0:00:00 In this training, you are going to learn how to set up, run, and analyze a technical website audit.
And in the process, you’re going to be able to generate tens of thousands of dollars in additional revenue for your agency or freelance business. That is revenue that you typically otherwise would not have gotten.
And the way that you’re going to generate this revenue, there’s a few different ways that these technical audits really help? And I guess the first question that a lot of people ask is, when should I be running a technical website audit?
And the answer is, anytime your client has an existing website, you should be running a technical website audit. 0:00:37
Whether they want you to work on that existing website, or whether they want you to redesign and rebuild a new website, it is still important to audit the existing website, okay? So either scenario, you need to be auditing the existing website.
If you are going to be doing work on the existing website, there’s that’s an obvious reason why you need to audit the existing website. And in those cases you need to charge for the audit.
Okay, so you directly charge for the audit, then the audit is going to reveal all of the things that need to be fixed and worked on, which becomes your statement of work, and then you’re gonna generate revenue from that statement of work. 0:01:16
So you get to generate revenue charging for the audit. You also get to generate revenue doing the work that the audit reveals.
That’s on an existing website. And that’s whether you’re doing SEO campaigns, performance campaigns, PPC campaigns, what have you.
There’s a lot of different reasons you might run an audit that they have to pay for that then reveals things that need to be resolved. Now, let’s say that they want a new website.
Okay. Why would you run an audit on an existing website when they want a new website?
A couple of different reasons. 0:01:46
Number one, we want to make sure that we scope the project properly. I have seen so many times where, uh, an agency freelancer, they go to somebody’s website, they poke around.
Okay. They literally, they just poke around in the navigation and in the footer.
And then they think they’ve seen everything. They’re like, Oh, well, I got a good sense of how big this website is.
And what they don’t realize is there’s dozens and dozens and dozens of published pages that have not really been linked to in any intuitive fashion or purposefully not linked to that they didn’t know existed. And it’s a very awkward conversation to have when you, you know, get a proposal and a statement of work together and a price and negotiation and sign a contract and get the first payment and then you start working and you realize, oh no, oh no, there’s a lot of pages that we didn’t see in the initial scoping process.
0:02:37 And now you got to go back to your client and have this conversation.
So you know, we didn’t really scope this project out properly, it seems. And so that price that we agreed on, and you’ve already partially paid for, is actually not going to be the real price because there’s all these pages that we just uncovered.
That is not a conversation you wanna have with your client. You need to run a technical website audit on every single website that you are scoping a new project for so that you have a clear, crystal clear understanding of the architecture of the existing website, the number of pages on the existing website, so on and so forth.
0:03:14 Also, it is very helpful, you run a technical audit like this, especially if the client is interested in SEO, but they don’t even have to be, right?
You run a technical website audit on their existing website even though you’re scoping a new project out, because you include this audit, and I often do this for free, because number one, it helps me scope the project properly, but number two, I can use it as ammunition by basically saying, hey, look at this audit report, look at all of the things wrong with your existing website, because they’re faced with a decision. 0:03:44
Do we proceed with a new website, get a redesign and a rebuild, or do we just kind of stick with our existing website because we think it’s doing just fine for us, right? That’s often a decision they are trying to make.
Well, you slap an audit on their desk, along with your proposal, showing all of these issues with their existing website and why that might be impacting their performance and rankings and all this other stuff that actually does matter leads so on and so forth and that just helps them make the decision oh I think we should proceed with getting a new website I you know we don’t want to keep these existing issues around and we don’t want to have pay to have them fixed because we could just they’re gonna get fixed in the rebuild and the redesign process anyway so that would be like a waste of money. 0:04:26
Let’s just go ahead and go with the redesign and the rebuild. So it’s generating revenue in the ways I’ve already talked about, but it can also generate additional revenue in a higher percentage of closed sales on new projects because it’s helping convince the client not to stick with their existing website.
So you can see here how this audit process and the tool that we’re gonna be using called Sightbulb, Sightbulb is $35 a month. I’m gonna go ahead and share my screen, we’ll dive right in.
This is Sightbulb. Sightbulb is $35 a month for the pro version.
0:05:01 I’m not an affiliate.
I don’t care if you buy Sightbulb or don’t buy Sightbulb. It’s the tool I use, it’s the tool I’m going to show you and teach you, and it’s up to you at that point.
What I don’t wanna hear is people complaining that, oh, there’s another tool I have to pay for, or $35 a month is super expensive. It is an absolute drop in the bucket compared to the revenue you are going to generate by doing these audits, and the insights that you are gonna gather from these audits which help you improve the websites that you are working on for your clients, everything that comes out of this is worth way more, way more, 100 times more minimum than that $35 a month.
