either of those are going to 25:53 be really important and high quality for 25:56 this particular business so that is how 25:58 you perform a proper seo audit step by 26:00 step and the goal of this process is to 26:02 find every possible seo opportunity that 26:05 exists now here’s the deal not all 26:08 actions are created equal in seo and 26:10 that’s why you need to know how to 26:12 prioritize all of your opportunities and 26:14 then develop a strategy and that’s 26:16 exactly what the next video in this free 26:18 seo training series is going to tackle 26:20 i’m going to show you how to develop a 26:22 winning seo strategy based on your 26:24 findings so to get first access to the 26:26 next video in this series subscribe 26:28 below and hit the bell button right now 26:30 and if you got value from this video 26:32 please like it and drop your comments 26:34 below thank you so much for watching and 26:36 i’ll see you in the next video 26:37 [Music]