1. I Lead With First-Hand Experience

Everything starts with lived experience. I don’t publish content based on assumptions — I use what I’ve tested, visited, reviewed, or built myself.

Whether it’s trying three different hostel tours in Vietnam, or testing AI-powered compliance tools for a SaaS client, I write based on what I’ve done, not what’s trending.

I include specific examples like real locations, real costs, tools I’ve used. I’ll often back that up with Reddit quotes that align or challenge my view, and when it makes sense, I drop in screenshots or outcomes.

“Did three Ripper tours — the original one was leagues ahead in detail and drama.” – u/creepywalksfan

2. Transparency Builds Trust (and Rankings)

I’ve seen rankings tank because content hid the “who” and “why.” Google and AI care about the intent and identity behind content.

Here’s what I now make standard on all pages: clear author bios with my SEO or travel background, a short note explaining how I researched or tested the content, and a clear statement of who it’s for. I write as me. It’s not generic. It’s personal.

3. I Kill Content That’s Just for Search Engines

I’ve audited hundreds of pages that ranked for nothing. Usually, it’s because they were built only around keywords, thinly veiled traffic traps, or just lacked real utility.

These get ignored by both Google and AI. Instead, I build pages that solve a real user problem, answer the question quickly and clearly, and include content I’d be proud to publish even without SEO as a channel.

4. Depth Wins. Always.

I’ve worked in industries where everyone says the same thing. To stand out, I use internal data, bring in expert opinions or Reddit commentary, and add my own outcomes: “Here’s what happened when I tried this on a live campaign.”

If your article doesn’t go deeper than what’s already out there — or at least frame it better — it won’t perform.

5. I Structure Every Page Like an AI Would Parse It

Since 2023, I’ve been testing how AI tools extract and summarise content. They don’t look for keywords — they look for clear, retrievable chunks.

So now I break paragraphs into 2–4 lines, use proper headings, and include inline summaries, tables, and FAQs.

Note: I use FAQPage, Article, and BreadcrumbList schema where applicable. This has directly improved visibility in AI-generated overviews.

6. Smart Linking Builds Authority

I don’t hoard internal links. I create hubs. Whether it’s a gluten-free food directory in Little Helpers or a silo structure for a SaaS client, I link contextually, define glossary terms, and create topic maps that Google and AI can crawl easily.

I also link out to high-trust external sources: Reddit threads, official tourism boards, research papers. This boosts the trust score of the page and the site.

7. Confident Language Wins Citations

If a page is vague, it won’t be quoted. I cut hedge words like “maybe” or “some say” and write directly. When I know something from experience, I say it that way. If I’m making a recommendation, I own it.

❌ “This might be a good hostel.”
✅ “This is the best €25 hostel I’ve stayed in — clean, central, and social.”

8. Reddit is My Secret Weapon

For almost every content project, I search Reddit threads. It’s a goldmine for unfiltered, first-hand info that never shows up on corporate blogs.

I usually pull in 3–4 relevant quotes that validate or challenge what I’m saying. This makes the content more real — and more retrievable by LLMs.

9. I Always Include Snippet-Ready Blocks

To get picked up by AI tools, I write for inclusion. That means TL;DRs with bold points, bullet checklists near key sections, FAQs written in the user’s language, and descriptive headers with both entity and intent (like “Best Walking Tours in London 2025”).

These are more valuable now than a #3 spot in traditional SERPs. I’ve had content get quoted in Gemini and ChatGPT without ranking top 5.

Final Word: SEO is No Longer Just for Google

Most SEOs are still chasing rankings. I’m optimising for retrieval.

If your content reflects real experience, is structured cleanly, links logically, and feels human — you’re already ahead. That’s how I work. And it works.

The post How I Create Content That Ranks in Google and Gets Picked Up by AI Tools appeared first on Rank Dough Digital.

Sauna Calculator tool

The post appeared first on Rank Dough Digital.