0:05:40 So I don’t want to hear anything about the $35 a month.
Okay. It’s it don’t, that don’t, don’t be penny wise and pound foolish as they say, okay.
The price is a drop in the bucket. So what we need to do first is we need to figure out how to set up an audit.
You’re going to go to SiteBulb. You’re going to get a license, a pro license.
You’re going to download the software and then you need to know how to set up an audit. So that’s where we are going to start.
So we’re gonna go to new project and we are going to type in a project name. This is the client’s name, okay?
0:06:11 You are going to say new settings right here.
Start URL, go ahead and put in their URL. I’m just gonna put in giri.
co. We’re not even gonna run this audit.
I have a different audit that I already ran for a random website that we’re gonna take a look at. And then we’re gonna go to standard audit, Chrome crawler, under the crawler type, the one that renders JavaScript content.
And then the device is going to be desktop to start out with. I would highly recommend you also run a mobile audit as well.
0:06:39 And then we’re going to hit save and continue.
This is going to take just a second to pull up all of the settings that are available to you in a new audit. And we’re going to talk about which ones you should probably activate and which ones maybe aren’t so important and you also you know keep in mind can run different audits based on the reason you’re running the audit for.
If I’m doing a brand new redesign and I just want to see what all the existing URLs are on a website and just the main glaring issues on the website I may not toggle certain things on. If a client is very interested in content and copywriting I might do the content area of this audit, whereas maybe I don’t do that for an audit for another reason.
So you want to kind of know what’s available to you and then go in and uncheck or check certain things that are going to be important. Search engine optimization, I’m almost always going to have that checked.
Under advanced settings right here, link analysis, yes. 0:07:34
External link analysis, yes. Duplicate content check, yes.
And I also check similar content and I also check readability okay I’m gonna close that advanced settings response versus render I typically do not have on page resources is a yes we’re gonna turn that on it’s gonna crawl all of these resource URLs right here good for various insights we’ll see the reports in just a minute. Performance and mobile friendly.
Yes, I want those to be turned on in most cases. Check for code coverage, check to parse technologies.
Okay, all of that is good. Structured data.
0:08:15 If I know that SEO is important to a client, I am going to turn on structured data, get a structured data report.
Security, yes, I wanna check for security. International, for me, not super important.
I work almost exclusively with US-based businesses that are doing business only in the US. But if you are international, you are going to want to turn that on right there.
Spell checker. 0:08:40
If I don’t care about the site’s existing content, because we’re going to be redoing it all anyway, and especially if we’re doing a redesign or rebuild, then I’m not going to worry too much about spell checking stuff. This is just gonna make my audit take longer to put together.
It’s gonna add more pages to the PDF and so on and so forth and it’s just really not that important. 0:08:58
But if I’m doing work on an existing website and it’s SEO related work or content related work or something like that, then yeah, and I’m gonna be working on existing pages. Yeah, I wanna run the spell check or audit and go in and clean a bunch of that stuff up while I’m in there doing the work and it’s an extra deliverable that we get to put on the statement of work.
Okay accessibility, absolutely we’re going to check accessibility in almost every case 2. 1 level AA.
Best practices needs to be checked. Do not check color contrast.
It says right here it adds five seconds to each URL crawled. I can verify that that’s the case.
Your report will take an absolute eternity if you turn on color contrast. You need to be checking color contrast with another tool and by the way this accessibility audit only covers 35 to 40 percent of checks that can be automated.
Most accessibility audit cannot be automated. This gives you a little bit of a jump, a little bit of a head start, a little bit of an insight, but do not treat this as a full-blown accessibility audit.
It is not that. Okay?
Okay, once you’ve run your audit, you are going to end up in your project details area. 0:10:05
This is not a real client of mine. It is literally a random website.
I just Googled plumbers in Atlanta, chose one in the top three, being that it’s in the top three, the website is probably not a total disaster. But I wanted something I didn’t even know anything about.
It’s like, Hey, let’s pretend like we just got this client and we’re running an audit for the first time and we’re gonna go through the report together and I’m going to show you how I use the report to start to formulate a list of deliverables. Now, I’m not gonna do every part of the technical analysis.
Sometimes this process can take a few hours, okay? 0:10:41
And in the cases where you’re running the audit because you’re gonna be doing work on an existing website or because you’re trying to identify the cause for specific issues that are happening with the website that have been reported to you or whatever the case may be, you need to be charging directly for these audits. It is time consuming in those cases.
If this is a new project and I’m gonna scope out a redesign and a rebuild and I just wanna get a glimpse at the existing issues of the website, I’m not doing the full blown technical analysis, put a statement of work, I’m not doing all of that side of things and I’m just gonna run the audit for free. Okay, so in the cases where the audit really benefits me and getting the new project, then I’m gonna run the audit for free.
