SEO Audits - Learn How To Find & Fix The Most Common SEO Issues On A Website

1. SEO Audit - Class Overview: Hello and welcome to the ultimate SEO audit course, where I'll be showing you how you can implement a manual SEO audit to find and fix the most common SEO problems on any website. My name is Joshua George. I own and run the award winning SEO agency in the UK called click Slice. And what I'll be sharing with you in this course is the exact SEO audit checklist. We use ourselves at the agency to ensure all our clients have a solid foundation from day one. Audit in a website is really, really important as if the website does have a weak foundation, then it's going to be ten times harder for you to get that website onto the first page of Google. Inside the course, you learn an SEO audit is, and how Google works. You discover the four parts that make up every SEO audit. 0 show you what tools you can use to carry out an SEO audit. You learn about the most common technical SEO problems or website can face, which includes checking if one version of the website exist. Would it's in the XML sitemap, checking the website's page speed. And we'll also be looking at the most common on-page SEO problems a website can face to, which includes reviewing the URLs and find him 44 pages, checking the size page titles, Meta descriptions, heading tags. In addition to this, I'll also be showing you how you can find duplicate content on a website. How to find the thin content, how to find broken links on our website. How to analyze a site internal link structure, how to analyze a website backlink profile, and even how to analyze a website's organic search traffic. So much value inside of this course. This is a course I wish I had when I first wanted to learn how to audit a website, instead of me just going over the theory behind all the points on our audit checklist and then leaving it up to you to figure out, I'll be showing you how you can fix these common issues in real time in an over the shoulder format, step-by-step, ensuring that everything you learn is going to be super actionable. I'll also be showing you some of the results that we've managed to generate all by fallen is powerful SEO audit checklist to the proof's in the pudding, right? So what you aim for, I'll see you inside. 2. What To Expect + Proof This Works: Hello, everyone. Before we dive into the first proper video of the course, I wanted to give you a heads up in advance to give you an idea on exactly what you can expect to get out of this course. In short, I'll be running you through our 15 step SEO checklist that we use ourselves at the agency to audit a client site before we actually implement any SEO work such as building any back links. So this is our 15 step SEO audit checklist. I'll be going over each element in its own dedicated video. I'll be giving you the theory behind all 15 points on this checklist, and then I'll be showing you how you can audit a site for these specific problems, whilst also showing you how to fix these in real time to ensure everything you learn is super actionable. Don't worry about trying to screenshot this as I will be uploading this into the project and resources section for you. Now, a lot of people say to me, I've seen SEO audits that consist of 50 checklists. Why does yours only contain 15 points? Well, the reason being is, yes, you can audit a website for 15 different points. I mean, you could even audit a website for one 100 different points if you really wanted to. However, from experience and carrying out over 500 audits, I found that it's way more effective to focus on the most impactful things when auditing a website, rather than looking into all these additional things that actually make little to no difference. I tend to find it to be more of an ego thing. People love to say that they audit a website for 50 points, 100 points. When in reality, the bulk of those points are actually auditing result in zero SEO gains. The 15 points that I will teach you have all been tried, tested and proven and all play a big, big role in increasing the visibility of any website out there. In fact, here's some results we achieved from a new client we've just taken on, and these are results we've achieved just by fixing the problems we found by carrying out our 15 step SEO checklist audit. No back links were built to this website whatsoever. These are results purely achieved from carrying out our SEO audit checklist. As you can see, we had massive jumps up in Google for this client. They were in position 100 before. Then they went up 96 positions, and now they're now in position four on Google, which is currently in the middle of page one. You can see again, lots of other big jumps up in Google. I did have to block out the keyword and the Google URL, just for privacy reasons as we do actually operate under an NDA for this specific client. But this is just to show you that what you are learning in this course does actually work in the real world. So this video here is to give you a bit of reassurance of what can be achieved once you've covered all of the contents of the SEO audit process, because as the course goes on, it gets more detailed and more advanced. This course is literally a step by step process on how to audit any website to find and fix the most common SEO problems. So, now that's out of the way, let's get started. 3. What We're Going To Cover In This Section: Seo audit, some basics. In this section we're going to cover one SEO audit is, and I'll also be explaining exactly how Google works at its core level, which is really important to understand as once you understand that, it's going to make the whole course contents way more easier to digest. After that, I'll be giving you an overview of the four parts to every SEO audit. Yes, that is correct. There's four different parts to a really comprehensive SEO audit. A lot of people actually just have one part to the auditing process, which is exactly why the audit never deliver any results. Once we have covered that, I'll be going over the different tools you can use to carry out an SEO audit. And I'll also be giving you an overview of exactly how you can crawl your website. That doesn't make any sense right now, then no worries. There's all going to be covered in great detail in this section of the course. So without further ado, let's get started. 4. What Is An SEO Audit + How Google Works: What is an SEO audit? And SEO audit is a process of evaluating a website to see how search engine friendly the site is. The main goal of an SEO audit is to help you optimize your website so that it can achieve higher Google rankings. Seo audits can help you identify and discover things that could be holding your website back from ranking on the first page of Google. As a result, SEO audit are a key cog in any SEO campaign. You see if you don't carry out an SEO audit from the star, then all their SEO work you're going to be performing on your website won't be as effective as it could be, is kind of like when you build a house on a weak foundation, eventually it's all going to come tumbling down. However, if you build your house on a strong foundation is going to be a great strong house and is rarely going to cause you any problems. The same applies to websites. To an SEO audit allows you to ensure your website has a strong foundation. To understand how SEO audit work, we need to take one step back and understand how Google works at a core level. So for those who don't know, Google has a crawler that you could call a spider. And what it does is it goes out there across the whole Wide Web and it finds webpages, which of course, there are trillions and trillions of different webpages out there. Now, once it finds those webpages is separate them into three different categories, which are known pages, crawled pages, and index pages. Known pages are pages that Google knows about kind of self-explanatory, crude pages are pages that Google Spider has actually gone onto and crawl that page. So it's got all the information about that page and all the code details. Index pages is a pages that Google has crawled and decided to add them to the index, aka allowing users to find them on Google search results. What happened on top of this is that Google's core algorithm determines a Rankin for the webpage to determine where that page is going to rank ones that page has been indexed. But that's essentially how Google works at a really basic level. They find pages, they crawl pages, and then they add the good ones to the index. So any preliminary have on your website such as poor, optimize on-page SEO, slow website load in time. This will all be found by Google Spider When they crawl your website. And it's going to have a big impact on where your website ranks. This is why it's super, super important to make sure you carry on SEO audit literally from day one, whether that's on your side or a client site, you need to carry out an audit from day one. So now we're going over the basics of what an SEO audit is and how Google works. In the next video, we'll be exploring the four parts that every comprehensive SEO audit. I'll see you there. 5. The 4 Parts To Every SEO Audit: The four parts to every SEO audit. A lot of people when doing SEO audit will have a really, really big checklists which contains item after item. One part is something you need to check on your website. Another part is on an off your website. A number part is to do with the technical aspect of your website is literally back and forth, back and forth like a headless chicken. And it consumed so much of the time and they literally end up hating SEO audits. Now, I'm here to tell you, it doesn't have to be this way. You see if you categorize your SEO audit checklist into specific elements, everything becomes so much more easier. Allow me to explain and walk you through exactly how we categorize SEO audit ourselves at the agency. So we split SEO audits into four different categories. Category number one is what we refer to as technical problems. So these would include things such as XML sitemaps, low times, or how far your website loads. It can also include things such as HTTP versus HTTPS. So the whole idea of technical problems as it relates to technical problems with your website, quite self-explanatory. Category two is what we refer to as on-page SEO problems. So this literally refers to any problem you have on your actual website. So that could be things such as missing page titles, missing Meta tags, or meta description, whichever way you wish to cool it. It can even be duplicate content and thin content and so on. Essentially, anything to do with your content or something on your website is going to be classified as an on-page SEO problem. The third category is what we refer to as opposite. So off-page SEO. So this would include things such as spammy backlinks, your backlink profile in general, etcetera, etcetera, literally anything to do off your website that could be holding it back from Rankin onto the first page of Google. So these are our three core categories. We do have one more category as of course, there are four in total. And our fourth category is what we refer to as general problems. So these are problems which isn't really related to either technical on-page, off-page problems. These are just general things which you wanted to check on any website you are working on. So that can be things such as analyzing your organic traffic. It can be reviewing low-hanging fruit, which if we don't know whether it is right now, then don't worry as I'm going to go into great detail on low hanging fruit in the general section of the course. So when you carry out an SEO audit, you want to make sure that you audit a website for all four categories in this specific order to make things super, super easy and actionable for you. What I've done is I've structured the cools into four different categories, being technical, on-page, off-page and general problems. And essentially, each section of the course is going to go through each problem a site can face in every single one of these categories. And ensuring that what you're going to learn is going to be really easy to digest and actually easy to implement as well. As of course, I'll be showing you exactly how you can fix or the most common problems for all four of these categories. At the end of the course, I'll be sharing with you a checklist which you can follow, which is basically going to be a summary of all of these points across all four different categories, which you can then use Azure master checklist for every time you went to carry out an SEO audit. However, I just wanted to let you know from the start that this is how you do an SEO audit the right way. There's four different parts and you need to make sure you cover every single part of the audit. So now we've got that out of the way. I'll see you in the next video. 6. What Tools Can You Use For An SEO Audit?: What tools can you use for an SEO audit? This is a question I get asked literally every week, and I don't blame the reason why people ask me is because literally, if you search online for tools to use for an SEO audit, the information is so conflicting. It can be so overwhelming, and literally all it does is end up confusing you. So in this video, I'm going to demystify the whole SEO audit tool problem, and I'll let you know exactly what tool I use myself at the agency, along with what tool I recommend you should use. So three of the biggest tools you've probably seen online when you've carried out any search for an SEO audit tool is probably Deep Crawl. You've probably seen Sitebulb, and the other one you've probably seen most common is going to be screaming frog. So Deep Crawl and Sitebulb are actually both paid tools. They do work very, very well, both of them. However, I don't actually find them to be any more effective or any more useful than screaming frog. And Screaming Frog is actually free to use. Screaming Frog is a tool we use ourselves at click slice at the agency. I highly highly recommend Screaming Frog over any other SEO audit tool out there. Number one, it's because it's free, and it literally does everything these other two tools do as well. As long as your website has less than 500 pages, which I assume a lot of people who are watching this video will actually have websites with less than 500 pages. You can use Screaming Frog for absolutely free. If you do have a website, which is more than 500 pages, then you will unfortunately have to pay for the paid version, which I believe is 150 pound for our annual license. Which is still really, really good value. So once you go over to Screaming Frog, which I'll include a link to in the project and resource section of the course. What you want to do is go over to the SEO Spider tab right here. And if you scroll down, we can have a look at all the features of Screaming Frog. So you can see when you use this tool, you can easily find broken links. So either any broken links you have on your website. You can analyze page titles and meta descriptions. You can even generate XML site maps. You can crawl any website. It's not just WordPress website, so you can crawl driver script websites as well, Wicks websites, Webly Cm stores. It doesn't really matter. You can crawl literally any website. You can find any redirect your website has, so that could be a free one redirect. You can discover duplicate content, If you have the paid version of Screaming Frog, you can also integrate it with Google Analytics, Google Search Console and page speed insights. Now, these free things aren't really necessary whatsoever. It's kind of a little feature which is nice to have, but you don't need it at all to carry out an SEO audit. So again, it's not even an essential. And one thing which I really like about Screaming Frog, which it added not too long ago, is that they now allow to see the website from a visual site architect perspective. If that doesn't make any sense right now, then don't worry, as I'm going