1. What is a 404 “not found” error

2. What a 404 error means for SEO

3. How large websites generate 404s

4. Why is it important to monitor 404s

5. How to track 404s

6. How to fix 404s

Let’s go

1. What is the dreaded 404 “not found” error?

If you are an awesome marketer working for a large e-commerce website and your products are counted in 100s or 1000s, you need to keep an eye on 404s as it will pay off.
If your website engages in affiliate programs or runs search ad campaigns, you need to watch your 404s because you may spot any of the following:

• Errors within your affiliate network
• Broken UTM campaigns using old URLs
• Google ad campaigns sending traffic to broken pages
• other 404 pages on your website for example: broken password reset, checkout errors etc

Let’s start from the beginning…

Internet is pretty simple…
As you probably know, the internet is made up of “clients” and “servers”.
Clients, being the browser on your computer, communicate with servers by requesting urls.
Every time you click a link, the server comes back with a “status code”.
The status code could be either a success, a failure or something else.
There are many status codes which are defined in blocks in the protocol.

The 4xx block indicates that something is wrong on the client side, meaning the page you requested is indeed screwed up!
There are many reasons for the page to throw a 404 error. The most common are:

• The page was deleted by the webmaster
• The link you clicked was misspelt
  But also
• The url was improperly tagged with UTM or perhaps
• The dude running Google ads is using old, redirected urls in his campaigns etc

Normally, the 404 is one boring page with no content. (I need to work on this one alright!)

but in some cases, you can see the developer has a sense of humour

It will make you smile, and you will hit the logo to go to the home page…

2. What a 404 means for SEO?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with serving a 404 page to the user.
Some people would tell you this is a real problem for your website and SEO ( I bet, these are the same people who produce those crappy SEO audits!)
but in fact,
google has no issue with websites serving 404 pages and will not penalise you for it.
See a great article on Google Webmaster Central Blog
Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst said:

Q: Do the 404 errors reported in Webmaster Tools affect my site’s ranking?
A: 404s are a perfectly normal part of the web; the Internet is always changing, new content is born, old content dies, and when it dies it (ideally) returns a 404 HTTP response code. Search engines are aware of this; we have 404 errors on our own sites, as you can see above, and we find them all over the web. In fact, we actually prefer that, when you get rid of a page on your site, you make sure that it returns a proper 404 or 410 response code (rather than a “soft 404”).

so yeah
Googlebot is capable of recognising the header status and either:

• Won’t index the page or
• Will drop it from the index if the page has been in the index and then got deleted.

However,
this only applies if the 404 page has been properly “marked” as 404 in the header.
I have seen too many times “not found” empty pages marked with a 200 OK status.
If your broken page is marked 200 OK, you are telling google that the page is good to be indexed.
Don’t do that

“Keep in mind that just because a page says “404 Not Found,” doesn’t mean it’s actually returning a 404 HTTP response code” – Susan Moskwa,

as you might end up with many 404 pages in google and with your customers landing on them.
To check the status of your page, go to REDIRECT CHECKER and make sure your “not found” pages are set to “404 Not Found”

3. How do large websites constantly generate 404s?

If you run a huge e-commerce website with 100s and 1000s of SKUs, price offers, seasonal stock, if you engage in affiliate programs and run google ads, you need to check your 404s on a regular basis.

On a large e-commerce website with a large dynamic inventory, products and categories will change all the time. Some lines go out of fashion and are replaced by new products.
Some of your products may be seasonal (Winter coats) or published on a trial basis.
A company’s buying department will manage stock by creating and removing products and categories accordingly.
This will create many 404 pages and they will pile up over time, believe me!
On top of that, you will have marketing running outreach campaigns and PR, sending traffic to temporary deals or bundle pages which get removed when the promotion is over.
It’s an endless loop on a large scale, which can hider your SEO, paid campaign performance and the user experience if not contained.

4. Why is it important to monitor 404s?

Discontinued products or deal pages may generate valuable backlinks.
They will feature on many busy websites long after your product or promotion is discontinued.
As we know, these backlinks are gold and hard to come by.
By monitoring your 404s you can, not only provide fresh content to your users, but also manage link equity and funnel it into your current products or categories via 301 redirects.
This will allow you to keep the accumulated link juice “under the hood” and provide live pages to your customers.
You can also have a close eye on any errors generated by other marketing channels like Google Ads, Affiliates, UTM campaigns etc.
In many cases you can spot paid traffic going to broken pages, errors within an affiliate networks or any broken UTM urls. Keeping a close eye of these will save you money and reduce negative user experience.