In the cases where I’m actually doing this as my job to go fix things or start an SEO campaign or a PPC campaign or a performance campaign or what have you on an existing website, absolutely they are paying for me to do the audit and then all of the deliverables that come out of it, they’re going to be paying for those as well. Alright, so let me open this audit, click the view audit button.
It does take a second to bring up the entire report and I’ll just kind of show you how I work through the process. First of all, yeah, I’m gonna look at the high-level scores here and I see an SEO score of 91.
Keep in mind this is technical SEO. It doesn’t say anything else about their SEO.
It only says, there’s only a score of the technical SEO. Okay, SEO is a large topic that has a lot of different moving parts, a lot of parts that are extremely important.
Technical SEO is one small part of SEO. It is not the overall, this is not an overall SEO score.
This is a technical SEO score. Hopefully I’ve made that clear, okay?
A security score and a performance score. Now first thing I do is I go to PDF report right here.
0:12:47 I’m going to check every single box including mobile friendly right here, and I’m gonna say print PDF, and we’re gonna allow this to take place, and it’s gonna open when it’s done, and we’re gonna look at this together.
One of the best parts about SiteBulb is the white labeled audit report that you are able to generate in seconds. And again, you’re gonna hand this over to the client, and a few different things are gonna happen.
0:13:12 Number one, I am gonna summarize the report findings for my client.
We’re gonna have a conversation about it. I’m gonna tell them all of the major stuff, okay?
But I’m gonna hand the entire report to them. And you’re gonna see when we go through it.
This report is very, very helpful for a few different reasons. Number one, here it is right here.
Number one, biggest one for a client, okay? 0:13:35
Let me jump to the top of this report right here and you can kind of see what’s going on. So it’s completely white labeled, right?
It’s just, there’s just no branding on it whatsoever, which is really, really, really nice, okay? You don’t have to like pay extra for that.
It’s just, this is how Sightbulb works. The client is not going to read every page of this.
Guys, there are 80, 93 pages. There’s 93 pages in this report.
0:14:02 But the client is going to skim it and they’re gonna be like wow One this is impressive Two I had no idea that websites were this technical and there’s and by the way Like if they do dive in and start reading certain things, right and you can see there’s no issues with these things But there’s low issues with these things They can start reading about all these technical aspects of our job the stuff that we worry about Constantly and talk about all the time, they’re gonna read this stuff and be like, I had no idea that there was this much stuff to consider, to think about.
Remember when we talk about valuing our work, right? And a client not understanding, right?
They’ve seen a Wix commercial and they think anybody can build a website. They have no idea that this amount of technical knowledge and know-how and checks and things like that go into the work that we do.
0:14:57 And this is a high-level, just quick glimpse.
They don’t even need to study it to realize there’s a lot here. And I really need an expert handling my website.
I need someone who cares about these things handling my website. I mean, Sitebump tells them what the implications of a lot of this stuff is, right?
So you’re educating the client by handing them a report like this. And they’re just getting the sense that, wow, these people are on their Ps and Qs.
0:15:24 These people are, they have the technical know-how to tackle my project.
And this goes a long way in terms of selling them a new website, for example, okay? But it also goes a long way in terms of showing them what’s wrong with their existing website.
But that’s the first step that I’m gonna do. I’m gonna generate this report, and then I’m gonna go over here, like in Basecamp, right?
So here’s the general report right here. We’ll do a, I’m basically gonna make a list of items, like tasks related to this audit, right?
So I’ll do a report review with the client, and then I’ll go in, and here’s my notes right here. Well what are my notes going to be?
They’re going to be the entire PDF report right there. And I’m going to hit save changes.
Okay, then I’m going to go back to our to-dos and we’re going to go on to the next thing. So I go into SiteBulb.
After I do the PDF report, I go to site visualizations and I go to the crawl tree. Okay, so what this is going to do, it’s going to give me a bird’s eye view of the architecture of this website.
I’m going to zoom in here and what we’re looking at here is the home page is the biggest dot and then you’re going to get all of your first level depth dots. Now if you don’t know anything about architecture what you typically want to see here is level ones and level twos.
You don’t want to see a lot of level threes. You don’t really want to see any fours, fives, sixes, sevens, etc.
Okay this is a fairly healthy looking domain. Okay, so we’ve got this first level Which says help guides which lets me know all of these URLs are basically living within this help guides section Okay, and that’s a good thing, right?
It’s a Compartmentalization of content on the website. It makes it easy for Google to crawl and understand what is going on here But I am seeing some level three links down here.
0:17:15 These ideally would be fixed.
You know, we would go in and say, why aren’t these level two links? Why are they level three links?
There’s another straggler over here. It would be really nice to see level ones and level twos, and that’s it.
