🏁SEO Audit

SEO Audit establishes a Funnel view of site's performance with search engines and answers the question: "When along the funnel opportunities are missed"?

SEO Audit addressed the following issues

1. How is the site seen by a search engine's robots?

2. What do they actually know and "take home" (being selective)?

3. Where users land on the site?

4. Which queries (and rankings) bring users?

But why it's even important (if at all)? Because I treat SEO audit, especially in eCommerce, as a way to establish a Funnel view to SEO performance of the site's pages.

---

Funnel view to SEO performance of pages (all pages vs. proportion of pages that make it to each step):

1. Known pages (scope of the report)

2. Crawled pages

3. Indexed pages

4. Ranked pages

5. Convert pages

A Funnel view of a large e-Commerce site (visualized using Botify)

The funnel answers the question "When (along the funnel) the opportunities are missed?" and is premised on the following approach that a page needs to be:

1. Technically accessible to robots.

2. Found (on site) and examined by search engines.

3. Once evaluated, accepted as worth indexing.

4. Selected for showcasing in search results as a potential appropriate answer.

5. Clicked, depending on the position in SERP, on how it's presented and how its matches the user search intent.

6. Generate revenue as users visit it.

The funnel approach is beneficial since it emphasises:

• The right sequence - Do right things in the right order?, e.g. why work on page quality if Google never finds a page?

• The fact that Extra-funnel life may exist - known pages ≠ existing pages, some existing pages may not be exposed to robots

• Helps unify the understanding why pages drop out of the funnel.

SEO Audit Structure

The SEO audit report contains two main parts:

1. Summary and

2. SEO metrics

Summary

• High level SEO performance overview (extracted from research data)

• Action board: recommendations (with priorities and implementation roadmap).

• Opportunities and alerts

SEO metrics

The most important of which are Website Analysis Metrics

These come from crawlers and we look at them to understand and explain the Performance metrics we see later in the Funnel view. If we want to improve our results, we need to make changes within the site itself.

SEO performance metrics vs Website analysis metrics

1. Accessibility metrics

These answer the question “can search engines can access the pages on your site easily and successfully”?

Usually contains the following metrics:

• Distribution of PageRank

• Performance (Core Web Vitals)

• HTTP codes (errors, answers from search engines)

• Incoming links

• Outcoming links

• Sitemaps

2. Content metrics

Answers the question: "what exactly will search engine robots see on the page"?

• Quality

• Similarities / Duplicates

• Canonicals

• HTML tags

• Structured data

SEO Audits comes as a part of Basic or Regular packages.

Basic

For small eCommerce sites.

SEO audit.

Market and competition analysis.

SEO Strategy refinement (vs Marketing, Lead generation, etc).

Action plan for stakeholders (developers, adjacent teams, etc).

Monthly SEO audit(s) and SEO recommendations.

SEO performance monthly analysis

Q&A, ad hoc research

Regular

For medium and large eCommerce sites.

SEO audit

Market and competition analysis

Identification of large upside opportunities

SEO Strategy refinement (vs Marketing, Lead generation, etc)

SEO recommendations and Action plan for stakeholders (developers, adjacent teams, etc)

Programmatic SEO PRDs

SEO Quality Assurance Framework development

SEO performance monthly analysis

Ad hoc SEO analysis, Q&A

Check the following articles

SEO Audit: Template, Interpretation of Accessibility and Content Metrics

SEO Audit: Annotated Example

How Google crawls the web? What elements impact Google crawl?