5. How to track 404s

There are three places you can see 404s errors:

• Google search Console – any pages
• Google Analytics – pages sorted by traffic
• Ahrefs best by links ( 404 ) report – pages sorted by link equity

5.1. Google Search Console

Google I’ll tell you how many 404s you have on the website. Thanks GOOGLE!
To see them you will need to:

• login to your Google Search Console
• Select your property
• Go to “coverage” report
• Look into submitted URL not found (404)

Google will give you a list of all 404s on your website.

The trouble is – Google Search console will only tell you the URLs. It will not give you any data on the frequency or clicks etc.
This is no good to us as we want to prioritise and start reviewing and fixing those generating the higher traffic, rather than just blindly fixing any URLs.

5.2. Google Analytics. Track 404s with the most traffic

To get stats on traffic, you will need to go to good old Google Analytics.
There are two ways you can track 404s in GA:

1. Set event tracking via Google Tag Manager (takes too long and not everybody has GTM)
2. Set a custom report in GA. (takes 5 minutes to do)

Let me walk you through the 2^nd option as it’s the easiest.
We will need something in common to define 404 pages in the report and we will have only a few options to play with.
The easiest is to use the page title to find 404s.
To get a page title, simply go to your website and type in any googly googb after the domain,
let’s say: https://www.rankdough.com/test404

I can see the title of my 404 pages is: “Page not found – {Domain} “
You can check this by looking at the meta title in your browser

Once you have that, head to your analytics and go to Customisation -> Custom Reports -> New Custom Report

Create a new report with these variables:

• Title: 404 report
• Metric: Sessions
• Dimension: Landing Page
• Filter: Page title exact/regex “Page not found

After saving, you should get a nice report that includes all your 404s with the metrics you have specified. In this example we only used sessions to prioritise the busiest pages for fixing.

You can schedule this report to be delivered to any inbox at your specified interval. To do this, go to “share” and fill in the modal box

Schedule and send the report to anyone who is responsible for fixing those or to yourself.
Get busy troubleshooting and fixing your broken pages.

Most of them will be good to redirect but you might be surprised at what you find here!
If you engage in any affiliate programs or run search ad campaigns, you will be able to spot any of the following:

• Errors within the affiliate network
• UTM campaigns using old URLs
• Ad campaigns sending traffic to broken pages
• other 404 pages on your website for example: broken password reset, checkout errors etc

Your report might look like this:

Analyse your report weekly and fix all 404s accordingly.

The 3^rd and the most awesome way to track 404s is to use

5.3. Ahrefs best by links ( 404 ) report. Track 404s with the most link equity

This is the most PRO and it will enable you to track the broken pages which have the most link juice and will allow you to funnel it back to your live products or categories.
Here is what you do to get your hands on this report:

• Go to ahrefs
• Put in your domain in the search bar
• Go to “best by links” report
• Select “404” from the dropdown

And there you go, a list of top broken pages with the most valuable backlinks pointing to them. TRUE GOLD!

You want to

• export these links into a google doc
• Rank them by “UR” ( URL Rating)
• Examine them one by one

Evaluate and 301 redirect them to THE MOST RELEVANT live pages on your website.

6. How to fix 404s

There is some controversy on how you should deal with 404 pages on a large e-commerce site.
Some SEOs recommend that you leave discontinued products online and you apply noindex, nofollow in robots.
This is BS!
Believe me, retail websites DO NOT want old, discontinued products to be featured on the site gathering traffic.
You have only limited number of categories and you want to feature relevant, fresh products that are in stock and are sorted by best a seller rankings.
Old products would just get in the way of good user experience on your website. It’s just bad retail!
You need to kill them!

Obviously, redirection is the way to fix 404 pages.