to give you an example of what I mean by a visual site architect in the next video. So Screaming Frog is a tool that I recommend. So, like I said, I will go ahead and add a link in the resources to this URL right here, and simply once you land on this URL. What you want to do is go ahead and download it. And yes, it works on all computers. It works on windows, Mac and Linux machines. So you shouldn't have any issues using it or whatsoever. So go ahead and download Screaming Frog, and I'll see you in the next video. We I'm going to give you a really brief overview of exactly all the information it gives you and exactly how it works. See you in the next one. 7. Crawling Your Website - An Overview: Hi and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how you can carry out your first cruel. And I'll be giving you a sneak preview and shown you is actually all the information that Screaming Frog returns when you actually crawl a website. So once you've got Screaming Frog downloaded and you open it up for the first time. It's going to look pretty much similar to this. Let me go ahead and make mine a full screen so you can see everything very clearly. So how do you crawl a website? Well, is very, very straightforward. All you need to do is entering your website URL into the top bar right here and then go ahead and click Start. So for the purpose of this training video, what I'll be doing is using this website right here, TM huge and sun dot UK. This isn't my website. I own a website. I don't even know the person who owns it. I simply found this website by carrying out a search for a local search phrase local to where I live and I thought would be a good fit for the purpose of this course as all of my courses, instead of me just giving you the ferry, I'll actually show you exactly how you can carry on SEO audit step-by-step. So let's take this website and I'll go back into Screaming Frog. I'm going to paste it in the URL at the top. And I, once I go ahead and click Start, what's going to happen is screaming Frog is going to visit this website and start to accrue all of the pages and discover every single page on a website, it's going to fall it one by one. You can see in total, it's found 249 pages on a website, and it's already cooled at 247 of those. So as you can see, the tool works extremely, extremely fast. Of course, if you have a big a website, it's going to take a little bit longer to crawl. So once the website crew has finished, and you can see we have tons and tons of information in front of us. We have the address which is going to be the website URL. We can see the content, the status code, the index ability. So if any pages on Yan index, you know exactly how to find them very, very quickly. You can keep on scrolling and getting tons and tons of information. We can see the page titles for all of those pages. We can see the page title length, you can see the meta-description. We can see what pages don't have Mr. descriptions. We can keep on scrolling and see the meta-description length as well. So 89 characters, 000 or a 191, we don't just stop there. We get more and more information. We can see the H1 tags, we can see another H1 tags. So if pages have multiple H1 tags, which by the way is a problem, we can find that out very, very easily. We can find out H2 tags as well. We can find out the h two character level as well, literally so much information. Now another thing we can also do is if I go back to the first tab right here, you can actually click any URL and what it does, it brings out a more detailed analysis of that page in particular. So essentially what it does, it gives you all that information in just a different view because some people like to view it in columns rather than scrolling row by row. But essentially it gives you an immense amount of information. We can even go over to the right-hand tab right here and then go to site structure. And what it does, it lets you know the structure of your website, literally folder by folder. We can even see our response time as well. So for those who don't know what our response time is, essentially the time in seconds to download that URL. Well, I'm also going to do attached to this video is I'm going to add a link to this resource right here, which is basically the glossary of Screaming Frog. And it basically breaks down exactly what all of these things mean, just in case you didn't already know. So let's go back into Screaming Frog. And as you can see, we have these tabs. At the top. We've got internal, which is a tab we've just been on the whole time. But if you'd just want you to see all the page titles on a website. Well, very easy to do. Just plug in that website and then go to page titles and guess what? You can now see all of the page titles across your website very, very easily. You can also go up to the top and then go to visualizations right here and go for maybe crew tree graph. And what it does is it generates, he's really cool visual representations of exactly how your website is laid out. So you can see for yourself exactly how your website is structured, what pages are linked into what pages. Now this isn't the only view you can see. If I go back into visualizations, I go for forced directed cross diagram. You can see we now get another visual representation of how our website is looking to have a homepage right here, link into AI Blog. Then on our blog we have all the different articles and links to another one and another one. So these are really, really cool features. And to help you understand exactly how your website looks from a bird's eye view, which of course is going to make it a lot more easier for us when we're trying to find problems on our website. Now another great thing about Screaming Frog is that you can actually export all of this data just by clicking this Export button. So if you're not a fan of looking at all this information within the tool itself. So in Screaming Frog, you can actually just export all of that data like so, and then review it in Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel, whatever it is your preference. But essentially I don't wanna get too carried away in this video as I'm going to go through all of this in great detail in his own category later on in the course. But essentially this is just a quick video to give you an overview and show you exactly what all of the data it looks like. Yes, it's nice to see a big list like this on our website. But you might be wondering, well, what are the page title look like? How do I find that? Well, now, you know, so now we've got the basics out of the way. I'll see you in the next section of the course, we will go into deep dive into the first category of our SEO audit. I'll see you there. 8. What We're Going To Cover In This Section: Technical SEO problems. In this section, I'm going to show you how you can check for multiple versions of a website. I'll be showing you how you can carry out an XML sitemap check. I'll also be showing you how you can test the speed of a website. So that is how fast it takes for that website to actually open. And I'll also be showing you how you can check if a website is mobile friendly. Now that is very, very important. The last point, because those who don't know, Google actually uses a mobile first index, meaning that when it indexes your site, allocates it a ranking in Google is first and foremost, all based on the mobile version of your website. So that's a really interesting one for sure. So without further ado, let's dive straight into the section. 9. Check That Only One Version Of The Site Is Browseable: In the last video, I gave you an overview of how Screaming Frog works, which should really help give you an idea of all its functions and exactly all the data it returns. However, before you go out there and actually entering a website in Screaming Frog and start to crawl it, what you need to do first for your website or whoever client site you are working on is make sure that only one version of the site exists. So what do I mean by that? Whenever you carry out a search for a website's URL, you can land on that website by searching for four different things. You could search for HTTP, four slash domain.com or the client site, whatever site it may be. Or you could also search for HTTP four WWW do. You could do exactly the same thing, but going for the secure version of the website. So HTTPS fourh domain.com. And once again, you can have the WWW version as well with the HTTPS protocol. So there's four different ways people can search for a website URL to find your website. And when it comes to auditing a website, essentially what you want to make sure is that only one of these should be accessible in a browser and the other should free a one redirect to the main version. So if that doesn't make that much sense, and no worries, let me go over to click slice, and I'll give you an example of what I mean. So, as you can see, click slice is HTTPS, four dot. So I've gone for this version on my website. So if I then go ahead and take off the WW dot and then simply carry out a search for this version, you can see it redirects to my main version once again if I take off the HTTPS, take off to secure and go to HTTP four WW. Carry out a search. Once again, it's going to redirect to my main version. And if I take off the WW dot once again and then go for HTTPS or HTTP, sorry, which is the last version, this is also going to redirect to my main version. So essentially in a nutshell, what you want to do is make sure that all of your websites have one main version and that all of the other versions redirect to that main version. And for those who are wondering what version should they use? Should they go for HTTP, HTTPS, and so on and so on. Well, to make things simple for you, I'll answer your question right here right now. I would recommend that you use HTTPS, either WW or non WW version, as there is a slight ranking boost for sites that use SSL certificates. I do actually have this document right here to support and back this up. I will include a link to this in the project and resource section of the course. But essentially what you want to do is make sure that your site uses the HTTPS version. Now, if you're unsure on how to get that set up for your website, it can be a little bit confusing. But the best advice I can give you is to simply get in tart with your web hosting company, go on the live chat or cinnamon e mail, and let you tell them that you want this version of your site to be the main one and that they need to redirect all the other versions to that main version. And they should be able to set that up for you without any issues whatsoever. In addition to receiving a slight ranking boost in Google when you use the HTTPS version, It also helps increase the conversion rate of your website as when you have a HTTPS website, what you actually have is a little padlock symbol which shows in the browser. And what it does is it helps build trust with your website visitors. Look at my website, for example, click site. We have a nice little padlock. Compare that to another website, which doesn't have the padlock, like this one right here. You can see it has no padlock, and as a result, it actually says not secure. So we want to avoid this showing on our website. As when you do actually click it, you get a bit more information as well, letting you know that your connection to this site is not secure. So once you've gone ahead and you check out all the different URLs, redirect to the main version, you are all good to go on step one, and you can move on to the next step. I'll see you in the next video. 10. XML Sitemap Check: The next thing that you want to check is that XML sitemap. For those who don't know what a XML sitemap is. It's essentially a URL on your website that lists out all of the pages your website has. What we want to do is check that none of our important pages are accidentally being excluded from being indexed by Google. As what you'll find is when you take on a new client, nine times out of 10, there's already been a web developer or playing around on the website. And this would develop a has no experience on no idea about SEO, how it works, and what they end up doing is playing around with the Yoast SEO settings or the all in one SEO sessions, depending on what SEO plugin the website uses and what they end up doing is accidentally setting some pages to no index, meaning that Google isn't going to index that page. Now if this happens, so an important page on the client site, such as maybe one of the service pages, then you can imagine how big of an issue it can be. As of course, if that page is not index is not going to be found on Google, meaning that it's going to have no rankings and you're really going to struggle to generate results for the client. So checking this out very early on is going to save you a lot of time, analog stress further down the line. So how do we check this out? Well, it's very straightforward. All you need to do is go over to the Google Search Console for the website you are working on. So this is the website I'll be using for the purpose of this particular training video. It's one of our client site. It's called Pet waiter.com. You can see I'm in Search Console for pet waiter.com right here. And once you logged in into the Search Console, or we need to do is simply click sitemaps. This is then going to show you the sitemap submitted for this actual website. Then what you want to do is simply click this icon right here, which is going to expand the results and give us a more detailed analysis. There's four tabs in total. At the top you have era, we have valid with warnings valid and excluded. You don't need to worry about the first free as those are kind of common SEO issues, which I'll show you how to sort out later on in the course. But essentially the main tab which you want to be you're looking at is this one right here called excluded. So if we go ahead and click excluded, this one right here, you can see that I have two different details coming up under excluded. And you can see it says submitted URL marked as a no index. This is exactly the ones you want to be looking at right here. I'll go into that. We can now see we have three different URL on the client site, which is submitted as no index. So if I take this URL for example and open it, you can see it's PET weights are.com forward slash. My account is basically a page on the website where people can log into the account. But if I actually carry out with search for this in Google, so do site colon followed by the URL. You can see this page has not actually exist in the eyes of Google. So what does this mean? Well, it means that someone has deliberately gone onto this page, set this page as no index. Now in this particular example of having a page about my account, this page does not need to be indexed by Google as this is a patient just for the user. So for here there's no issues whatsoever. But essentially what you want to do is just login and make sure that you don't see any important pages set to no index because of course, that is going to cause you some SEO issues. So if I saw maybe the home page, the contact page, one of the service pages says no index. Then it definitely I want to be aware of and I want to go in and fix. And of course, once you do actually fix those issues, if your site has any, just go ahead and click Validate fixed at the top. Google will then record that page and make sure it is actually indexable. Now one other thing which I just want to note is that if you go over to your excluded and you don't actually see any option for submitted URL, mop, no index, then what that means is your website or your client's website has no issues and no problems whatsoever. So there's nothing to worry about. You're probably wondering, well, what do I do if I take on a client and they don't have a Google Search Console, while it's a great question. And essentially if your client does not have a Google Search Console or