How to Audit a Website: Live SEO Audit With UberSuggest

In order for your website to be successful, you need to make sure it is optimized for search engines. 

This means that your site should be designed in such a way that it is easy for search engines to find and index your content.

The formal concept or name of this is called site architecture and of course, search engine optimization.

Fortunately, there are a few simple things you can do to improve your website's SEO. B and I talk all about it in Episode 17 of the Simple and Smart SEO Show.

And like I said, even at the beginning of this episode, I've been trying hard to lean into imperfect action.

Or, if I didn't say that we were recording yet: I've been trying to lean into imperfect action. And do - and then figure out the not so good things in hindsight.

My friend asked, how do you like having a podcast? I said, I love having a podcast.

And she's someone that likes to look put together.

I know she would wanna edit her episodes. I know she would want everything like to the T ... like, perfection.

And that is how I am, but this is like the one thing I was telling her.

I'm usually a perfectionist about everything, but this is the one thing where I'm like, let's send it out.

Let's not edit it.

And I know that it's been more important to you to edit it. It's so funny.

It's so funny because it's not how I am.

I'm trying to lean into imperfect action. To do stuff and kind like fix the plane as I'm flying it.

So this will be another example of that, with doing a website audit of my website.

We've never done this in so much of like a formatted way, right? Is that fair to say?

That is so fair to say. Now for, for you, our friend who is joining us right now, we are making today a little bit more fun and uncomfortable.

We are gonna take turns, auditing each other's website, SEO audits. Search engine optimization.

So one of the reasons why we're doing this is because we're also going to be offering this as a service.

There's going be a place down show notes, where you can have one of these SEO audits done for yourself for only $99.

So we're gonna kind of walk through the audit and show what it's like to audit a website for SEO.

Not only are we going to do the SEO audit, but we're going talk to you about it, and talk you through it!

Do you think I need to go ahead and like do a full SEO audit here?

Or do you think we can put your website into Ubersuggest and go with what pops up right here?

I would say let's start with the Ubersuggest site audit tool.

Also, what comes to mind when you think of doing a website audit?

Like what audit tools are you thinking of?

I know Ubersuggest is one thing, and we have lots of plugins we could look at.

You've mentioned Ahrefs and SEO Surfer.

Oh yeah! Surfer SEO. I always mess up the name of that one.

Yeah. I almost think we've gotta do 'em each. Because they're different, the website audit process is different.

Today we could do Ubersuggest, okay?

And then next time we could do a Surfer content audit.

That would be cool.

We also have someone who wants to come on and talk about that, one of my Instagram friends.

Surfer is life-changing, you know. At least business-changing for sure.

They're mind blowing because it's like, you can do what with what on the internet? So yeah.

It's true, people. Okay. Well let's take a look here.

Okay. So, the last search engines crawl that happened. When the Google spider bots went around your website URL was on September 5th.

So you know, that was yesterday.

One thing I've noticed is people who have Ubersuggest, their stats pop up faster.

Than people who don't have Ubersuggest, which makes sense.

But when I do SEO audits for other people who, you know, have never done a website audit before  on UberSuggest it takes a while.

So, go into Ubersuggest site audit tool and you hit the site audit button.

When you put your website in, it could tell you this crawl is going to take a few minutes or 10 minutes or whatever.

10 minutes, yeah. It always makes it scared. It's like, you're gonna be here forever.

Yes!

So we're gonna start with the on page SEO score.

And this is your SEO score for all pages scanned in the website audit.

I'm actually shocked by that number. Yeah, because it's a zero to 100 score was zero being the lowest possible score.

And 100 being the highest possible score. And this score represents the ratio of issues found to the number of checks performed by the SEO audit tools.

So, you know, the number of checks they ran through this program divided by the mistakes it found.

That's how they get that number.

And so we want to use this as our main guide to keep track of our SEO if we're going to use Ubersuggest.

Okay. So B's score right now is 84, which is great.

I'm shocked. Yeah, good job. Thank you.

Now, I know we're not gonna talk about other other SEO tools. I'm used to seeing like a 90 or above being great, versus Uber suggesting 84 as great.

I definitely would recommend like trying to get to 90 or above.

It's still awesome that you don't have a lot of problems. 

The reason your score is so high, but not a 90 is because you have a few issues that aren't major issues.

No major issues, like a whole bunch of redirect errors or something like broken links.

If it was that type of thing, you'd have a lower score. We'll hop into your SEO issues in a second.

So you're ranking for 362 organic keywords, which is awesome. It is. That's good.

Most of them, the last time I've checked this, they were massage related.

Ooh, well you're, you're ranking for client testimonial template.

You know, this is SEO audit is amazing. Yeah. Friends, good job. This is good.

Yeah. How long have you had that template up? Oh, that's a fantastic question.

And the answer is, I don't remember. I'm trying to think of when I worked for this client, and when she suggested that I sell it.

I want to say, end of Q1. So sometime in the spring. It's had some time awesome to percolate on the internet.

Well, it first starts to kind of pop onto the scene that you have a position ranking when you get into a hundred.