Once again, some SEOs say that this is not a good solution as you send a user to other location than he/she is expecting. I don’t think this is an issue at al if managed properly, and for sure its better than leaving product live on the site. So:

6.1. Use 301 server redirects to fix your broken pages

If you are using WooCommerce for your online shop, you can download a simple plugin called “Simple 301 redirects”

Once you download the plugin, it’s as simple as setting FROM and TO in the back end

Always make sure your redirect is 301 status, rather than 302 status.
301 will pass the link juice to the new page and will index the new page, while 302 will tell google the change is temporary and will not pass the link juice. 302s are not helpful, don’t use them.
To check your redirected status, head to REDIRECT CHECKER and paste in your URL.

6.2. Use automatic redirection in SAP/CMS/Other to fix 404s.

Redirecting Automated at scale

The WordPress plugin will do the job for you on a smaller scale, but since we are talking about the big boys here, you will need some kind of automation to keep up with changing website content.
Depending on your software, you might have an “Out of The Box” solution to this issue or you will need to work with developers to give you two things:

1. Ability to redirect directly from your desk like a ninja, on demand, on the spot, with no delays
2. Redirect automation with on/off switch and ability to override with option #1

The first point doesn’t need an explanation. You should have the ability to action any redirects without asking developers every time you need to do it.
The 2^nd is handy on large sites.

The CMS redirection can be applied to automatically redirect removed pages, for example: If you have a product sitting in a sub-category and that sub-category sits in a larger category, say:
www.mywebsite.com/shoes/snickers/cool-product

If the ‘cool product’ goes offline, your website automatically redirects to the parent category:
www.mywebsite.com/shoes/snickers/

And if the category ( snickers) has been deleted, your awesome website will redirect to shoes
www.mywebsite.com/shoes/

And if shoes category has been deleted, the website redirects to the home page.
In this scenario:

• your 404s are minimised
• your customer will always be served relevant content
• you preserve accumulated link juice

Summary

So there you go!
Now you know how to track and fix broken pages on your E-commerce site.
Depending on your priorities, you can start with those that generate the most traffic or those that hold the most link equity. Either way, you decide to go for, there are some important points to remember during this exercise.

• Redirect only those that MAKE SENSE to you and the user.
• Don’t send users to irrelevant/totally different pages.
• Redirect only those which have traffic.

This exercise will allow you to retain your link equity, provide users with live pages and a better experience.
The important factor to remember is to keep it simple, think about the user and their experience.
Don’t redirect links from questionable websites, old archived pages with low domain rating with no traffic.
Old links will not bring you referral traffic or link equity. You don’t want these.
Keep only those with high scores, relevant to your niche and those with a decent traffic.

The post Here is what to do with 404 errors on a large retail website appeared first on Rank Dough Digital.

1. Conventional Keyword Research vs E-Commerce keyword Research
2. Three Razor Sharp keywords sources including:

• Onsite Search
• Your Buyers
• Your Adwords Account

Introduction

This article is written for the owner or SEO manager of an E-commerce website selling goods or services online.
My goal is to present to you 3 unconventional yet simple methods of generating relevant keywords your products and categories should be ranking for.
These methods will be in line with your business objectives and most likely improve your online visibility and your margins.
They will allow your team to focus on keywords that bring the most value to your business vs those with the most volume in Google.

Let’s dive in

As you know, there is a vast amount of content written on the subject of keyword research.
When you google “how to do keyword research” you will find dozens of high-quality articles describing the process.
If you want to read up, I would recommend starting with big brand names like

• Moz
• Ahrefs
• Searchenginejournal
• Robbie Richards
• or even Backlinko.

Surely time well spent.
These articles will differ in methods, tools or logic but the core idea remains the same:

• …find a list of relevant, high-quality keywords with the right intent and decent volume.
• Then go to work on your content to start ranking for them.

The problem is:
Our resources are limited, and we need to have razor-sharp focus to generate the best results.

Normally

An SEO agency would apply a blanket approach to keyword research for any client they work with.
They would look at all the keywords the site appears on and prioritise from there.
They would pick low hanging fruit to get the most traffic and rankings for the least resources spent.
This is all well and good for most businesses online however, when it comes to a pure E-Commerce webstore, things get a little different. There are other variables at play like:

• Best-selling products
• Products generating the best margins
• Seasonality
• Release dates
• Fads etc

Overall, you don’t want to spend time and money optimising for ANY keyword, you want to optimise for keywords that matter to your business the most

So, as you can see

There is so much more to keyword research if you run sizable E-Commerce website

and

there is not much out there to teach you the real deal behind keyword generation for your E-Commerce business.