you don't have one, of course, dependent on what site you are audits in, then what you need to do is actually do this manually. Now, that would involve you go onto your website or client's website once again, and you take any other most important URLs, maybe such as this one, heavy bowls, copy the URL. You go back over to Google site colon, entering that URL and make sure you can see is indexed by Google if you are carrying out research or any important URLs and it's not coming back as index. What it means is that page is set to no index and you definitely want to investigate why. That's it for this video. And I'll see you in the next one. 11. Check The Websites Page Speed: The next thing which you want to check is how long it takes for the website to load. As of course, you don't really want to be having a website that takes ages to load as it just results in a poor user experience and it can have a negative impact on a website's rankings. So there's a few different tools you can use to check how fast our website loads. Might see favorite RGT metrics and PageSpeed Insights by Google. A lot of the time people ask me, well, what tool is better? Should I UGT metrics or should I use PageSpeed Insights? It doesn't really matter. It all comes down to preference. Both of them pretty much give you the same amount of information. However, I personally prefer to UGT metrics because it allows you to search a website based on a particular location. And as we worked with a lot of local client here in London in the UK, I want to make sure I check the website load time from if I was actually based in London and somewhere else in the world such as America, for example. So GC metrics is really, really good for that when it comes to chicken, how fast a website takes to load. There's one number which you need to have in the back of your mind, and that is free seconds. So every single page on a website you are working on should load within three seconds is important. That is stress that is every single page and is not just your homepage. So just because your homepage loads in three seconds, it doesn't mean that having a service page which takes 12 seconds to load is going to be okay. You want to make sure every single page on the site loads within three seconds. That's super, super important. So let's head over to my browser and I will show you my personal site, which I'm currently working on at the moment. It's not finished by the way, essentially, we can use his website and plug it both into gt metrics. I'm plugging into page insights and see exactly what data they returned to us. So I'd say the URL George, George SEO, I can plug it in like so. I can click here to change the location Hong Kong or go for London, which is where I'm based. One thing to bear in mind is that if you do want to change the location on GT metrics, you do actually need to sign up for an account first, which is free to do by the way, and we want to do is click Analyze once you've entered in your website URL. And then what GZ metrics is going to do. It's going to go over your website, analyze it and see how long it takes to load. If I was actually based in London, which is the location I set the server up before I click Analyze. The scan has now finished and as you can see, it takes my website 1.5 seconds to load, which is absolutely great as half of the recommended time of three seconds. Nothing to worry about it whatsoever for this website. However, when you get your results from your analysis, we actually want to do is click retest a few times. I will recommend that you actually analyze your website free different times and then take the average of those free times as what can happen is you're going to get different results each time you carry out a scan. So instead of taking one number is way more reliable to the average of three different results. If you are low time is anything over three seconds, then what you want to do is scroll down this part right here where it says top issues and gt metrics will basically tell you exactly what it is, which is slowing your website down. So you can expand this menu and see all of the recommendations over URLs of the plugins and themes which could be sewn the website down. So basically what you want students actually go through this and optimize your site in the best way possible. Now I do want to stress that this is a course on SEO audit in and of course on how to speed up your website, which to be fair, speeding up your website is actually more of a developer role than a CRO. However, I do actually have a section on how to speed up your website in my ultimate SEO training course. But for those who don't have that, there's essentially four key things which you need to do to speed up the time of any website, which is number one, you need to reduce your image sizes. Number two, you need to reduce your HTTP request. Number three, you want to minify JavaScript and CSS files. And number four, you want to use a caching plugin. Those are the four most impactful things you can do to speed up any website out there. However, instead of me just giving you those four points and then leaving it up to you to figure out, I do want to make sure that everyone gets the most value out of this course, even those who don't have my ultimate SEO training course. So what I'll also do is I will include a link to an external resource, which will basically talk you through everything step-by-step on how you can speed up a WordPress website and if you would prefer not to do it yourself, then another option you also have is to go onto a freelancing website such as upwork.com. And you can simply post a job saying you would like your website to be speed, optimize. And then anyone who was qualified who apply to your job. You can then review the profile, check out the reviews, hire someone who can actually help you implement the work. Because like I said, it can be a little bit confusing, especially if you don't have a technical background. So let's see how this would work now if you are using Google page insights. So as you can see, I've already entered in my URL of George, George SEO.com. I've analyzed and I've got my result back as 79. This is actually out of a 100. So 79 is actually a really good result. And if you scroll down and look at the lab data right here, you can see that Time to Interactive is 2.5 seconds and offers content paint is 1.2 seconds. So both of these are under free seconds once again. So nothing to worry about whatsoever. Now I do want to stress as well. People get tied up on this metric right here. This is 79, 22 and they think, Oh no, I must get 100. What I wanted to just say to you is that this is just a metric and it's just a vanity number. As long as your website loads of in three seconds, you don't really have to worry about trying to hit a 100 on this skill. I've literally only come across a handful websites which actually have a 100 is very, very hard to achieve. So don't stress about it whatsoever. If you don't see a high number such as 99 and 100, 100, as long as your site loads of in three seconds, then that is the main thing to focus on. Now you also want to check the website on mobile as well as you have three different tabs, one for desktop and for mobile. Now, nine times out of ten that most websites are going to be higher on desktop, then they are on mobile. As of course, all websites just load faster on desktop computers and it also look better and a more user-friendly to. So if I checked my site on mobile, you can see it drops down to 29 and it's a time to interactive 11.4 seconds. And my first content paint is 5.9 seconds. That is definitely quite a bit what I need to do on my website from a mobile aspect. Now, like I said, this website isn't actually finished. I was going to be a lot more optimization going on. So no doubt once actually optimizes website, this number is going to go up definitely be below the free second MOC, which is the most important figure. So that's it for this video, and I'll see you in the next one. 12. Check If The Site Is Mobile Friendly: Another thing which you're going to want to check is if the website is mobile friendly. So a website being mobile friendly is so, so important. I can't stress how important it is just by using verbal words. But essentially, if your website is not mobile friendly, then you're going to have so many problems when it comes to ranking on Google. The main reason why it, because Google actually has a mobile first index, meaning that when they index your website, what they're going to do is visit your website from a mobile device first, see how your website looks, and then determine a ranking for your website based on all of those outcomes. They then do exactly the same from a desktop computer, but mobile comes first. Thankfully, it's very easy to check if a website is mobile friendly, we need to do is take the website URL. So I'll be using kick slice for this example. Then you want to go over to Google's free mobile-friendly website checker tool. I will include a link to it in the resources for ease. But essentially you can't just go onto Google and type in mobile friendly test it like so. And you can even get URL pop-up into the actual search results. I always like to open it anyway, just say a good idea of exactly what's actually going on. And then once you're on this page, simply entering the URL and then click Test URL. Google isn't going to analyze your website from a mobile perspective. Once the scan has finished, you should land on a page like this. And as you can see it says click Slice is mobile friendly, so nothing to worry about whatsoever. If you'd rather not wait for this total load, the results as it can take a few minutes sometimes, another way you can check if a website is mobile-friendly is to simply make sure you are using Google Chrome. Go onto that website and then right-click anywhere in some clean space like so. And then click Inspect. And then what you want to do when you get this box appear, but the bottom is simply click this icon right here, toggle device toolbar that are then going to change a website to a mobile view. I can actually get a little bit granular until Google, what mobile you'd like to view this website on. So at the moment I'm using an iPhone 6, 7, 8 Plus, I can change it to an iPhone 5 FC and then it will adjust the host site as if you are viewing the website on an iPhone five slash sc. So this is a really good way you can use as well just to double-check, site is mobile friendly and as you can see, the site looks really, really good. And on the words are getting cuts off. All the images to decide is definitely going to be mobile friendly. So what happens if you find that a website is not mobile friendly? What that means is a website is not responsive, aka the website does not respond to multiple devices. So what you need to do here is go into the website's code and actually get this fixed. Now I can't really make a video covering exactly what you need to do as it's going to change drastically depending on what website platform you are using, what type of site you have it. A blog, e-commerce site is a service page base website and so on and so on. However, my advice is if you're not coming from a technical background and you don't really know that much when it comes to web design, you're far better off just outsource in the process and actually paying someone to make your website responsive. The great thing about when you use a WordPress website, or literally any femur is out there, is that nine times out of ten, the themes East Asia combined FEM forest and any other FEM website are all mobile-friendly and are responsive. So you really shouldn't have anything to worry about. However, it's always good just to carry out check, just to make sure the site is a 100 percent mobile friendly. And like I said, if you do come across a site which isn't mobile-friendly and you need to outsource it. And this is all for a new client and you are working with then you kind of take that into consideration and make sure you charge the client enough money to account for that additional work. That is it for this one. And I'll see you in the next video. 13. What We're Going To Cover In This Section: On-page SEO problems. In this section, we're going to be looking at 404 pages and optimize URLs. I'll also be showing you how you can audit a website for its page titles, Meta descriptions, heading tags, which includes both the H1 and H2 tag. I'll also be showing you how you can audit a website to find out if that site has any duplicate content. I'll be doing the same, but showing you how to find that it has fin content as well. I'll also be showing you how you can find any broken links on our website too. And I'll be showing you how you can analyze a website's internal link structure to see if anything can be reconfigured to provide pages with an additional SEO boost. This is a really cool part of the SEO audit process. I can't wait to start. So without further ado, let's dive straight into this section. 14. URLs - 404 Pages + Optimised URLs: When it comes to auditing a website from an on-page SEO perspective, the first thing which you want to do is audit the websites URLs. Now there's two parts to audits in a website URL, you have number 1, which is finding dead pages. So this can include things such as finding four or four pages. I'm finding any free I want to read our x at that website has the second part of auditing website URLs is what we call optimization. Now this only applies to new websites and insights that have no ranking in Google. So when it comes to optimization, you want to audit the website URLs to ensure they have four main things. Those four things are including your biggest keyword in the URL. Number two, you want to make sure that you don't keyword stuffing URL. I see so many people out there that literally just try and stuff as many keywords as possible in the URL. Please don't do it. It looks unnatural and you're only going to do more harm to your website. Number three, you want to avoid repeating words as well. And number 4, the shorter the better. So don't go out there and try and have the longest website URL possible, just really trying to stop keywords in there. The shorter and more concise your URL, the better is going to be for Google to understand exactly what your page is about. Just to clarify why the optimization only applies to new websites and sites we have no Rankin is because if you optimize an existing clients website that is ranking on page on Google, and you notice that they're not including the keyword in the URL. You don't really want to go ahead and saw a change in that exist in URL that already has backlinks pointing to it as what that means is you potentially have the chance of losing all that SEO juice and power that the existing URL has. Yes, you can feel one redirect the old URL to the new one. But it's really not worth playing around with, especially if that page is already ranking really high in Google, your way by error of optimizing a website from a different aspects, such as on-page SEO for example. So now we've covered the theory behind URLs. Let me head over to Screaming Frog and I'll give you a real time walk-through to show you exactly how it's done. The website I'm going to be using is this one right here is called Green at home Docker that UK. Once again, just to clarify, I do not own this website. I have no affiliation with it whatsoever. I simply went on to Google and are carried out a search for landscaping company London. I went over to page 4 on Guigo, as you can see, and this is the website right here. The reason why I've used a website on page four is because, of course, all the websites on page 4 of Google could do with a hand when it comes to SEO audits in and the general SEO of the website. So what I'm going to do is copy the website URL. I'm going to go over to Screaming Frog. Then I'm going to enter in the URL and click start to begin the process. The crew is now finished. And