What do you look for in a local website audit?

[zach.todd]

Hey everyone, I'm hoping to learn more about the factors that local search experts weigh when auditing a website. I'm thinking about this from a local perspective, so items like embedded maps or driving directions are fair game.

When it comes to the website attached to a GMB listing, what do you consider? Here's what I look into.

• Backlink Profile
  • Quantity of referring domains and links.
  • Link quality. Do the links have topical relevancy, or are they coming from spun content on PBNs?
  • What is the dofollow/nofollow ratio? Is it reasonable, or does it seem overcooked (i.e. 90%+ dofollow)?
  • Does the anchor text seem natural, or is it overstuffed with their money keywords? (Penalty potential).
• Health
  • Are the indexing/crawling basics, such as robots.txt, functioning properly?
  • Is the page heavily bloated and slow to load?
  • Are any pages returning a 404 or 500?
• Content
  • Does the home page copy adequately describe their services?
  • Do pages have a title, meta description, and H1 tag that fit the targeted keywords?
  • Is the word count roughly appropriate? (Here I look to the top ranking competitors for a ballpark idea of good content length.)
• Structure
  • How many pages are there overall?
  • Are the URLs easy to read and reflect the subject of the page?
  • How deeply nested are pages (i.e. should it really take 6 clicks to get to any page)?

Those are just some of the items I like to look into. I'm especially interested in competitor analysis as a means of finding out what's working (or not working).

Would love to hear what your process looks like!

 

[Rich Owings]

From the website section of a recent proposal:

• Review site for local SEO best practices and implement where possible
• Conduct a basic content audit and make recommendations for improvements
• Review configuration of your SEO plugin
• Conduct a detailed technical SEO audit
• Conduct an overall review of site structure
• Identify any duplicate and thin content issues
• Review Google Analytics for 404/page not found errors
• Review Google Analytics for algorithmic penalties, diversification of traffic sources, goal setup and other issues, and make recommendations for improvements
• Review conversion optimization in detail and make recommendations for additional improvements if warranted
• Review Google’s indexation of your site
• Review Google Search Console for errors and other issues
• Submit sitemaps (or update them as needed) to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
• Check your robots.txt file
• Conduct my own crawl to check for a wide range of issues
• Review schema markup
• Test mobile friendliness
• Review site-wide page load speed issues and make recommendations for improvements
• Review expertise, authority and trust signals

 

[zach.todd]

That's a pretty comprehensive list! I like the focus on Analytics and setting up conversion goals.

I'll admit content duplication is something I'm still not sure about. Some folks go as far as saying that you should only have one page focusing on a keyword topic, and anything more is "diluting" your search potential for that query. On the other end of the spectrum, you might consider duplication on a word for word basis. Curious if anybody has an opinion on that.

 

[Rich Owings]

My main focus there is thin content -- attachment pages not redirecting in WP, sitemap submissions of other pages with no content, excess tag and category pages, etc.

As far as keywords go, it's fine to mention them again in a blog post. Just be sure you link back to your primary page on that topic.

That's all just opinion though. There are many different ways to approach all this stuff.

 

[Barb Davids]

A couple more things I'd add that I do is look at the BrightLocal map ranker. Love that new feature. I also do a visual review of the top competitors in Google Maps. Screenshot each one and make note how they are different. Of course most of the time it's all over the board as to what each competitor does with their listing bu the visibility helps.

 

[dgrunited]

Hey everyone, I'm hoping to learn more about the factors that local search experts weigh when auditing a website. I'm thinking about this from a local perspective, so items like embedded maps or driving directions are fair game.

When it comes to the website attached to a GMB listing, what do you consider? Here's what I look into.

• Backlink Profile
  • Quantity of referring domains and links.
  • Link quality. Do the links have topical relevancy, or are they coming from spun content on PBNs?
  • What is the dofollow/nofollow ratio? Is it reasonable, or does it seem overcooked (i.e. 90%+ dofollow)?
  • Does the anchor text seem natural, or is it overstuffed with their money keywords? (Penalty potential).
• Health
  • Are the indexing/crawling basics, such as robots.txt, functioning properly?
  • Is the page heavily bloated and slow to load?
  • Are any pages returning a 404 or 500?
• Content
  • Does the home page copy adequately describe their services?
  • Do pages have a title, meta description, and H1 tag that fit the targeted keywords?
  • Is the word count roughly appropriate? (Here I look to the top ranking competitors for a ballpark idea of good content length.)
• Structure
  • How many pages are there overall?
  • Are the URLs easy to read and reflect the subject of the page?
  • How deeply nested are pages (i.e. should it really take 6 clicks to get to any page)?

Those are just some of the items I like to look into. I'm especially interested in competitor analysis as a means of finding out what's working (or not working).

Would love to hear what your process looks like!

It depends on the features provided to you by your SEO software. Explained slightly differently, your audit is limited to the limitations of your SEO software.

 

[Rich Owings]

It depends on the features provided to you by your SEO software. Explained slightly differently, your audit is limited to the limitations of your SEO software.

Unless you go old school and do it manually like I do!

 

[zach.todd]

Or you make your own software