Okay? And so we are going to go over.
I’m going to drop this in as another item to go over with the client okay and really just for our team as well so I’m going to go ahead and hit save changes there so now I’ve got a little overview of the site architecture I’ve got the full report going in my mind now I’m getting an understanding for how this website is laid out let’s go back to site bulb and I know that there’s a couple other things that we’re gonna need to address and potentially fix here, but I’m not seeing an absolute mess right off the bat. 0:18:08
I’m also wondering to myself, hey, these pages in this help guide section, is that like a blog? Is that kind of what they’ve called their blog?
And in that case, I’m seeing a lot of URLs and my immediate thought is, if this is built with a page builder, I really hope they used a template properly for this and like Gutenberg. I really hope they didn’t design every one of these URLs with the page builder.
0:18:33 And this is actually, I need to put a list here together.
Well, an item on our list, which is going to say audit blog template, okay? And I’m gonna hit, and now normally I’d be assigning that to myself or a team member or something like that.
But in this case, this is just a sample plumber, we’re not going to really assign these to anybody. But I need to know, I need to audit the blog template as part of my process to go in and find the answer to that question.
0:19:00 Okay?
Alright, let’s go back in to SiteBulb. Next thing I can do is go to the crawl map, and this is kind of a similar but different overview of the architecture of a website.
Alright, again, you know, fairly healthy looking website. I’m gonna go ahead and screenshot this.
Now, what is the difference between a healthy looking website and a not healthy looking website and yada, yada, yada? A little bit of it’s practice, a little bit of it is art and science kind of mixed together.
0:19:31 I will say this, Sightbulb has a fantastic blog article that covers how these overviews work and how to kind of interpret them.
And so I’m just gonna link you over there. I feel like you should just go ahead and read their overview of this.
But I’m gonna go in and I’m gonna add this to my report review. Okay, we’re gonna go ahead and edit here.
And this is the exact process that I go through, which is why, and again, this is more for if I’m gonna go do work on an existing website, an SEO campaign, a PPC campaign, a performance campaign, something like that, or maintenance and management has not been done on this website for a year or something, and somebody needs to go in and clean up a bunch of stuff. 0:20:13
I’m not gonna go to this level if I’m just running an audit to show the client that there’s a lot of stuff wrong with their existing website, so that they are more inclined to get the redesign and rebuild. In that case, I’m just doing that fast, you know, rapid fire audit, and then we’re moving on.
Okay, so I’m gonna throw this in here, and I’m gonna hit save changes, awesome. Okay, let’s go back.
0:20:37 Now, and by the way, this is not a gigantic website.
The bigger a website is, you know, the more data you’re gonna get in these visualizations, and the more potential problems they are, and so on and so forth. Okay, I’m gonna go over to URL reports and we’re gonna kind of go down the list right here.
So I’m gonna start in URLs. You see, we can see all URLs.
We can see internal URLs, external URLs. 0:21:01
Those are links to other places. And then resource URLs.
The one that is almost always the most important to me is the internal URLs report. And almost immediately, the first thing I’m going to do is go to export 178 URLs export to CSV or I will Most often export to Google Sheets because I want a shareable sheet that we can use But in this case, I’m just going to go ahead and save this and we’ll save it to downloads And then I’m going to go in and we are going to report review.
All right, and I will go ahead and edit this Normally, I’d be putting these in all the docs and files section, but I didn’t even turn docs and files on for the sample client. 0:21:43
Let’s go to downloads and let’s go to mrplumber. csv.
Okay, save changes, drop that in there. Awesome, okay.
We need to take a look at that report though, because I want to show you what this reveals. So number one, if you’re scoping a new project, you need to know how many URLs exist on this other site that we’re gonna be transitioning away from.
This report right here is necessary to create a redirects game plan, but it’s also important to understand all of the URLs that are there. 0:22:14
And most clients, if you said, hey, how many pages are on your website? And they’ll be like, ah, you know, we probably got 12, 15 pages, something like that.
No, dog, you have 178, okay? You have 178 pages on your website.
Now, a lot of those are blog posts, right? But if they’re not created with a template, that’s a lot of URLs with a manually fixable problem that we’re gonna have to manually address, right?
0:22:41 Now the scope of work just went up.
The price of this project just went up, okay? But most important thing here is I’m revealing truly how many pages are on this website.
Not just what the client thinks, and not just what’s linked to in the header or the footer or something like that. I have a full list of exactly what is going on on this website.
And then as I scroll over, check this out. 0:23:05
I can see status codes for every single page. I can see the title tag of every single page.
I can see the length. Now we’re gonna be able to filter in just a minute into different issues related to all of this data.