as we are all as in the URL of this website, what we want to do is make sure we go over to the URL tab at the top right here. Simply give it a click and it's now going to show you all of the URLs on that website. So you can see we get quite a bit of information. We have the address, the content type, the Status Code, Status Index ability, inexorability States is hash, and so on and so on. It can be a little bit confusing to review right here in Screaming Frog. So what actually highly recommend you do is you actually go ahead and click Export like so by clicking this button up here, then all we need to do is go for the type that you'd like to export to Save As so, I'll leave mine as CSV comma separated values. However, if you prefer to work on Excel or Google Sheets and feel free to go for that. I'll leave mine as CSV and then click Save. And then what you want to do is open up that spreadsheet, which is exactly why I have right here. Let me just zoom in a little bit as it can be quite hard to see, just going to expand the row right here. So we actually see a URL just going to make all of these bowed as well. And I'm going to go over to view, and I'm going to freeze the top row so we can scroll and still see exactly what all of these columns are. So one thing which I've noticed already is our under column F on the index ability, we had the word they're saying canonicalized. You can see it says right here and there. What this tells me is that there are multiple versions of this website in Google. The reason I know that is because when you use the canonical tag on a page, you are basically telling Google to ignore this page as there is a different page on your website, which is the primary source of information. So if we look at this URL, I will zoom in a little bit more just once again to make sure everyone can see that. You can see this row right here. Row number 24 is HTTP. And if you look below that, we've got HTTPS. So it's very clear that this website has multiple versions. Now if you remember what I said in the previous video in this course, you only want to have one version of your website live and every other version should redirect to that page. So if I go back to that website, was actually really interesting to see is that on the homepage they have the padlock symbol. The site is secure, HTTP S. And if I take off the S, Let's see if it redirects. So the homepage does indeed redirect. So let's go to one of the service pages. Https still. So I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take off the S on one of the service pages and have a look if it directs. And as you can see, this page is not secure. So what's really interesting to see is that they only sell the redirect on the homepage and it hasn't been done sitewide. This is exactly why I said when you check if a website has one version, you want to check it on your inner pages as well as sometimes what you'll see like this website, the homepage will be direct with their inner pages won't redirect. So this is a really good example just to show you how important that is. Because essentially all the information that we have in this spreadsheet right here, a lot of it is going to be duplicates of the same page in just another version. So what I'm going to do is simply go ahead and add a filter to this index ability column just so I can see all of them that are localized. So click here. And I wanted to go for canonicalized right here. And I can see all the pages on the website which is listed as a canonical. So what I'm gonna do is just simply zoom out a little bit just so I can select them all. And I'm now going to delete them as we don't actually need them on our spreadsheet. Now, do bear in mind the website you are working on. It might not have this issue is if it doesn't simply skip past this part right here. So let me go ahead and select them all now and actually remove all the HTTP ones. And as you can see, it's now back to o HTTPS alike. So which is great. So let me just scroll back to the top, like so. So once you've got rid of those URLs, the next thing which you want to do is add a filter to the second column, which is going to be content type. As you can see, we've got a lot of URLs, you've got some WordPress logins, you've got some content up loads lots of random URLs, which we don't really need to see. So to filter all of these out, Let's go and add a filter to our second column, like so. And now we only want to see this one right here, text slash HTML. And as you can see that it's now removed. A lot of those really weird wordpress URL that we do have a few, but the bulk of them are definitely gone, which is nice. And I can actually start to see some of the main service pages like so. And then there is a cover which is nice. So once you've added these filters, the next thing which wants to do is simply clean up the remaining part of the spreadsheet and remove all the parts which you don't actually need. So we don't need this one right here. Inexorability, this can be delis it. We don't need the hash that can also be deleted. We don't need the canonical link element one, so that can be deleted as well. And we don't need a URL encoded addressed, so that can also be deleted. I can see our spreadsheet looks a lot more cleaner and it's a little bit easy to digest exactly what is going on. Now if you remember what I said when it comes to audit in a website URLs, there is two parts of the process. There's number one, finding dead pages up here. And you had the second part, which is optimization. So let me show you how to carry out the first part which is finding dead pages. So that would be any four or four or 301 redirects the website actually has. So it's very easy to do. We need to do is go to status code. And then what you want to do is deselect all of them. I simply go for four or four, like so. And now the spreadsheet is going to show you all the four of four pages on that website. So what do you do when you find a four or four page on a website? Well, the first thing which you need to do, analyze that specific URL. So we had this URL right here at the SOP is the status for a four. It looks to be like a WordPress login page. Let me just click it and go over to Google. Let's carry out research that URL just to make sure it is indeed a WordPress login page. As you can see, it says, sorry, page not found and it is indeed a WordPress login page. There's no real direct or nothing like that. So basically, as this page is going to have literally 0 backlinks pointing to it. I know that for a fact or I'm always 99 percent confident, just because it's a WordPress login URL is very, very unlikely that this page has any SEO value for the website. If it did, then what I would want to do is set up a free one redirects and read, I've read this page to the closest page on the website. So if it was a page maybe about landscaping services, I would redirect this page to our landscaping services page. However, in this instance, there's not that much we need to worry about and we can simply leave the page as it is. Yes, that is right. We can literally leave the page as it is. A lot of old fashion SEOs would tell you that you actually had to remove the page from Google's index. That is actually not true. We actually have the support article right here by Google. They do have a tool which allows you to remove URLs from the index. However, if you actually scroll down and read what it says on this page, I'll zoom in once again. You can see it says, when not to use this tool, you shouldn't use it to clean up your staff are like old for four pages, so this is not for that. So please ignore any advice you see on line in blog saying you should remove URLs. That is simply not true. Just follow Google's advice. What I do, I actually linked to this as an external link in the resources so you can refer to it in your own time. So if I go back to my spreadsheet, you can see we've got a lot of WordPress Login URLs, so nothing to worry about it whatsoever. We've got a URL right here, which seems to be a portfolio. So go ahead and search for that in Google once again. And as you can see, this page is not found in this instance as it can actually result in a poor user experience of someone who's trying to visit this portfolio item, what you do want to do is actually go ahead and redirect this page to another item in the portfolio. So that is pretty much it for 404 pages when it comes for free or one that redirects is pretty much the same process you want to untick free or 144, sorry, and then select for a one. And now you can see all the free one redirects on the website. And he said, Do you want to go for his URLs and just make sure that all the URLs or should indeed be 301 redirects. So that covers the first part of auditing URLs when it comes to finding dead pages. Now let me go through exactly how you would cover the optimization aspect for brand new websites. Back over to my spreadsheet. We're going to do is change a status code to show up to a 100, which is basically all the URLs which are absolutely fine on the website. So again, let us imagine this is a brand new website. It's got no backlinks pointing to the page whatsoever. So let me go ahead and show you exactly how I would rewrite these URLs. So let's take this URL here, for example, is the waste removal page. If I copy that and then go over to Google and carry out research for that, we can see they are targeting the keyword waste removal ways for me Will services in London. So the Clearly based in London, I got the content below. So one thing that stands out to me already is a target in London. London should be par the keyword. So what actually missing is not including the full keyword in the URL. So instead of having a waste removal, I would actually change this to waste removal London. As it remember what I said on the PowerPoint slides, you want to include your biggest keyword in the URL, which of course as a page is about waste removal in London. London is going to be part of their biggest keyword. So that's pretty much the process you would follow when audit in a website from an optimization process, there's not that much you can do when it comes to optimizing URLs, other than making sure that the URL is short, which indeed ours is. And that includes the keywords you're targeting. That is it for this one. And I'll see you in the next video. 15. Page Titles: Welcome back. In this video, you're going to learn how to audit a website's page titles. There's five main things which you want to keep in mind when audits in a page title, which are number 1, you want to keep the page title under 60 characters in length. Now that does include spaces as well. Number two, you want to get your keyword toward the front of the title tag as Wordsworth, the front of the title tag carry more SEO weight. Number three, you want to write naturally. Now hopefully that is pretty obvious, but trust me, you'll be surprised at how many people go out there. And unnatural title tags simply because they're trying to keyword stuff that's high school. Number four, you want to include single words and variations to. For example, if you are targeting the keyword SEO consultant New York, then another variation of the word consultant could be consulted in same way, if you are trying to rank for SEO expert, you could go for SEO specialists. These are all different word variations of the same word. Number five, you want to avoid repeating words. So this is the same logic which we apply it to a website URLs as well. So those are the five things you need to follow. However, instead of me just giving you the ferry, you know, I always like to go the extra mile and make sure it is cause is super, super actionable. So let's head back over to Screaming Frog, and I'll show you exactly how this is done with a real-time walk-through step-by-step. So for this video, we're going to be using the same website we use in a previous video for URLs. I do already have the website loaded into Screaming Frog as you would have saw from the last video. But essentially, as we're looking at the website's page titles, all we need to do is change its head from URL to page titles. And now we can see all the Patriots also for this specific website. So it's exactly the same process. You want to go ahead and explore all the data and then review it in a spreadsheet. I mean, you can review it here, but like I said in the last video, it can be a little bit clumsy and disease API what's going on and if any of your patients would need to be rewritten, it's way better to do it in an actual spreadsheet so you can keep track of everything in one place, making it really easy to action when it comes to actually clean up your website. So let's go ahead and export all this data on the page titles. I'll go for CSV as my file type once again and click Save. Once you open up that spreadsheet is going to look pretty similar to this. You've got a few columns, you've got the website URL, which is address. You've got occurrences, you got the actual page title itself. We have the page title length, we have the pixel width as well, and we had the index ability. And just as a side note, I have actually cleaned up this file first add, like I said in the last video, we did have a lot of duplicates come in free with HTTP and HTTPS URLs purely because this website hasn't done the SEO correctly. But essentially, all I've done is I've removed the HTTP versions so we can focus on just one version of the website. So first things first, what you want to do is tidy up the spreadsheet and remove all the columns which you don't need. So we don't need this column right here, column B for currencies as they should all say, number 1, which as you can see, that is actually what the website says. So just be sure to double-check. You only have one occurrence of this URL and the title tag. If you have multiple occurrences, then it basically means you have two URLs on your website talking about, is that P the same thing? So let's go ahead and delete that. We don't need to see this column right here, that pixel width that can be deleted. And the last column index ability, while all the URLs are actually indexable as you can see. So we don't need that whatsoever. So essentially, all we need is free columns. We need to address the page title and the page title length. So what I like to do is go ahead and make all of these in bold. I'd like to go over to view and freeze the top row. So just when you scroll, this is always going to be in view. Now we've tidied up our spreadsheet. The second thing which I like to do is quickly add a filter so I can see all the title type which are over 60 characters in length. As like I said, you wanna make sure you're touched like is under 60 characters. Otherwise it's just going to get cut off by Google. So to find all the title tag which are over 60 in lamp, Very, very easy. Once again, we need to do is go over to your title tag. And I'll come under two data. Add a filter and then click this drop-down arrow. And then what you want to do on this little box, you want to change from choose one to greater than. Initially enter in 60 as our, as our limit. And the spreadsheet is going to show us all of the title tags, which are over 60 characters in length. So essentially what you want to do is go through all of these title tags one by one and rewrite them following the list of things I gave you in the PowerPoint slides. So let's go ahead and apply that to the first free URL is at the top, just to give you an idea of exactly how this would work in the real world. So the first URL is for a waste removal page. We can see the title tag right here. We know it's over 60 characters. So the first thing which you want to go and do is condense this title tag and make it more concise. However, before you go ahead and do that, It's always a good idea to actually take the website URL. Over to Google and land on that URL as she was an actual customer. Just so you can get a good idea of exactly what the pages