When you break a hundred, so like position 99 or whatever.

So, you're already at page three on this and you're almost to page two.

I'm so glad I haven't been checking up with this. I looked a month ago. So I'm glad that we're doing this website audit. 

So another thing I always like to look at is: which keywords do I have ranking in what position?

So yeah. I love checking the position. It's fun. It's like, okay, where am I toward the top?

And then what what's going on at the bottom, and where are there opportunities where I could take that?

And get it going up the ladder. Right, exactly.

And I will download that results page. Either from here on Ubersuggest or within Google Search Console and put it in a spreadsheet.

So that way you can see it or clients can see it like the movement of those keywords over time. So that's kind of a neat way to do it too.

So, you know, I'm all about some spreadsheets and color coding. I know.

Well, I was so you've brought up something that's good, too.

If anyone listening wants to do this, but they don't have Ubersuggest? Let's say they want to save their $99 and do this on their own and find a budget friendly way.

Make sure you're plugged in with Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

You can do something very similar in there. At least we're checking for the keywords, right?

Oh my goodness. We have four show ideas from starting this one because now we have to do one on Google Search Console.

It's the brain tornadoes! Oh my gosh. Crystal with the podcast ideas. 

Your domain authority is 17. 

When you started this journey, do you remember what it was?

It was single digits. Which single digit I wanna say it was eight or nine. It wasn't great, but it wasn't like awful.

I had some domain authority. This is fantastic. The last time I checked it was 12.

So, look at that spike in the graph! We're checking it out.

Do you remember when you even kind of started? September 2020 when I started with copywriting.

It was early March or April, 2021 when I changed my website for being massage heavy to, "Hey, I'm a copywriter!"

I have one page of, I do massage therapy.

Well, that makes sense because see your, your graph is starting to grow at March 2021.

And then in September of 2021, it does this like massive jump.

You know, and we're continuing to see a steady increase. That's incredible. 

That follows with what we say this to our clients. 

Don't expect anything to improve with your SEO before four months.

Four months, six months is where you're gonna start to see any kind of movement in organic search results. This tracks right along with that. 

That's six months, five to six months, depending on when I did actually rewrite my site.

Yeah. So good for you. And then, you've got referring domains!

97 referring domains and how 75 back links, which is fantastic.

I know why I have so many backlinks. Can we chat about that for a minute?

Yes. Please tell us your secrets.

Let's talk about, well, it's not so much secrets, but three things that I've done.

The first is help a reporter out. It's helpareporter.com.

I heard about this from one of our mutual friends who does PR. 

KJ Blattenbauer. Did I say that right? Sorry, KJ, if I messed up your name!

She was telling us about HARO in a podcast episode.

She mentioned this and I was like, oh, I'll check it out. So, I've got myself doing that.

I pitched when I was first signed up with them. I was pitching three to five topics a week at the most.

And then, if I can't read these emails - because you get up to three emails a day. If I can't get to it, I'm not even gonna open it.

I delete it so that I don't overwhelm myself. So I know that that was step one for why I have so many external links.

Step two was pitching myself to podcasts. That's another one that will link back to your website.

And then the third one, and I was telling you the other day that I've noticed since you and I started our podcast. 

That has driven so many more external links because we have, I'm not gonna say the right words. We have a podcast thingy majigger.

And that will connect us to a whole bunch of other websites.

So I have a page of my site. That's dedicated to the podcast. It serves a couple purposes.

One, if someone wants to listen to the podcast, they can listen to the podcast from my site.

I am able to have a page that has the form on there, if anyone wants to be a guest on the show.

And then I also link any relevant pages and free resources that I want to drive people to anything that I bring up in the shows.

So HARO, help a reporter out. I've pitched myself there. I've gotten on podcasts. That way I've been in articles. I've been pitching myself, and then our podcast.

So let's talk about some of these things.

What's the importance of referring domains?

They're votes for your website from other websites. They're saying that we kind of vouch for your web pages.

So, the referring domains that you've got here look amazing. Like this Squarespace versus WordPress, which is better in 2022?

That was a HARO. Okay. That's what I was thinking. So well done.

Thank you. Awesome job. And then it looks like the Scaling Wellness podcast. That's a recent one, but he's got a pretty big listenership, followership follower count.

I don't know any of the words you wanna use that actually fit there.

And then, the "best social media marketing strategy for new massage therapy practice. "

That was through HARO and I'm pretty sure that was a podcast.

Well, so what's interesting is that you have some high authority sites pointing to you.

Yeah. WebsiteBuilderExpert.com. Their domain authority is 57. So on a scale of one to 100, their domain authority is 57, which is great.

And then you have another one, it's 59.

Spectrum.com is pointing at you. "The common business mistakes you made when first starting?" Oh, check that out, I forgot.

Was that another HARO? Yeah, that would've been been a HARO. Wow. You go girl, this is cool.

I remember see B tried to tell me for a long time.

She was like, you should do HARO! And she would be like forwarding me stuff. And I'm like, I'm too busy.

I am notorious for that. I still forward people.