But this report is giving us an overview. And again, it’s an overview that’s easily exportable to Google Sheets or a spreadsheet so that then we can start tagging pages with like, okay, this one can be deleted.
0:23:31 This one is similar to this one, they need to be combined.
That’s a lot of manual work in putting a game plan together for what needs to happen with all of these URLs in a rebuild and redesign situation. And again, that’s where we’re going more into a paid audit.
So where I may run for a new project, right? Again, put yourself in the shoes that you will typically be in.
They wanna redesign and rebuild of an existing website. You need to do a lot of manual analysis on what needs to stay and what needs to go.
0:24:03 So you run this audit initially as a rapid fire audit, and you include it in your proposal and statement of work.
But remember, what are we always putting as the first line item in a proposal? Discovery.
So we’re gonna be doing PPC discovery, maybe, SEO discovery, we’re gonna be doing market research, competitor research, you know what we’re also gonna be doing? A game plan for how to map the existing architecture over to what will be the new architecture.
0:24:31 That’s work that needs, somebody needs to do that, and somebody needs to pay for it.
So that is a deliverable that we’re not gonna do now, but we are gonna put it into the proposal. So if they do green light the new project, they’re gonna pay for me to do this work, to go in and analyze what needs to stay, what needs to go, what needs to be redirected to what?
Like put that whole game plan together, right? Okay, and that’s all generic.
0:24:56 From this one report comes all of that, all right?
So meta descriptions, we have the length of the meta descriptions. I can see the H1s on every single page.
Being able to see right here, just scan the titles, scan the metas, scan the H1s. If I’m proposing SEO for this client or coming in to do an SEO campaign, high level I can see, was that, did anybody put any thought or care into basic on-page SEO?
0:25:25 What do these titles look like?
What do these descriptions look like? What do the H1s look like?
How many H1s are there? Look, this page has two H1s right here.
Sometimes you’ll see a page with five H1s. What is going on on the careers page that there would be five H1s.
These become elements or items to fix. They go onto your SOW, but we’re gonna talk more about identifying, rapidly identifying fixable problems and deliverables in just a minute.
0:25:54 But look at everything that I’m getting.
What if you’re scoping content? How much copywriting?
If we’re pricing per word, where should we even start on getting an average word count together? Well, this tool right here tells you the word count of every single URL, okay?
So this really helps you in the content and copywriting scoping phase. Crawl depth is right here as well.
0:26:15 So you can identify those that are threes instead of ones and twos.
And then that’s pretty much it for this report. This is a very, very important screen in terms of this audit.
Okay, also an internal here, I’m going to go back to URL reports, we’re going to do it from up here, okay. You’ve got your internal, you’ve got your external, you’ve got your resources, then we can get into crawl status though.
Which URLs are being redirected, which URLs are not found, which URLs are errored out, Let’s go look at these errored URLs. Ooh, these are resource URLs.
Now, under URL reports, right, I’m just looking at all URLs more or less, but look here, under the actual URLs for internal, I can look at what is redirected or orphaned or broken in terms of pages on this website, right? 0:27:11
Maybe I don’t care about external URLs. Maybe I don’t care all that much about resource URLs.
I only care what’s going on with internal. So you can see here, there’s like overview reports, but then there’s also segmented reports in terms of here’s internal versus external, first page resources, and so on, okay?
Crawl statuses, indexability, uh-oh, what do we have here? And I’m actually gonna go back to, sorry, I clicked out of this, let me go back in here.
Indexability right here, indexable 178. Okay, let me tell you right off the bat, I do not like to see a hundred, I don’t like to see a hundred and seventy eight URLs and a hundred seventy eight indexable URLs because I know there’s pages on this website that should not be indexed.
So right away I now know I’m going to need as a line item, okay let’s go in here, okay, audit indexability of URLs. Because there are URLs that should not be indexed and now I need to go find which ones they are, right?
If this client is running PPC campaigns, I’ll give you a perfect example. PPC campaigns require PPC landing pages a lot of times.
Those are hidden pages. They’re not linked to anywhere on the website.
0:28:27 We don’t want general traffic going to them.
We don’t want those to be indexed and potentially found. That’s gonna screw up analytics.
It’s gonna screw up a lot of stuff, okay? We need those to be no index.
I’m assuming this client does PPC. Why are those pages being indexed?
There’s probably a lot of pages that are indexed that don’t need to be indexed. Now I have to go find out which one those are.
0:28:47 Why?
Because the audit alerted me to the fact that every page on this domain is indexable. And that is a problem, okay?
I’m going to go in, indexability, and so indexable, see if I see no index right here, that lets me know, oh, there’s a batch of pages that’s set to no index. And I just want to verify that those are correct and none of those really should be indexed and so on and so forth.