about and have a look at the actual contents of the page as well. So we can see this page is all about waste removal services in London. That is most likely the keyword they are targeting as of course is company is based in London. Ucl got best price gardeners in London as well. We've got London here as well. We've got London here again, waste removal. Okay. So I have a clear understanding of what this page is about is literally a page about weight or mutual services in London, quite self-explanatory. So that's always good to know and to keep in the back of your mind when it comes to rewriting these title tags. So just from looking at these title tags, I've already noticed one thing that is that every single title tag end with the same texts. You've got professional garden and landscaping services in London. You've got the same text right here. You've got it again below. You gotta again, you've got it again. You're going to hear literally every single patient has or has this. Now if you see this, what it means is probably some code added to the FIM on the website. And whilst it might look good for a web developer or someone is making a website is not really good for an SEO aspect whatsoever. Two reasons, because all your title tags are going to be very similar. And number two is going to drastically increase the length of your title tag. As you can see, it's not in all of these instances right here. So let's go ahead and start to rewrite some of these title tags. I'll take the top one more light to do is add a new column and I put new title tag, similar to copy the title tag we already have. Then let's make it a little bit smaller just so I can actually see my new title tag. I'm going to remove this part. And as it doesn't need to be there on do one thing now just double-check the character length of this title tag. Go over to what counter dotnet. We're currently at 53 characters. I will include a link to this in a resource as well. Basically, it's what I like to you just to see how long a title tag is 53. Good. Best way to move services in London green at home is obviously the brand name. The next thing to check is that if they have the keyword or the front of the title tag. So it's very clear that this page, it talked in the keyword, waste from legal services, London. You can see the keyword right here, away from evil services in London, they do have the word best at A-star of the title tag. However, as is only one word, it doesn't really matter. And actually having the word best in this instance is going to help them stand out from the competition. The third thing we want to check is that if the title tag is written naturally, which is indeed you can see it says, best way for me Will services in London green at home, you will see a lot of people were taken up these filler words such as in. And what you'll see is the title tag will be best way to meal services London, I mean, that's not the best English. You ideally want to have the word in there for sure, excuse the pun, and don't worry about trying to have all your keywords right next to each other, as long as you have the individual and single keyword variations in there as well, which we do in this instance. You have nothing to worry about. The fifth and final thing to check is if we repeat any of the words, Well, we don't have a waist mentioned once. We have removal mentioned ones and we have London mentioned ones as well. So this is a really good title tag and is much better than what we had before. So let's move on to the second one. The looks of it seems to be a URL for the category and buying products page. So it's going to be pretty straightforward for this one's actually going to go ahead and skip that. And I'll do another one of the service pages, which seems to be for the landscaping page. So once again, I will copy the old one and copy it here. I don't want to go ahead and take this URL, go over to Google and land on this URL just to see what the page is about. So once again, it is all to do with London, and it's all about the services which is specializing in landscape in. So the main keywords seems to be landscaping services in London. Got high-quality garden landscaping in London. So it could be God and is another potential keyword. So in this instance, when you're not sure what the best keyword is, is it landscaping services London or is it God? And in services London? If you have any doubt whatsoever, the best thing to do is to carry out a little bit of keyword research and see which key word has the most searches as you want to optimize our page around the keyword, which is the most popular keyword. So all I've done is I've gone into SEMrush. I typed in landscaping London. And as you can see, we've got all the keyword variations popping up right here. We have London landscape. We have landscaping garden as London, so not God. And then we have gardeners. So a different variation. And as his keyword is showing to me, we have 720 searches, very clear and it's a very strong signal that this is the boat keyword that I want to optimize at page 4, where if we go back to our spreadsheet, you can see at present is optimized for gardening and landscaping services. So we definitely want to go ahead and get this written. So I'm going to do is simply copy this main keyword. Copy it from the left to the right of copy it quite a lot. Okay. I can't copy for some reason what I'll do. I'll just type it landscape, God enters. And then we'll have London. Excuse my capital letters right here. There we go. Got there yet. So I will copy that. We're back to my spreadsheet. I'm going to copy this at the start as this is the main keyword, landscape gardeners, London. I'm gonna take this out right now. And what I'd like to do is put the brand name back at the end, Green at home. And I'll go for reliable this time. So as you can see, what I like to do is literally include a word at the start of the title tag. And this is going to allow us to stand out automatically from all the other standard SEO people that literally just go for landscaped garden as London and it had the brand name. Let's go ahead and put reliable back in some other ideas of what you can use for trust signals and go for trustworthy, reliable, high-quality family Romney that all I did you can use at a star of your title tag, but of course, just make sure you are under the 60 character counts. So I'm going to do is just copy this. We've got a double-space air. Get rid of that. I'm going to copy that. Go back over to my tool, just double-check what 53 characters were under 60. Nothing to worry about whatsoever. The title tag is written naturally. I do have my keywords towards the front of the title tag. The title tag is also written naturally in regards to single and other keyword variations where you can always go back to your keyword research and analysis and just see it as any other keywords you can have in there. So maybe the word architect is another variation we can get included in our title tag. However, as you can see, we've already got 50. We're only got seven characters left. So instead of me trying to keyword stuff and get the word architect in here, it's actually going to be way more better if I include this keyword in one of our H1 or H2 tags on the actual page, instead of trying to stuff it into our title tag. So essentially, what you want to do is go ahead and rewrite the title tags for all of these title tags. And of course, these are all over 60 characters. And then once you've done that, what you want to do is clear your filter and then have a look at the type of salaries that are below 60 characters and see if any of those can be rewritten following the five principles that we covered in the PowerPoint slides. So that is it for this one. And I'll see you in the next video. 16. Meta Descriptions: In this video, I'm going to show you how you can audit a website. It's Meta descriptions. Just to clarify, a meta description, it's the description you see below your website in Google search results. So here's a meta-description for clicks license page on our SEO consultant page, you can see it says, Are you a business owner who's looking for an SEO consultant in London? Let's jump on a call today and discuss exactly how we can help your business. So instead of me just showing you this and you're trying to figure out exactly why this is a good meta description. Let me go through four things which you need to bear in mind, which ultimately determines how you're going to write a meta description to ensure is performing the best for your website. So number one is you want to keep it under 155 characters. Once again, that does include spaces. Number two, you want to get your keywords mentioned in the tag as well. Now this is a little bit different in comparison to the title tag. As with the title side, you won't get your keyword mentioned at the front. However, when it comes to your Meta description, it doesn't really matter where you mentioned the keyword. You just want to make sure you get it included back in the day, adding keywords in your Meta description did actually give you an SEO boost, however, is no longer a ranking signal. Well, you might be wondering, well, if it's not a ranking signal, then why should I include my keyword in the description? The reason why you want to include it is if you look at my image, you can see the keyword I'm obviously targeting for my page is SEO consultant London is very clear from the URL and my title tag. And if you look at my Meta description, the words, SEO, consultant and London have all been put in bold by Google. Now this doesn't have a direct impact on my Rankin, but it does do is it makes my website stand out more in Google and highlights to users that my pages will about SEO consultant London, which are the main topic of my page. So when you do include the keywords in your Meta description, it by default helped up, page down now and can actually help improve your website's CCR, which is a percentage of people who clicked your website from the Google search engine results page. When a website it has a high CTO is a very strong signal to Google that people are liking what they are. I'll see you in. So as a result, what does Google do? It bumps up the rankings of that page. So long story short, definitely make sure you go ahead and include your keywords in your meta-description. Number 3, try and grab people's attention. I personally like to do this by asking questions. Questions are a great way to grab people's attention. So in my example right here, you can see my description. I say, all you, a business owner who is looking for an SEO consultant in London, question walk. So my meta-description starts off with a question. If you own maybe an e-commerce website selling gaming monitors, for example, you can solve your meta-description saying, looking for the best game and monitor question, we sell the most premium game in one it says blah, blah, blah, blah. And in a question in your Meta description is a really solid weighted grab people's attention. Number 4, write, naturally, this applies to pretty much anything when it comes to SEO. You want to try and be as natural as possible and avoid trying to keyword stuff. So let me go back over to Screaming Frog and I'll show you exactly how we can analyze this website's Meta descriptions. Once again, using the same website green at home. I'm currently on the page titled tub from the last video. So what I'm going to do is go over to the next one, which is Meta descriptions. Now as you can see, this website actually has some pages on its site which doesn't have any meta-description whatsoever. So that's something you definitely want to avoid at all costs as when you do have a meta description on your page, what it does, it makes your website stand out more in Google and it gives you more digital real estate. Just imagine if I didn't have this description right here, I would literally only have my URL on my page title. So definitely go ahead and analyze all those URL. So once again, why I like to do is click export, CSV and then click Save. And it simply open up that spreadsheet. Once you have the spreadsheet open, it's the same logic as we apply it to the previous videos. What you want to do is clean up this spreadsheet ever move all the columns which you don't need. So I'll start from the right this time. We don't need inflexibility as all of these pages actually indexable, which is good to see. So let's go ahead and delete that. We don't need the pixel width as well. So go ahead and leave us actually in this column. Don't need the pixel width that can go. Occurrences, again, is pretty straight forward is how many times you see is meta description on this page. So we've got 0, these ones, which of course AB no meta description. So I'm already aware of that's going to go ahead and delete this column as well. Literally, all you need is free columns. You need the address, the actual Meta description, and the Meta description length in characters and just go ahead and make this left alignment is very easy to see the zoom in one more hope that you can see all the information right now. So I'll wait like to do is start off with the pages which have no Meta descriptions. As like I said, every page should have a meta description. So let's start off with the top one. Seems to be a category byproducts. Let's go over to Google and then have a look at what this page is actually about just to make sure the meta-description my writing. A true reflection of the page. It is literally just a page. Listen out some of their products. So as it says, it's a category and buy the products is very unlikely. That is, pages target in any keywords. So we don't have to worry about trying to get a key was mentioned in here whatsoever. But what we definitely want to do is go ahead and create a mere description that we can use on this page. So let's go back to our spreadsheet. What I'm going to do is add a new column on the right like usual, I'll call it new meso description like so not sure why the text is going down like that. There you go. There's nothing to copy across in this instance as a court, it's a blank meta description. What I'll do is I'll make this column a little bit smaller. So you can see Nuan now as this page is all about the showcase in the company's products, I'm actually going to say something like, are you looking for the best Gordon products to help you create your dream garden? Question mark. So I'm starting off the Meta description with a question and I can say, check out what green at home, which is a name of the company or the website has to offer. That's pretty cool. Now I've written that I wanted to do is just under 155 characters. So I'll just go back into my word count tool. We've got a 125 characters in total, so no problems whatsoever. As I said, this page isn't targets in any key words. It has no key was to really include enhance whatsoever. So that's essentially how you would do it for a blank page. Hope that gives you a really good indication of exactly the structure you need to follow when it comes to writing really good method descriptions for your website. So let's look at one more URL now to give you an idea of how you would rewrite an existing meta description is pretty much the same principle you want to follow. Let's take this page, in particular, the god in deck and services for London. So same strategy, I'll go over to Google when I land on this page just to see what it's definitely a bout oh, God, index and services in London, debt on deck and installation. So it's all to do with installing this deck and in people's gardens. Very straightforward and clear. If I go back over to my spreadsheet, we can see this method description is actually 213 characters in length. That is over a 155 recommended allowance. So we definitely want to go ahead and rewrite this description. Now as I showcase in last video, you can actually add a filter to this column 2 so you can automatically see all the Meta descriptions