This happened a couple months ago. I have a client who deals with a certain kidney disease and I found something and it was talking about PKD. 

So I forwarded it and I was like, Jess, do, do you want me to like send you stuff like this sometimes? And she was like, oh yeah, that'd be great. 

So that's another amazing benefit of being friends with B, like there's a thousand.

She's sweet, but she's also good at sending you emails of information. Things that you don't want to do, but would be helpful for your business.

And then you, you have another one that's 70 with massage chairs and then one's 77. Oh yeah.

And then check out the very tops! Simple and Smart SEO Show!

Buzzsprout is the website backlink that has the highest domain authority.

Yep. Remember how we were talking about that in one of the previous episodes? Where we weren't sure whether it's good?

We have, we have the benefits of both. We have our own domains. We're building our own podcast domain authority, but we still get the link from Buzzsprout.

So that's awesome. And we've been doing this since, when did we launch? Was it like April? May?

I know how to check. Hold on. I was gonna say it was gonna be March. So I know it wasn't no, we got pushed back.

I'm on Spotify. April 26th was when our first episode dropped. Awesome. Well, good for you.

We'll look at backlinks next in this website audit.

Backlinks are the actual incoming hyperlinks from other websites to the domain.

So, there's like a slight difference between backlinks and referring domains. I was always splitting hairs with that one.

I always thought that was so weird. I guess it could be because the referring domain might have more than one link coming to you.

Buzzsprout only has one link coming to me.

Yeah. Anyway, they're different. We can't give a simpler explanation. Yeah. So, we'll have to circle back to that.

Get back to us on that one!

So let's take a look at the pages discovered in this SEO audit.

You've got 314 pages. Seven blocked.

I was going to say, it's a password protected page, but tell me your thought.

Shopify blocks your shipping pages and your checkout pages. They're behind that paywall and you don't need it indexed by Google.

There's 13 pages redirected. A permanent redirect is a 301.

And that's good! Because whatever you did at, www(dot) whatever.com/one, you can point it at /two.

Everything that happened on, /one, the links and internal links transfer now.

What is not good is what's called a broken link.

And that's when you end up at a 404 page.

So let's take a look at what your 404 pages are. We're gonna search through all these guys.

If we exported it to an Excel spreadsheet or Google sheets, we'd be be able to sort it a little bit faster. You've got seven pages of pages.

Most of them are successful. So, that's good.

So, your theory is right. Cause look, the cart, right? It's blocked.

This is interesting.

It says blocked robots for the cart and for the search bar. Does that mean that it won't let robots try to do any of the searchy or the purchasing of things?

It means that there's HTML code on there. 

It tells Google's robots or search engine robots not to scan or index that page.

Those first four are your blog pages. It's almost, gosh, what do they call that?

They call it canonical. They index the first, you know, Brittany Herzberg dot com / blog.

But other than that, then they, sometimes they block it. I have mixed feelings about that.

How does that work then? So many pages of blogs with different content, you know? I'm not exactly sure how that works.

We'll find, we'll find somebody to answer that question.

And then your author page is blocked. What does that mean? I'm not sure. Check with Squarespace.

We do have a broken link here, which you'll want to fix.

It looks like it's in your shop.

So, change that page and redirect it.

You have some 302 redirects, which means that it's seen as temporary by Google.

So, I mean, they're not wrong, a lot of those are my downloads.

A lot of those are the downloads that I have. That's interesting.

They're not hosted elsewhere? It's a PDF that I actually put in my Squarespace site. On the back end.

Is there, is there a reason why you don't host them off-site? Is there a benefit to hosting them right there?

I was trying to give those downloads to people immediately.

Okay. Well, for future reference, Amazon S3 is free and a lot of people use that.

Let's look at site speed.

There looks like there's some long loading here. So some stuff that we can improve on the site speed?

This is desktop. Ubersuggest defaults to desktop on the left. I want to go to mobile.

That's the most important.

A lot of that for me is the images. I've learned a lot recently about how much images can slow down your website.

I know that I don't know the proper way to put the images on there.

One of our other SEO copywriting friends shared she figured out how to do that for her website. After many years.

Here's my issue. I have some workarounds what I created in Shopify to cut my image size down.

But at the same time it's like maintaining photo quality AND reducing load time is such an art.

Ok, so load time makes up the site speed score. This is the time it takes for the page's main content to load.

For reference, an ideal speed is less than two and a half seconds. You don't have to have Ubersuggest to do this.

The website auditing process

It's true - if you want your website to be successful, you have to optimize it for search engines. 

But it's tough to know all of these things AND be an expert in your business. That's why we're offering our $99 SEO website audits.

We want to help you understand how to improve your website's SEO.

Simple things like using keyword-rich titles and descriptions. Keywords that your clients actually use!

Making sure your site loads quickly on mobile devices. 

We want you to understand the importance of fixing broken links and structuring your URLs for search.

A website SEO audit can empower you to make little changes with a big impact. 

By taking the steps identified in our website audits, your SEO efforts will improve your website's ranking and increase traffic to your site.

Listen in to this episode of the podcast and pick up even more SEO tips to implement on your website!