Not indexable is another category. That means there’s a problem with the URL preventing that URL from being crawled.
Now this website is fairly good in the sense that, you know, there’s not any that are not indexable and if we look under here, there’s nothing broken, redirects, orphaned, errored. 0:29:32
This website, you know, looking fairly healthy in a lot of cases, but not healthy in the sense that every page is indexable because we don’t want a lot of those pages to be indexable. And that hurts SEO to have thin content pages indexable, for example.
I bet there’s a lot of those help articles that are just super thin content that need to be deleted or combined with other articles or rewritten, okay? All of that has to be audited and looked at and then we’re gonna put a game plan together if you’re planning on selling content marketing and SEO to this client.
0:30:06 So in a lot of ways, it depends on why you’re going through this process, right, of what you’re gonna look at.
I’m trying to show you everything that’s available, but then you’re gonna have to figure out, okay, what do I really need to look at for this particular client? All right, so we are gonna go with back to URL reports.
So canonicals, not a lot of data in here. We can maybe do a follow-up video on what any of this means.
0:30:31 Redirects, all redirects, external URL redirect broken.
So this part of the report would come in very handy if I’m going in to clean up an existing website but also if we’re going to be bringing over pages, we don’t want to bring over content that has broken URLs and existing issues, right? We want to clean those things up So we would be marking these on our main URL report as URLs that need to be fixed They have issues that need to be fixed I’m not going to do that right now because it’s going to take up extra time, but you get the point I would be going back into base camp marking these URLs as needing to be fixed for whatever reason Okay, let’s go to internal, let’s go to indexability content, and let’s go to headers.
H1 is too long. 0:31:14
So right off the bat, we see H1 tags that are too long and H1 tags that are too short. Let’s go back into content, headers, here’s too short, here’s too long.
And then duplicate content, there’s title tag too long, 79 URLs, title tag too short, sorry I clicked out of there, metadata, page titles, too long 79, too short 25, descriptions, too long 21, too short 32. So immediately I’m going in over here, fix meta, fix meta titles, and then I’m gonna say fix meta descriptions and then that was let’s go in so metadata descriptions 21 and 32 is 53 so this is gonna be 53 URLs all right and then fix h1 and how many URLs is that going to be?
We’re going to go into content headers so 26 and 21, 47, there we go, 47 URLs. Okay, excellent.
And so you see this is just the beginning, this is just the start of building our statement of work. These things are important for SEO, probably important for UX and readability of the pages, scannability of the pages, things like that.
All right, let’s go back into SiteBulb. So that’s under metadata, also under content.
A lot of times you’ll see a bunch of duplicate content issues throughout a website. That’s just going to create more things that need to be fixed and resolved.
This website’s fairly good. This website is not a disaster or anything like that.
0:33:16 Okay, so back under URL reports, let’s go to images.
We can see 470 images. You’re gonna get a lot of data about these images.
I’m gonna keep going over just so you guys can see the extent of the report. This is a very important column right here.
You can take a look at how alt text has been done across this website. And this is gonna come into play where it’s like missing alt text, images that are too big, things like that.
0:33:44 Again, they become deliverables.
We got to go in and fix these things. It’s quite important.
Okay, so but this gives you an example of how can I drill down into one aspect of this website like show me what’s going on with the images on this website. Show me what’s going on with the redirects on this website.
It’s all compartmentalized and organized for you. Okay, the next thing that we’re gonna do, I’m gonna go up, I’m just gonna take a quick jaunt over to our PageSpeed Insights report, and we are going to put in their URL, and we’re gonna hit go.
0:34:18 This is actually a Lighthouse report, but I’m just gonna grab this, and I would put this into that overview review kind of task.
I kind of hate flipping back and forth and doing this because it just kind of wastes time. Like I think you guys get the point.
But this is a lot of the stuff that I’m reviewing with the client. Okay let’s go back to SiteBulb.
You can do the desktop version as well if you want. Next thing that we’re gonna take a look at is our hints area.
Let me make sure there’s nothing else that we want to do. Oh, Link Explorer.
So you can get an idea for all of the internal links, the anchor text being used on internal links. 0:35:00
Here’s one word anchor text, verse two word anchor text, verse three word anchor text. I can click on this.
Here’s all the three word anchor text. And I can just get an example of like, are they doing anchor text properly?
What kind of anchor text are they using? And this all looks fairly logical, right?
If you see a bunch of like, get info here, learn more, learn more, learn more, learn more, right? 0:35:23
Click here, click here, click here, click, that lets you know people don’t know what the heck they’re doing with the anchor links on this website. And then you know what becomes a deliverable?
We’re gonna go back, we’re gonna say, fix anchor links. And it’s gonna say, 47 URLs or whatever.