which are over 155 currencies. However, when it comes to Meta descriptions, I don't want to add any filters. The main reason being is because what you find when you order a lot of websites, I love websites actually have no meta description whatsoever. We should count as 0. So if you add your filter over 155, you actually miss out on all of these blank Meta descriptions. So let's go ahead and rewrite this description. I'm going to copy the old one and paste it over here so we can use some of the words. I'll start my day off once again with a question or you look in that will space there. Are you looking for a reliable decane installer? Install law in London? Christian law is a great. You've just found one. We install professional deck in in commercial and residential proxies. I think that will be absolutely fine. And I can end that once again with the brand name Green at home and then delete all of this. That should be a lot more condensed. Now I just want to copy that, go back over to my tool and just make sure that it's under 155. So in this instance we're actually overall limits. I want to go ahead and start to condense this and actually have a few spelling errors which correctly. First, There we go. So I can just take off the brand name if I want. And that way I should come down a little bit. I want a 162, just a little bit more work on this. So what I can do is I can say we install professional decking at affordable for ice, is that we now I'll generally free kind of get the brand name in green at home. No icon is tomorrow. So what I do in this instance is I'm just going to something like this. So as you saw with this real-time walk through, it can be a little bit of back and forth just to making sure you are on your carrots a limit. But I highly recommend that you pay extra attention and give it more time just to make sure you are actually underwent a 155. If you are not, what happens is Google would take a snippet from your page and use whatever part of content on your website they think is going to be applicable. And nine times out of 10, they always get it wrong. So it's going to be our new meta description. So I'll go ahead and replace that one. And essentially once you've done that for all of your pages, you've got a nice meta description we need to do is go into your website and update your Meta description. If you are using a WordPress website like iron for clicks lice, it's very easy to do. You can have a plugin such as Yoast SEO, get it installed on your WordPress website for into one of your pages or your blog posts, whatever page you are optimizing, scroll down to the bottom and then click this button right here where it says Edit snippet is comes under the main SEO tab. Once you click that, you'll actually go into the meta description and simply enter in your Meta description to suit. If you are not using a WordPress website, then essentially all you need to do is find the HTML code for your Meta description. Very easy to do. If I go to the page source for my SEO consultant London page, you can see I've got a Control F or the word description, and this is a HTML tag for meta description. So here between the speech marks is exactly where you'd want to add your new meta-description. This part right here, that brings us to the end of this video, and I'll see you in the next one. 17. Heading Tags (H1 & H2s): In this video, I'm going to show you how you can optimize a website is heading tags, specifically the H1 and H2 tag. There's five main things which you want to be aware of. Number one is that you want to include your main keyword in the H1 tag. Now, don't just copy the page title. I literally see so many people that go out there. They create a really, really good page title and they can't think of anything that's used for the H1 tag. So what did they do? They literally copy and paste the page title and insert it as an H1 tag. Definitely do not do that. I will show you exactly what you can do in just a second. The second thing you need to be aware of is that you should only have one H1 tag on a page. Have a page with multiple H1 tags, then all you are doing is confusing Google. Your H1 tag is essentially the main heading of that page. If you have multiple H1 tags, then you're telling Google that is page is about multiple different things. So definitely avoid that number free. You can have as many H2 tags as you want on your page. You just need to be sure that the relevant sub-topics of your H1 tag. Now the same applies to h3 times you have on your website. You can have as many as you want. They just need to be relevant sub-topics of the Haiti which comes before the H3 and finally, same as always, you need to make sure you write naturally when composing any of your H1, H2, or H3 tags. So if you found a number to a little bit confusing as well, I mean by relevant sub-topics, then this image should provide a little bit of clarity. Here we have the heading structure of my SEO consultant page on clicks lines. You can see I have one H1 tag and it says SEO consultant, London, partner with the best, I have H2 set, again, a subtopic of the H1. And I say how my SEO consultancy services work. Consultancy is another keyword variation of the word consultant. And as a whole topic is relevant to SEO consoles in it makes sense having it as a subtopic. I then go another H2 tag which says, SEO experts meet my rocks are team in London. This is all relevant to Microsoft and services. So as a result, it comes under my main H1 tag, then under my second H2 tag, what I'm talking about my rockstar team, I have a list of all of my staff which are actually a subtopic of my H2, which is why they're hedge free. So hopefully that clarifies is actually what I mean by a subtopic. So for the real-time walk-through, we're going to be using a different website. It's time to say goodbye to green at home. We've used them in the last two videos. So this is a new website I'm going to be using for this specific video. So this is a website called Galatia Photo Booth dot code at UK. Once again, I have no relation or affiliation to his website whatsoever. I simply just found it on Google by carrying out a search for photo booth higher. So I've already plugged this website into Screaming Frog. And what I want to do now is go over to the H1 and H2 tags and view those tags for the website. Now, if you remember what I said in my slides, when it comes to your H1 tag, what you want to do is make sure that it's unique and not exactly the same Azure page title. So when it comes to reviewing your H1 tag is always a good idea to actually export the page titles as well and then compare your H1 to the page titles. The same applies to the H2, export that, and then compare it to the H1. So intos all you need to export three different tabs. It's going to be your page title and you go ahead and do that. Now. You want to do exactly the same for your h one click export. And then finally, go ahead and export, or the H2 is on a website. So you should have three different files in total, your page titles, H1 and H2. So let's go ahead and open these up. And the main aim, what we're trying to do here is merges all into one file. Let me open up the page titles. Drag that across. It's on my other screen now going to open the hatch ones. Once again that's on my other screen. Drag that across and let me go one more of the H2 and no doubt as going to open on my other screen as well. And yes, it did. So what we want to do is clean all of these files up and then merge them together. So let's just make patriarchs was our main one. We should need to see is a page title. We can ignore the page title length as of course, you would have already done that by now as it comes off the page title. Let's go on. All of these essentially, all we wanted to see is the actual title tag and the URL. Delete that like so. We can now go on to the next spreadsheet, which is going to be our H1 tags. So here all you need to do is go ahead and copy across your H1 tag. Only one occurrence of one time. So I don't need to worry about copying multiple H1 tags. Let's take this column and then copy that in the second column, like so. We don't need to worry about one limb as a Lemma, doesn't really matter when it comes to a H1 tag. Of course, try and keep your H1 tag as concise as possible and always keep the user in mind. You don't want to have an H1 tag which is hundreds and hundreds of characters. The shorter, the better. And then once you finish with you or which ones to go ahead and cancel that you want to go ahead and do exactly the same thing for your H2 tags. Now before I go ahead and copy my H2 tags, you can see in this column right here where it says occurrences, there is multiple occurrences. All this means is there's multiple H2 tags. So what I want to do is make sure I copy both occurrences across, over onto the main spreadsheet. So let me go ahead and copy the first age 21, like so. But in column D, and I will copy the second H2, which is this one h two dash to copy that into column E. And that is it for this spreadsheet, we don't need to see the link once again, the level does not really matter when it comes to the headings. Has go ahead and close that this is no longer needed. And now we have a one main spreadsheet which I'm going to make it full screen. Let me zoom in a little bit more. Filter like so, just clean up a little bit so you guys can see exactly what is going on here. Once again, I'm gonna make that bold. And I'll zoom in a couple of bits and more. And essentially what we have here is a breakdown of the page's title, the H1, H2, and the second H2 as well. So it's quite a bit of manual work involved. However, when it comes to doing SEO audit, you really want to pay attention to exactly what is going on. So doing things manually is a great way to see exactly how a site is laid out. I'm just gonna take it back one more and zoom out. And just so we can see the actual website URL, instead of me going through all of his website URLs, or just use one for the purpose of this video. So let me just go ahead and clear this as it can be a little bit hard to save all this information. I do appreciate that. And I did she get feedback in one of my previous courses saying I'm showing too much information on spreadsheets. So yes, I am listening to all the feedback I get. So let me go ahead and show you exactly what I would do to improve the head instructor of this page. So rule number one, always visit the actual page to see what it looks like. So let's go back to Google and then carry out a search. And this is the page right here, photo booth higher leads, those who don't know lead is actually a location here in the United Kingdom, is a city. So just by looking at the page is very clear. This is literally a page, as it states, is a page about photo booths you can hire in the area or beliefs. Okay, That's all crystal clear. Let me go back to my spreadsheet. So the title tag of this page says Photo Booth higher leads. The H1 tag says leads higher, so definitely a big room for improvement. The H2 literally just says Photo Booth higher lease, which is very similar. It's actually identical to the page time. So other than that, the page plateau mentioned that brand name blush brief at the end of it. Then I have another H2. It says five-star service, which has nothing to do with abuse whatsoever. So they definitely should not be a high H2 tag. So what would I do to improve this? So what would I do to improve this? Well, of course, imagine a title tag stays the same as we're only working on the headings, the hate to untag, I would definitely change it from Leeds higher before I go ahead and start to craft any other H1 tag or H2, I need to figure out exactly what other keyword ideas I could be using. So if you carried out some keyword research for your website or your client's eyes already, then you can literally refer to your keyword research spreadsheet and go ahead and start to include some more keywords. If you haven't, then obviously what you can do is just go over to Google, carry out a search for the main keyword. So my example is going to be Photo Booth higher. You can scroll down and look at the organic results. So try and get an idea of exactly other keywords you can be using in your H1 tag. I mean, what we're looking at right now is actually the page titles. Well, I can see I've got the word rental, which is another word for hire. You've got rental appear in again, you've got wedding party and corporate, which is pretty good ideas. And of course, some people, it's a high or a photo booth for a wedding. Some may want to hire it for a party or a corporate event and so on. So you actually get quite a few ideas just by looking at the organic results on Google. If you have access to seminars, you can do exactly the same thing. Just plug in a photo booth higher or ever keyword is you are targeting. And then under keyword variations, you can get an idea of other keywords you can be using. And as you can see that the same recommendations right here within Photo Booth higher, we got Party photo booth higher, and so on and so on. So taking this into consideration, why would do for my H1 tag, I would go for something such as photo booth rental instead of HIO. And I'll put in Lethe, which is location they are targets in. And I'll put in the word booths to hire for all occassions like that. That is a main H1 tag and go ahead and make that a little bit smaller so you can see. So what I've done is I've put the word booths in there with an S. So I put in the plural version in addition to the single version right there, I've included the word rental and I've included the word higher as well. I've mixed up the words a little bit. Instead of having a photo booth higher are going for photo booth rental. Well, I've also got the word higher in there as well, so this is a much better one. Optimize SEO take. Moving on to the H2 tag. At present, it just says Photo Booth higher leads, which like I said, is basically a duplicate of the title tag. We definitely want to go ahead and change this. So as my H1 says, booster higher for all occasions in my H2 tags, what I can actually do is mentioned those occasions. So I could go for photo booths to hire for weddings, I think was an occasion we saw for weddings. And I can have another H2 say in photo booster high art for some reason I can't edit it in the field and for policies now I've got two similar H2 tags. One includes a keyword weddings, and one includes a keyword policies. Now you don't have to do an exact duplicate and just change out the actual heart of the hasty sac, which is unique, aka weddings and policies. You can rearrange it if you want and actually recommend you do. I do say a lot of people actually go for a standard format like this. And the reason why is because it's the easiest thing to do. However, when we're doing SEO, want to avoid always doing the easy option. We saw earlier that the word rental was a really good cue at variation. So how about we include another variation of the word rental? So we can do photo booth to rent for parties to clean up, like so. So we've got photo boost to rent for policies. Now, got the party variation in there. I've got rent in there. I've got written Tools, I've got booth, I have got booths, I've got occasions, I've got higher weddings policies. I hope you can see just how many keywords we've now got in. Just by optimizing a little bit better for the SEO, you can even go a step further if you wish. I for example, instead of saying photo booths or higher for weddings, you can say photo booths or higher for weddings in Leeds, I once again get your location in there. Just be very careful that you don't want to overdo an over-optimized your page. If you're ever unsure exactly if you are over optimize or if you're under Optimized, always review at a top ranking websites are doing on Google and use it as a guide to follow. So what we just run through now is literally the same process that you wanted to apply to all of your pages on your website. That's it for this one. And I'll see you in the next video. 