So, let’s get you educated!

Conventional keyword research vs E-Commerce keyword research

Conventional keyword research
Conventional keyword research for most online website like blogs, content, SAS (Software as a service) or digital products is fairly straightforward.
I would simply define it in a few bullet points:

• Decide who you are ( well… your product or service )
• Find out what your customers search for
• Find out what your competition is ranking for
• Go and get them!

There are 100s of very creative strategies to come up with the right keywords.
You need to use a few prime online tools to help you with generating data and help with your selection. The best out there include:

• Ahrefs
• SemRush
• Google Search Console
• Keyword Planner
• Keyword surfer (Chrome extension )
• A few others too…

If you are pro SEO and you know what you are doing, you should have no problem coming up with a bunch of good keywords for the business.

but

If you run a sizable E-Commerce website selling 100s or 1000s of products online, your keyword research will be a different story altogether.

1)
You need to consider a bunch of keywords that you will always want to rank for like top-funnel head keywords. These might not convert for you as much but they play an important role for your brand visibility and recognition. When people see your brand more often online, their journey to conversion will be shorter over time.

2)
You might need to consider keywords that are seasonal, for example, “black Friday”, “Christmas”, “Book day” “back to school” etc

3)
You might need to consider keywords around major product releases “PS5 release date”, “pre-order“ etc

4)
You should consider keywords that may take off like crazy or be a fad and die next month “loombands”, Fidget spinners” etc
And, as an E-commerce operation, you might have a different objective like:

• Anticipate trends and sales volumes to make buying decisions
• Get ahead of the competition in organic for product launches
• Save on PPC spending by optimising high cost keywords
• Optimise best sellers in stock vs products that don’t bring much revenue

All the above should be your objectives and it should feed into keyword research for your business.

Not only that,

As an Ecommerce business, you have different sources and tools at your disposal to generate keywords that are important to your organisation compared to other business models. E-Commerce websites enjoy more insight compared to an offline small business and present opportunities for keyword research which are not described anywhere online.
( as far as I can see, and I do read a lot! )

Below I have listed

3 Razor Sharp keyword sources for E-Commerce websites

a few sources that as an e-commerce website you might want to explore as a smart business owner or an SEO manager working for an e-commerce enterprise.

Onsite Search

Let’s face it: People use search on e-commerce websites much more than on any other websites.
On average over 40% of traffic uses onsite search and over 70% go for a search bar on your home page.
This is a significant amount and the search terms collected in your analytics are a tremendous source of keywords your customers search for.
Mining your onsite search data in Google Analytics can prove to be an excellent source for long tail keyword and also a place to spot early signs of demand forming for a particular product.

Not only that,

Site search is the first place you will spot rising trends. As other search volume tools like Google Keyword Planner can give you only a 12-month average search volume, it will not be able to show you fads or sharp growing trends such as these examples:

To see that before anyone else you will need to go to your Site Search Report

Here is how I use the Site Search report for keyword research:
I assume you have your site and Google Analytics set to collect search term stats, if not this is what you do

1. Define your search url pattern.
To do that, simply search for anything on your site, let’s take Walmart.com and search for “test”

The search url pattern is …/search/?query=test

2. Insert into the backend of GA
You will need to simply take “query” and insert it into the backend of GA. To find it go to:
Admin -> View Settings ->
Enable “site search” and enter “query” into Query parameter section as per below screenshot.