Now in terms of this client, it’s not actually doesn’t appear to be a problem at first glance, but you will see on lots and lots of sites major issues with internal link anchor text here. Okay?
Same thing with external link. An external link anchor text is very important as well.
So that part of the report gives you more insights, more deliverables. 0:36:03
We did site visualizations already. We did our PDF report already.
Let’s go into hints, okay? So, and this is all given in that main PDF report as well, but we’re just gonna go down the list.
This is the all hints report. If you wanna go into specific sections, you absolutely can.
But when you’re, you know, auditing a site for the first time, it’s helpful to just go to the all hints report and then start to go down the list. Title tag outside of the head area okay critical issue it explains why these things are an issue it also tells you how many URLs are affected very important for scope of work right if there’s a critical issue but it only affects one URL, that might be a five-minute fix.
If it affects 178 URLs, now we got to figure out, okay, is that happening in a template that controls all those URLs? Because that might be a five-minute fix.
Or have all 178 URLs been manually created in a page builder and that issue was manually put into every single one of those pages, now we’ve got a significant problem. 0:37:16
Now we’ve got a bit of an expensive problem, right? This report helps you figure this out, okay?
And then you add that to the deliverables, add that to the deliverables, so we’re going to put this on there to fix. Serve static assets with an efficient cash policy.
Sometimes this is a false, like, you know, what would they call it? Like a false positive, right?
False positive that you could be caching this website properly and it still flags this. Eliminate render blocking resources.
0:37:47 Some of this stuff is performance related.
It kind of tells you what category it’s in, right? This is right now organizing everything by the critical nature of the issue.
You can also, like I mentioned, just categorize them. Show me all performance issues.
If you’re mainly doing this for performance reasons, hey, show me all performance issues. You can click on the tab right here.
It’ll only show you performance related issues. Here’s an overview and then you can click into hints right here.
Performance, budget, cookies. It gives you an insane amount of data and insights based on what you need.
Back to the all hints report. 0:38:27
So we’re going to check caching right? So we’re going to come in here.
Check caching. In fact, let me let me see if I can put these side by side.
So we’re going to do this and we’re going to do this. OK, awesome.
Alright, so we’ve got eliminate render blocking resources alright, so we’ll do render blocking resources and this affects 16 URLs. 0:38:55
Alright and then images must have alternate text. Uh oh, 7 URLs.
Okay, fix alt text, 7 URLs. And it’s actually going to tell me, you know, if I click on view URLs or I go to the images report, it’s going to tell me exactly which images are missing alt text, they’re very easy to track down.
Load page resource using protocol relative URLs, I don’t typically care all that much about that one, has only one followed internal linking URL. We have 50 pages on this website that it’s basically telling you need more internal links, that not enough pages on the website are internally linking to these URLs, and that’s an SEO problem.
0:39:40 So we’re gonna say add internal links to, I call them like nearly orphaned pages, 50 URLs, okay?
We’re gonna keep going down, external URL redirect broken, fix external redirects, and we’re gonna say five URLs, all right? And then we’re coming down, reduce server response time.
That’s really only on one URL. I don’t care all that much about it, but we are gonna be doing a performance optimization.
Why? 0:40:11
Because you saw that Lighthouse report. It looked absolutely atrocious.
Okay, back over here, we have resource URL redirect broken. That’s only on one URL.
URLs that contain possible soft 404 phrases. So they respond with a 200 status, but may appear to be an error page, a soft 404.
And again, it’s a page that looks to the user like a 404 page, but actually returns a 200 HTTP response. They can cause a terrible user experience as the user is expecting to find content, but is presented with some kind of error a hundred at every page of this website, so I need to say investigate soft 404 on all Domain URLs okay, and I’m going to mark this as critical and then what comes out of that investigation May be more deliverable of what do we have to do to fix this or resolve this issue?
0:41:08 But first it has to be investigated a little bit further All right has JavaScript served over a CDN without sub resource integrity.
I’m not really going to mark that Has an anchored image with no alt text 177 URLs So fix alt text we’re gonna say Anchored images with no alt text and this is a hundred and seventy seven URLs. I’m gonna say investigate All right.
Investigate anchored images with no alt text. Add.
Somebody’s got to go put additional eyeballs on this situation and figure out what’s actually going on here. 0:41:50
Ooh, use HTTP2 for all of its resources. URLs that do not use HTTP2.
It’s basically a performance issue, right? So we’re definitely marking that.
So HTTP 2. All right.
And I’m just kind of abbreviating some of this stuff so you don’t have to watch me write out the entire thing. Remove unused JavaScript, which is not actually used for rendering.
So this is going to be in our performance optimization most likely. Remove unused CSS.
Not really caring too much about that ensure text remains visible during web font loads. There might be some page layout shift That’s all going to get taken care of in our performance optimization add Dimensions to images properly sized images.
