How to Do an SEO Audit Using Google Search Console | Ep. #145

Published Dec 23, 2016, 11:00 AM

In Episode #145, Eric and Neil teach us how we can do an SEO audit using Google Search Console. Since SEO plays such a valuable part in our content marketing, we need to tighten our SEO campaigns and understand how they work. Learn more about how you can best utilize your audits from Google Search Console and make the changes that drive more traffic to your website faster and more efficiently.

Time Stamped Show Notes:
  • 00:27 – Today’s topic: How to Do an SEO Audit Using Google Search Console
  • 00:32 – Make sure you have Google Analytics and Google Search Console installed
    • 01:02 – Both are free to install
  • 01:50 – Login to your console, then add and verify your website
  • 02:04 – Go to search traffic and search analytics and sort by pages
  • 02:28 – Tick box on clicks, impressions, position, and click-thru rates
  • 02:56 – Change the ticked box from Pages to Queries
    • 03:02 – It will show you all the queries that are driving you traffic to that page
    • 03:12 – Look for the ones that have high click-thru rates and low position
    • 03:27 – See what percentages are higher than normal
  • 03:47 – Make sure keywords are in your page, title tags, and meta descriptions
  • 04:06 – Look at what you have in the search appearance section
  • 04:13 – Have your AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) set up to create a better experience for your visitors
  • 05:05 – Have a sitemap for your website
  • 05:25 – Check crawl and crawl errors to find out where Google finds errors
  • 06:39 – A CDN (content delivery network) solution helps people and Google can access your website faster
  • 07:09 – The search traffic section lets you see linkings to your site
  • 07:23 – Explore tools like Ahrefs, SEM Rush and Moz if you plan to pursue SEO
  • 07:37 – Look at your top linked content and check in with people linking to you
  • 08:10 – Look at your traffic in the past 90 days
  • 08:35 – Look for missing, duplicate, and short title tags
  • 09:27 – That’s it for today’s episode!
3 Key Points:
  1. Google Analytics and Google Search Consoles are essential tools for SEO audits and they’re free!
  2. Keywords are of the utmost IMPORTANCE – remember to spread them in your content, metadata, and title tags.
  3. Double check your crawl errors and fix them so people can access your website faster.