18. How To Find Duplicate Content: Welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how you can find duplicate content. Before I show you the process, let me just clarify exactly what duplicate content is for those who don't know, duplicate content is identical content that is found on two or more pages on your website. So this is essentially where you have exactly the same content on two different pages. Now the reason why we wanted to find duplicate content and fix it is because if you have too much of it on your website, then Google may actually penalize your site. So how do we find it? Well, the process is very straight forward. We need to be using our same tool we use in the last video, which is Screaming Frog. Essentially what you want to do is go in and enter in any website URL into the top, like so. So you can see, for example, for this video, I'm using the BBC dot code at UK. Once you've entered in the URL and you carried out accrue on that site. What you want to do is make sure you go to the Content tab right here. And what it's going to do is give you an overview of all the content on all the pages on the website. Now, so find duplicate pages on the site we need to do is go to the right-hand side under content and then click duplicate right here. And another way you can actually do that is by clicking this filter menu. So I'm just going for exact duplicates. And just like that, you can now see Screaming Frog is shown us all of the duplicate content type URLs across the whole website. So we have eight exact duplicates in total. We can see we've got two pages for the terms. We've got two for the privacy 24 accessibility I may have to for the cookies pages as well. So in this instance is very easy to see which URLs are duplicates if you ever do have any doubts. And essentially what you can do is just click any URL and then go down to duplicate D sounds rather bottom and you click that URL like so it's going to show you the other URL, which is page, is a duplicate of, say, the open. Any of these URLs go for the first one, and then we'll go back, open the second one as well. You can see yet these are indeed exact duplicates. You've got this one right here is actually the same content. The only thing which is change in seems to be the URL. We go forward slash on this one and on this URL it, there's no forward slash. So what this person would need to do is essentially read are at one of the URLs to the other ones had only one final version of this page. So if finding duplicate content, is it really that straightforward? Essentially, all you want to do is plug in a website URL, go over to content, go to exact duplicates. And just like that, you'll see a list of all of the duplicate URLs. Now, one other thing which I just want to note for those who have the paid version of screaming Frog, is that you can actually tell Screaming Frog to show you near duplicates as well. So this is pages that have similar content and not exact match identicals. Now this can be very handy to know as of course, if lots of pages on your site have similar content, then that can also be a problem as well. So it's a fine those near duplicates or you need to do is go up to configuration and it has to be done before you carry out accrual. And essentially what you want to do is go to content and then go to duplicates, and then tick the box where it says enable near duplicates. So like I said, this is only available if you have the license paid version of the tool. This is a brand new Screaming Frog account which I've created just the purpose of this training course. But essentially, if you do have the paid version, just go ahead and tick this box, then you can put in a percentage for your similarity of being similar. So I recommend you go from 90 and above, which is actually what the default is anyway. And once you've done that, you can simply go ahead and click near duplicates from the right-hand side. And then it will show you a list of all of the pages on the site which have similar content as well. So that brings us to the end of this one. I hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next one. 19. How To Find Thin Content: In this video, I'm going to show you how you can find thin content on a website. To clarify, thin content is content that has little to no value to the user. Typically, pages that offer little to no value are short in length. And when I say shoe in lamp, I'm referring to the word count. The reason why we want to identify what pages on a website has been content as if you look at this from Google's point of view. So from Google's perspective, ask yourself, do they really want to show a website on the first page of Google if that page has little to no value to the user? Well, of course the answer's going to be no. So what we want to do is find all the pages on our site within content and then beef them up with more content, AKA more words to ensure they're not seen as FIN content, AKA to ensure they provide more value to the user. Now, a lot of people always ask me, well, josh is a magic number I should be looking for to determine if my page has been content or not. Well, unfortunately, there isn't any magic number as this number is going to vary depending on what industry you operate in. However, as a guide, anything below 350 words can be viewed as FIN content. But like I said, this isn't any magic number. Just use it as a guide. So how do we find these thin pages on our website? The process is very straightforward. Wanted to go over to Screaming Frog, enter in a website URL and then carry out accrue. And then once again, it wasn't your results have loaded. You want to go over to the Content tab, just exactly how we did when we were finding duplicate content 12 and a Content tab you and look at the first column right here which says word count. This is pretty self-explanatory, but essentially what this does is it shows you the word count of that particular page for all of the pages on the website. So we can see the homepage has 295 words. They have a location page which has 646, so a decent amount of words. We've got one of their location page's targets in the photo booth, higher leads. I do believe it was actually the page we looked at earlier on in the course. This has over 1300 words, which is nice to see. They've got 360 booth higher free, 105, so it's below 350. So this is definitely a page I would want to take a look at. But essentially instead of just going through the list like this and trying to support any number below 350, you can just explore all the data. Or if you are looking at our website which isn't too large in terms of how many pages it has. You can't just filter the data right here within Screaming Frog. And just like that, I can now see all the pages by word count from lowest to highest. So all these pages right here are ones out. Definitely want to take a look at. So this page right here, instagram proof, let me go ahead and copy this. I'll go over to Google. Entering that URL, just have a look at the actual page. You can see is a page on the website targeting the keyword Instagram booth or Instagram booth high. You've got a little bit comes in up here, a few more words down here. Two videos which currently do not actually work at the moment, which is quite interesting to see. Then they've got the standard About Us text, which is actually on all of the pages of the website. So it's kind of like a template. So 70, the only unique words I have on this page is going to be this part right here. So hopefully you can see already why this would be classified as FIN content as if you're a user and you're in the market for an Instagram booth, the higher, well, what value does this page really provide you? The answer is a little to none. Compare this to one of their competitors who they are competing for the similar keyword photo booth higher. But this website right here by Showtime photo booth that code it UK. They're going for a different keyword variation of hashtag prints or higher, but essentially it's exactly the same thing going off the Instagram related keywords because either content is a lot more thorough than their content. And as a result, this page actually ranks higher up in Google as well in comparison to this page. So it just goes to show that you really don't want to be having a thin content on any website as it definitely going to hold you back when it comes to SEO. So that is a process on a whole is very easy to do once you've filled the pages by a word count as literally in just a few seconds, you can see all the pages which are below 350 words. Then you can go out there and beef up all those pages in terms of content. Now, just one final warning orbit of word of advice I should say, is that typically when you have a contact page on your website, maybe even About page. Those pages are going to be sure in word count in comparison to your main service pages just by nature of the page. For example, we have this page right here which has today, it has 100 words on the page which might seem like, oh no, it's paid at a 100 words. I didn't want to beef up the page's content, but we actually open this page and go back over to Google. You can see is literally just a page with a contact form. And this page obviously isn't going to rank in Google. So having thin content on this page isn't that big of an issue, is only really your main service pages and your blog post that you want to look at when it comes to thin content. So now that we've clarified that, I'll see you in the next one. 20. How To Find Broken Links On Your Website: In this video, I'm going to show you how you can find a broken link on our website, also known as 404 pages. We've all been there ourselves in the past. We've gone onto Google. We've carried out a search for something that we are looking for. We've clicked one of the results. The website opens only to find out that the page does not exist. And we get a Big Four, Four message on our screen. As you can imagine, this is a really, really bad user experience. And Google does not want to have 44 pages in its index. As of course, it results in a poor user experience. So in this video, I'm going to show you how you can very easily find out all the four or four pages or website hats. There's two different ways you can use to find these four or four pages. The first option which you can use to find these pages is by using Google Search Console. If you are working with a client and they let you know that they have a Google Search Console already set up on the website, then all you need to do is login to that console, go to coverage on the index on the left-hand side. And if they have any 44 pages on the website, you're going to see under the details box right here. So you can see it says submitted URL not found brackets four or four. If we then click into this, we actually get a detailed list of exactly what the 40 for URLs are. So you can see one right here for the product and another one for the products as well. Now remember, this is the actual 404 page, the page which does not exist. If we want to find out what patient lynxes page, aka which page has the broken link, then what you need to do is click into that page and then carry out and inspect URL. And what it's going to be. Basically inspect the URL in real time and in combat with some information and let you know exactly which page has the broken link. Now isn't a little bit Columbus and clicking ahead and click that, then click this and inspect it, then go and find the page. This is why I do find it a little bit easier just to use a second option, which of course is going to be using Screaming Frog. So for this example, I'm using a website called viper CIO.com. This is actually an old SEO blog. I used to read this all the time when I was first getting involved into SEO is really, really interested in. However, unfortunately, the blog is no longer updated as you can see here. But essentially this is a site I've just plugged in into Screaming Frog. And if I wanted to find out all of the 44 pages at this site has all I need to do is go over to the fourth tab right here where it says response codes. Once I'm on this page, what I want to do is go to the Thought option right here and simply click Client error for x, x, which of course is going to include all of our 404 pages. And now you can see this page, it has one broken link, which is actually really good. And it's primarily because the person who owns the site was of course an SEO himself. But it's likely if you are working with a client who doesn't know SEO at all. And even I have a lot of broken links. So this is a broken link on this particular website is for the widget algorithm. So just to double check that I can copy that URL, go back over to Google, and then carry out a search for that. And as you can see, it says 404 page not found. So this page does not exist or whatsoever. So to find that what pages are linking it to this broken page, then what we need to do is go back and click this URL. And then we need to go to in-links right here at the bottom. And just like that, it will now show up to two pages which are linking to this broken link. So we have two broken links on this site in total. One coming from the link building guide in 2016. And I've got another article about private link networks. Both are linked to that widget page, which of course is a 404 page. And the great thing about Screaming Frog as well is that if you scroll further down to the right, we can see exactly what the Anglo-Saxon is on both of those pages as well. So if this was my website, what I would do is I will simply go into my link board in 2016 guide. I'll do a Control F on the anchor tags, wrote a blog post. Then what I want to do is simply go ahead and update that link and then point it to the most relevant next page in line. If you don't have any relevant pages which you can update the link to, the more I recommend you do is you simply just for your one radar that page back to your homepage. Now, that's literally the worst case scenario. As you can see, the process is very straightforward. So now you know how to find broken links is over to you to carry out the process and find any broken link on your website or your client's site. I'll see you in the next one. 21. How To Analzye A Sites Internal link Structure: In this video, I'm going to show you how you can analyze a website's internal link structure. So first things first, why would we want to do this? Well, when you have lots of backlinks pointing to a page on your website, you can give another page on your site some of that power and that link juice by adding an internal link to it. This will help that page rank higher up in Google without you having to build any links directly to that page, which is a massive wind when it comes to doing SEO, internal links also help establish more relevancy across your website too. As a result, analyzing the internal link structure is a great way to understand what pages linked to work. And it allows us to see if our internal links could be better optimized. Their website I'll be using for this specific video is going to be viper CIO.com. This is the same website I used in the last video. So to see what pages have internal links, what we could do is literally click any URL. So maybe this one right here, and then go to in-links down here. And then that will tell us what pages are linking to this specific URL. So we can see this page has free internal links coming from the homepage and it link to this blog post. However, whilst this is good, it doesn't really give you a good indication of the whole website on the whole, As I have no idea what internal links this page has, because if I click that, it's got a whole number of different lists of internal links. So instead of clicking the links here and then checking the in-links, a much more effective and easier way you can analyze internal links on the psi is by