This is all going to get taken care of in our performance optimization Has one or more outgoing followed links with non descriptive anchor text. We already put fix our anchor text in here Transferred image size is over 100 KB, performance stuff, we’ll be taking care of.
0:42:52 I’m just gonna keep going down.
Has style sheets served with CDN, okay. Has incoming followed links that do not use descriptive anchor text, all right.
Only affecting one URL, not a big deal. Redirected page resource URLs, only affecting two, okay.
Ooh, more than one Google Tag Manager code being used on the website. This is on 178 URLs.
So I’m gonna say duplicate Google tag manager code, okay? 0:43:21
Audit, audit and optimize GTM. Perfect, okay?
All right, here we go. Title tag too long.
Fix title tags. Oh, we already did fix meta titles up here, okay?
So we already added that from earlier when I was showing you how I would start to put together a report. Okay, too short, too long, H1s, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, 7 URLs All right has links with an empty href attribute.
All right fix empty links and that is for URLs Those could be like modal pop-ups that actually should be buttons, but they’re you know empty Href links don’t want that to happen Duplicate meta descriptions. We already got oh, we’re using more than one Google Analytics code on this website.
Alright fix duplicate Google Analytics code, audit and optimize Google Analytics. Okay maybe their data is all screwed up.
Maybe that may like do they not have good data on this website? Got to go in and find that out.
That’s gonna cost some money. 0:44:45
Alright then you got a bunch of insights here right? Okay so more or less what I found from a technical standpoint, we got a whole report to go along with this, is this list of deliverables right here.
And remember, this is not a bad site. This is what came out of a decent site.
What happens when there’s, this report gets quite long when websites are bad. But I kind of showed you how to go through all the different areas of the report how to kind of analyze what’s going on Here what applies to performance versus what applies to accessibility versus what applies to?
SEO yada yada yada I can go down here into Structured data if I want to and I can get a kind of a good look at what’s going on with schema Why are there all these warnings over here? Why are there errors?
0:45:35 errors.
This all stuff like structured data, so let’s just go in here, structured data. I’m gonna say investigate.
We need to put eyes on that. What’s going on with our structured data on this website?
You could just go tab after tab after tab after tab and ultimately what you’re end up, what you’re gonna end up doing in most cases, let me go back, I think we’re done here. You can see there’s a lot more manual work that has to be done, right?
This audit process is what gets you started. Like I said earlier, I might spend two to three hours on a paid audit really diving into a lot of different details related to this stuff.
0:46:18 And when you put a statement of work together, you’re going to end up prioritizing different things because the client may not want to do all the work at once.
And by the way, combine this with a manual accessibility audit that you might do for this kind of website. An additional SEO audit that goes outside of the technical SEO nature of this website into all the other areas of SEO that we need to look at.
And you’re going to get a huge amount of work that needs to be done for most clients. Then it becomes a matter of prioritization.
What are the main critical things that we need to tackle first? 0:46:55
And then we’ll do this as a phase two and this other group of things as a phase three and on and on and on. But this is going to do a lot of heavy lifting for you and it’s going to get you started moving in the right direction and it’s going to get you a nice healthy statement of work.
It’s going to get you a nice healthy PDF report that you can then use for sales purposes or just education of the client purposes as well. I didn’t want this to be too long.
We’re closing in on close to an hour here. Right now what I want you to do is start to use this tool.
Get yourself a SiteBulb Pro license, start running some reports on maybe your existing websites that you’ve done for clients, and then start using this in your workflow when you’re scoping out new projects, just do some of these audits for free, right? If you don’t feel comfortable yet doing the detailed, you know, two, three, four, five hour technical audit with this as a starting point that people actually pay for, and we can talk about prices for just a minute, a technical audit might be, you know, a thousand bucks somewhere around there for a smaller site.
Could be up to four or five thousand dollars or more for an enterprise level site. 0:48:05
Depending on what you’re auditing for, what’s going on with the existing site and how big it is and so on and so forth. But that’s it, that’s it for today.
Okay, this is going to get you started in the right direction. Start running these, start getting more comfortable with them.
Go in and read every single hint. Sight Bulb is fantastic just from an education perspective on why all of these issues matter and what they mean and why you should be looking out for them.
Start to further your education in this regard and I will do some follow-up videos if you guys want on different areas of the technical nature of this and how to approach it and maybe even show you going in and doing some fixes and things like that. Hope you got a lot out of this I hope you actually understand the value in doing audits like this and that you actually start to incorporate them because you will be able to generate a lot more revenue and at the end of the day, build better websites for clients, fix existing websites to make those websites better and ultimately get better results for your clients.
0:49:08 All right, cheers.