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Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Sue. All right, guys, before we start, we got a special message from our sponsor. If you want to rank higher on Google, you gotta look at your page speed time. The faster website loads, the better off you are with Google's Core Vital update. That makes it super super important to optimize your site for low time. And one easy way to do it is use the host that Eric and I use, dream Hosts. So just go to dream host or Google it, find it, check it out, and it's a great way to improve your low time. Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Sue and I'm Neil Patel, and today we're going to talk about how to do an CEO audit. So within the framework of ten minutes, we're going to try to make this as actionable as possible. So first and foremost, when you're doing an SEO audit, you do want to make sure that, first of all, hopefully you have Google Analytics. Hopefully you have Google Search Console. Those are two good places to start. I do like using Google Search Console to see if there's any craw errors on the website, you know, the traffic decrease at a certain point. And I also like taking a look at you know, top performing content as well, right, what has the highest click through rates well with average positions and also you know queries that I'm ranking for as well. You know, Google Search Console it's free, same thing with Google Analytics, it's free. You can take a look at what's going on exactly and start there first, right, start there to see what's happening on your website. What are the top performing pages, what are queries that could use that could use help, what's you know barely uh, you know, what are some high value pages that are ranking well that you can perhaps push into you know, the you know, the top five positions for for Google. So you can take a look at that high level view and decide what you want to do for there. And that's a bit starting point for SEO audience. Yeah, and because this is short, right, we're doing ten minute episodes. Eric, let's do something interesting. Why not, let's just focus on Google Search console and breakdown how to do an audit using Google Search Console, because I think that'll work out really well for people, be actionable and everyone has it. So, as Eric mentioned, go log into Google Search Console, make sure your site is added. If it's not added, then what you want to do is addit, verify, etc. Within a few days at the latest, you start collecting quite a bit of data and then you can go from there. The first thing you want to end up doing is you want to go to search traffic. Once you load up the site right in Search console, there's an AV option called Search Traffic. Then you want to go under Search Analytics and instead of sorting by queries, sort by pages. And the reason being is you make page changes, you don't make a query change, right, So you want to sort by pages. Then you want to have the tich marks clicked for checked off, which would be clicks, impressions, position, and click through rate. And then once you figure out the pages right, it lists all the pages and it's sorted by the ones that are getting the most clicks. You can look at the ones that are getting most clicks. First click on the first result, and that first result will load up that page and only that page and show the graph for total clicks, total impressions, average click through rate, and average positioning. Once that page is loaded up, change the tickbox from pages to queries and now it'll take a bit to load, but it'll show you all the queries that are driving you traffic to that web page, the clicks that you're getting from each of the queries, the impressions, click through rate, and positioning. Look for the ones that have a high click through rate and have a low position right like let's say position five or lower, and the ones that have a high click through rate. And the way you determine what have a high click through rate just look at the numbers right eyeball it. See what's higher than normal. See what's in the double digit percentiles. That's not that's ranking let's say number five or above five percent, that's ranking above number five, because that's pretty high, above meaning like six, seven, eight, nine, right or below number five. Technically, and with those keywords, make sure they're in your page. Make sure those keywords, if possible, or the ones that are close enough to the most popular keywords, are also in your title tags and meta descriptions. Doing that simple change will start helping you get more search traffic. That's a big one. And I would say also looking at Google Search console right now, I'm actually digging around at the moment, I would recommend also going to the search appearance section and taking a look at what you have going on. Right So the big thing, you know, Neil's talked about AMP or accelerated Mobile pages. One of the sites I'm looking at right now does not have AMP set up, so they have a simple call to action right there, get started with AMP. And I think a key point of emphasis here, whenever I click on a Facebook Instant article or whenever I click on a Google AMP article, the experience is just a lot better. Right I get there, There's just this weird feeling when I see a little lightning icon and I'm able to load the article really quickly, get what I need and then just leave. And certainly you can add a call to action to your articles, but just overall creating a better experience for your users, AMP is just going to get bigger and bigger. So as of you know this recording, you should at least be adding it to your repertoire. And then also you can also check, you know what kind of structure data that you have on the website. And also I would also recommend taking a look at the one thing a lot of people don't do is the site map portion, right, I do recommend or I do remember in the past when we did not have a site map for certain websites. After we added a site map, we just it seems like, you know se O one on one, a lot of people still tend to forget it right. Adding a site map and specking out you know, word things should be exactly. That does help out and you do in some cases get a boost from from traffic. Yeah. Also in the navigation in the Google Search console, click on crawl and click on crawl air. This is a big one that catches up a lot of news site owners and people who are just starting out with SEO. You'll find all the errors that Google's finding within your site. It could be dead links, it could be people linking to those pages and they're no longer alive. It could be you once have those pages and then you remove them, whatever it may be. You don't want to have too many errors. So if Google keep seeing errors, you're going to notice that your rankings will keep tanking over time. But if your site has no errors, no crawl issues right and under the cross section, you can look at crawl errors, cross stats, and these things will help you determine. You know, how many pages is Google crawling on your site? How long does it take them per download? Because if it takes them too long to download your pages, you'll notice that they're not going to download as many pages. But if they can download a lot of pages with less effort, less server resources on there, and they'll crawl way more pages. So looking at the cross section tells you a lot of key things such as what issues you may be having with your site which is going to stop you from ranks, as well as is it taking Google too much time to crawl your site, because if it is, then you may want to think about changing your host or getting a faster server, or using a CDM solution right, which stands for Content and Delivery Network, which means that like companies like Akamai, will place your website across servers throughout the whole world, so in that way, other people can get access to it faster as well as Google can get access to your site faster as well from their different data centers and CDNs certainly help a lot things become a lot more. Basically, you can compare to we're talking a couple of seconds to maybe one second or so in some cases, so it's basically a lot faster what I'm looking at right here. For Google Search Console, if you go to a search traffic section and you look at the links to your site, you can see who's linking to your site the most. You can expand on this table and then download the latest links as well. So if you're not paying for an SEO tool right now, this is at least a basic way to get go about it. I do recommend you know, if you're looking to get more serious with SEO, you probably want to explore a tool like h REFS or sea rush or even mos as well, just to see get more granular data on the people that are linking to you, and you can also look at your top linked content as well. The thing I like about seeing who's linking to you You You can come to these people and say, hey, I noticed you guys have been linking to us a lot. You know, definitely appreciate it. You know, what else can we do with each other? You know, we love to partner up? Can we do anything for you, so you start to build a relationship there. It's not so much just looking at the link. You build out a relationship with people in your niche, and that way you just become bigger and bigger that way, versus just trying to go for the link all the time. Being able to look at your most linked content. That's also really good too, just to see what your top performers are and then you can compare it with your analytics. The other thing I like to do is also look at you go back to the search traffic search analytics section, look at your traffic for the last ninety days or so. If you feel like something's been dropping, you can always Google you know what kind of updates have been happening. There's also there's graphs out there that you can compare your traffic to and see, you know, if any update has hit you at all. And then you can also check if any manual actions have been taken on your site. Neil, Yeah, another thing to look at. I just signed an error on my website doing this right now as we're doing this podcast. Go to search your parents, go to HTML improvements and look for duplicate title tags and missing title tags, as well as short title tags or ones that are too long. Make sure you fix all those. So I just went into duplicate title tags and I noticed in the Spanish section of my website, my guys created two of the exact same blog posts. I'm like, why do we have two of the exact same blog posts and they're published on different dates? One was published in October and what was I mean, what was published in August and what was published in September? And I was like, this is really silly. So I messaged the guys not always the title tag the exact same, but the content is too. I'm like, why do we have two pages on the same posts and content? But looking at those little things, even if you're advanced SEO, you'll find errors because we're humans, right, we make errors, all right. I think that's it for this episode of Marketing School. I think we can get we can dive even deeper by I think we need to split it, probably into two episodes, so we'll see you tomorrow. Let us know what you think about this episode, and Doculator. This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of, and don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow right here on Marketing School