looking at this visually. So from a visual representation, the way you can do this is you go back to internal miniature on the internal tab. Then what you want to do is go to visualizations at the top. Then you have two main options. You've got accrual tree graph and you've got a directory tree graph. So I'll show you both of them in this video. When people are using the directory tree graph, people always go for the fourth directed version, which is this one right here. And go ahead and click that. And I'll go back to Screaming Frog. And I open the other one which I typically like to use, which is a tree graph. So let's look at the fourth directory tree diagram first, and as you can see, it's given us an overview of the whole website. Let me just zoom in. You can actually edit all of the sets in. So essentially each node you see is going to be a different page on the website. So if I hover over this node right here, you can see it says tree path via CIO.com forth at six mumps. That's probably one of the blog post on the website. You can see the cruel depths or how many clicks it would take to get to this page if you landed on the homepage of the site. Before we go ahead and do that, let me just go ahead and go into the sessions and the right-hand side. And as you can see, we had the link limb so we can customize all of these and make it smaller. We can make the node smaller as well. So maybe actually see what the words actually say. We can do the node overlap as well, the node size literally so many options you can play around with. However, as you can see, even when you play around with the options, is still can be a little bit difficult to see what is actually going on. So this is actually why I recommend you use accrual tree graph version as if I close this one and show you that you can see things are a lot more clear. Now, we have the homepage, which internal links are all of these pages. We can see the pages which then go on a link to another page. They have another line going through the graph. And you can really start to analyze exactly how the page is structured from a bird's eye view. So we can see straight away they have a homepage link into the private link building page. And the homepage also links to another page about link building, this one right here. Then it also linked to another page about link building. However, when you actually analyze what should go in on, in his bomb string of lines right here. We have the homepage link into the link building Page and then link burden page now linked to the widget algorithm page. Then we've got another link node and page up here which doesn't link to the widget algorithm page. Then we've got private link button at the top which links to another two different types of link building pages. So in summary that a lot of link Bowden pages on the site. However, the pages which can be linked to from the link board and pages aka babies ones right here. Private link network future of blogging and which algorithm these are all linked to from all of the link building pages. We can see that very, very clearly, especially this one right here, that standard link board in page, this link wooden page, literally links had no other pages. Now, let's imagine you are trying to rank these three pages in Google. Then obviously what you want to do is get as many internal links pointing to these pages as possible. So when you use a cruel tree graph visualization, it allows you to see opportunities. You can add internal links to boost that pages visibility. So if this was my website and I was trying to rank these two articles, what I would do is I will go into my link Gordon article right here. I would add in to internal links to both of these articles. I would also go into this link burden article right here. And I'll add in interlinks of these two pages as well. So I hope that gives you an idea of just how you can be using these visualize charts to be fair, they do provide you the same information you get from your standard crew. They'd like to see things easier from a visual aspect. That's it for this one. And I'll see you in the next video. 22. What We're Going To Cover In This Section: Off-page SEO problems. In this section of the course, I'll be showing you how you can audit a website from an off-page SEO perspective. Now typically speaking, when it comes to audit in a website, there isn't that much that you need to check from an office respective other than a website's backlink profile says exactly what I'll be doing in this section of the course. This is going to be the shortest section of the whole course. Primarily because like I said, there's only one thing which you really need to check. The bulk of the things which you need to audit on our website is all going to be from an on-page SEO perspective, as you would have saw in the last section. So without further ado, let's dive straight into this section. 23. Analyze A Website Backlink Profile: When it comes to auditing a website from an off-page SEO perspective, there's two things which I like to look at. The first is DA, which is the main authority. Now when analyzing a website, I always like to see a domain authority of at least 20 and above. As if you see a domain authority of 20 and above is a very, very good indication that the website has had some decent SEO implemented on the site in the past. The second thing which I like to look out for is a number of referring domains of website has. And when it comes to number two, I like to look at at least 50 plus referring domains. It's really important that you focus on referring domains and not the actual backlinks. As sometimes what you can have is the same website linking to you multiple times. So that website can give you five different backlinks when in theory, is only from one referring to main. So referring domains are essentially linked from unique websites. This is where you really want to focus on referring domains and not the actual backlink number. Now that we covered the theory, let me give you a real time walkthrough and I'll show you exactly how you can check a website for both of these metrics. So for the first one, DA, you need to be using this free Chrome extension by Mars bar. And essentially what it is, it's a Google Chrome extension that you add to your browser. And once you have it installed, you can let you go onto any website. So let's imagine this is a client I just took on and I want to figure out just how formative their website is. Give me a good indication of how much SEO work needs to be involved. I can simply go over to their website and then click the icon in the top right-hand corner. Once I click that, you'll get this little menu drop-down. And we'll see this number right here, 41, which is DA, which is a website domain or foresee. So this website has a domain authority of 31, which is a really healthy number. So once again, it's a very clear indication to me that decides had some SEO done on it in the past. So once you check the website's domain authority, you can move on to number two, which has a number of referring domains. Now to check out how many referring domains a website has, you're going to need to use an SEO tool. You have two choices you can use. The first is using SEMrush. Second is use another tool called H ref. Let me just turn off this most current extension just so we don't see it on these SEO tools. But essentially, all you need to do is go into each one of these tools and plugging the website URL. And for SEMrush, you can see on the main domain overview tab, we have this book right here which are backlinks are 515. And then below that we can see the number of referring domains. This site has to decide it has 90 referring domains according to SEMrush, which is almost twice what I recommend. So again, nothing to worry about whatsoever. It would go and check the same site on H ref. Just to see that difference, we can see this slide has AC free referring domains right here. So it's about seven referring domains. Discrepancy between the two different schools. I typically always find seminars to be a little bit more accurate and actually find all the backlinks and referring domains a site has. It's actually I'll go to all tool we use at the agency these days. And another great thing about SEMrush as well is that if you are a new user, you can get access to the tool for completely free for seven days by using the free trial. So that is essentially the process. In a nutshell, you really do not need to over-complicate things when audits in a website from an off-page SEO perspective, as what you'll find is when you're auditing a website, most of the problems are going to find are going to be on the actual website itself. However, it's always good just to carry out a quick off-page SEO audit, just to see how powerful and how a forest if the website you are working on actually is. And of course, if you find out the website you are auditing has 0 referring domains and it has a 0 domain authority, then it gives you a heads up. That is going to be a lot of SEO work you need to do to get the site ranking on the first page of Google. I hope you enjoyed this one and I'll see you in the next video. 24. What We're Going To Cover In This Section: In this section, I'll be showing you how you can audit a website to cover its general problems. So what do I mean by general problems? Well, I'm referring to problems which aren't classified as either a technical problem, a on-page SEO problem, or off-page SEO problem. General problems consists of analyzing a website's organic traffic. That can be a very good thing to check out for sure as it gives you a good idea on exactly how that website is progressing. And another thing which you want to check when it comes at a general problems is going to be the brand visibility of that website. So let's get straight into it and I'll show you how you can do both of them. 25. Analyze Organic Search Traffic: Another great quick finger you can check when auditing a website is going to be the websites monthly organic traffic. The reason why I'm checking this is really good as you can very easily see exactly how much traffic that website is getting every single month. Now, when you review this traffic analysis on a large-scale, so maybe over the course of a few years, you can very clearly see any patterns and it gives you a good indication on exactly how the size progressing. You can very easily see if the site had any large spikes of increased traffic or if the site has been penalized, which will show a massive decline in traffic. So these are all good things to know when taken on a client and Audit Center website. As once again, it gives you more information and more data so you can understand how challenging and how difficult is going to be, sort of rank this site in Google. So there's two different tools you can use to analyze a website's traffic. The first, of course is going to be Google Analytics. To use Google Analytics or client will need to have the Google Analytics tab installed on the website. But essentially it once I had the tag installed and you've got access to the analytical account we need to do is login and go to acquisition, and then go to overview, and then scroll down and go to organic search right here. And once you open that you should see something pretty similar to this. The first thing which you want to do is change it from day two months because at the moment we can't see what's going on. Let's change this to month, like so if you scroll up to the top, we can now see the timeframe of what the traffic is showing us. So we can see the site launched in 2017. I had a big increase in traffic, seems to be a little bit flat line up until 2019 and going into 2020 there. So a pretty decent increase in traffic from roughly about a 1000 visitors at the peak down to 400 two years before. So being a decent amount of increase in traffic on his website in duration. And then in 2021 and C is kind of going down a little bit and it seems to be rising in once again. So, so this looks pretty smooth and nothing to worry about whatsoever. However, if you were seeing a massive decline in traffics and maybe the chart was going up, up, up, up, up, and then all of a sudden the traffic just completely tank on the site, then that is a very clear indication that something has gone seriously wrong. You can also check the website traffic of websites who don't have access to by using a tool such as SEMrush. So you can see I've plugged in the website daily, Mel, I'm currently looking at the website traffic for the last one year. Now you may think, okay, there's traffic is really flat, it looks really good and I think it's declining or in client is on the whole, it's pretty much neutral. Well, no. If you did think that you'd be absolutely wrong, this is why when you're analyzing a website's organic traffic, you really want to view it over a course of years and not just the Luftwaffe mumps. Because if I change this from one year to 0 time, you can now see that since when we're this February 2008 seen, the site has actually seen a massive decline in traffic. So like I said, when you apply this to an all-time perspective of the website, it gives you a really good indication of exactly what is going on. So if I was actually going to take this client on the Daily Mail dot code at UK. Definitely be asking him what happened around this time of February 2018 because that's when they saw a massive decline in traffic, asking him or give me a good indication of what happened. Maybe they changed all of the URL structures on the website. Maybe they hired a new SEO company who knows what happened there, but at least you have the data and the knowledge that she'd go away and an awesome what happened and find out exactly what is the core problem for this particular website. So this is why it's a really good idea to check the website's organic traffic. And it's going to give you more information and put you in a better position to maybe sell your SEO services, or at least get us closer to actually solving the problem. That brings us to the end of this video. And I'll see you in the next one. 26. Conclusion.. goodbye for now: Hello Now SEO audit in experts. Well, I certainly hope this isn't a goodbye forever and it's just a goodbye for now. I thank you so much for making it to the end of the course of me, I'm really taking the time to understand how the carrier and extensive manual SEO audit, understanding how to order a website is going to make it so much more easier to rank a website onto the first page of Google purely because what you are building upon has a strong foundation. I cannot thank you enough for choosing me to be the person who teaches you all about SEO audit. I'm really, really humbled and grateful for your support. I wish you tons and tons of success. Whether you are using SEO audit is to audit your own website or even order a client site as part of your SEO agency service, wherever you go is, I can say with confidence that you now know way more than a majority of so-called SEO experts when it comes to SEO audit, believe me, a lot of people are going to be absolutely confused when you mention to them that there are four different parts of an SEO audit, a lot of them are just going to turn around and say her four different parts. What do you mean literally, you now know way more than a majority of so-called SEO experts. I truly sincerely hope this course has given you everything more respected to gain from it. I really hope you found the course valuable. So please do leave me a review and share your experience. It would mean the world to me if you could leave me some feedback, it would also be great if you could share the course on your social media platforms and share it with anyone who you think would get value from it. Sharing is caring. Once again, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I hope you loved it. I had a great time making this course and hopefully I'll be seeing you in another course shortly. Bye for now.