On different platforms, the query search string might be different but, in most case, it will come as
“text”, ”q”, “query” or something similar

3. Collect the stats
After a minimum of 24hrs, your search terms report will be ready for you in your Google Analytics.
You will find it under Behaviour -> Site Search -> Search Terms

If your site enjoys decent traffic, the Site Search report will provide you with more than enough useful keywords which your customers are searching for.
From here you should:

• Narrow down the concepts you are interested in
• Export data to an excel spreadsheet
• Import into to Ahrefs Rank Tracker and check search volume and rankings in google
• Optimise for higher positions

Ahrefs will give you Google’s search volume and your current positions. You should prioritise keywords on the bottom of the 1st page or 2nd page that have high search volumes.
The final file after exporting back from Ahrefs Rank Tracker would look like this:
( with Barbie as a sample concept )

You can mine endless amounts of useful keywords from your Site Search for any concept you provide products for.

Simply narrow down your search using the filter in the Site Search -> Search Terms Report

Your buyers

This is the big one.

To whomever does your buying – be it a whole buying department if your organisation is being enough or you yourself if you are a one-man show – you should pay close attention to what your buyers have to say about products, ranges, new launches, demand, stock availability etc.
Most often, the buying team is way ahead of everyone else in terms of products, demand, priorities.
They know what products or ranges are making the best margins, sell well, those that are scheduled to hit the market on certain dates etc. They also know which products or ranges do not sell well and are likely to be soon discontinued.
Therefore,

you should involve your buying team in your keyword research and keyword tracking

in fact your keyword research should be driven by buyers’ input.
I would advise you to establish a monthly “keyword review” schedule where the SEO team shares the currently tracked keywords and let buying department provide a feedback on:

• Those that should be added
• Those that have been discontinued
• Those that should be prioritised
• Those that are scheduled to go live

If done regularly it will allow the business to:

• Keep focus on optimising keywords which matter to the business
• It will keep the SEO report fresh and relevant
• It will allow you to maximise ROI from the organic channel

Here is a sample email you could use to send to your buying team

In the attachment would be a list of all keywords you currently track, optimise, and report on for the whole business. My personal tip on this one:
CHASE, CHASE, CHASE!

Your AdWords Account keyword data

Organic traffic is the life blood of every profitable online business. You cannot sustain profitability and protect your margin if ALL your sales come from paid channels over a long period of time. Ad spend will eventually eat into your profits, hinder your growth and possibly kill your online venture.
But, at the same time, every retail operation needs to diversify their online channels and the paid ads should be part of a large digital mix.
It would not be wise to forgo revenue opportunities that may come from a lean paid strategy.

As you have an Adwords Account and you have been running ads for a while, you will have a tremendous amount of keywords information in your Adwords account. The SEO team should actively work with the Paid search team to share keyword stats on a regular basis.
The objective would be to optimise the most expensive keywords to get closer to the top of the page. Once accomplished, the paid search team might remove ads for these keywords – saving the ad spend and improving performance.
There are a number of KPIs you could use:

1. Total Cost per keyword
2. Total cost of sales per keyword

Your PPC keyword report would look like this:

I like to look at the Total Cost of sales metric as this is a better performance metric to keep in mind vs total spend, which could be huge but efficient.
Once you have such list from the paid search team,

1. drop it into Ahrefs rank tracker
2. see where you rank for these keywords
3. export and clean up the data
4. sort by the position and volume.

Chose those which rank between 4-10 and start with the highest volume keywords for optimisation.

Now you have a nice list of keywords which your business spends the most money to run ads on. Your job is to push them up to top 3 on the page. This exercise will have huge benefits for the company if done on a regular basis.

Wrap up

So, there you go. I hope that the above opens some opportunities for you and your business to narrow down the team’s efforts and focus on these keywords which bring the most money to the business, vs those which have the most volume in Google.
All resources are limited and time moves only in one direction. Make sure you use it wisely and you get ahead of your competitors in Google.

The post 3 Razor Sharp keyword sources for E-Commerce websites appeared first on Rank Dough Digital.

In this article, you will learn the gold standard of an SEO audit. I will describe to you in detail what you should expect from a professional audit and what to watch out for.

The reason?

I have had really poor experiences with SEO audits during my career. There is a lot of rubbish out there and you need to be careful. The below list should serve as a helpful guide because many SEOs won’t even tell you what they will be looking into after they take your money. This list doesn’t leave any stone unturned and will include.

1. What is a SEO Audit?
2. When you should do an audit?
3. What areas should a professional kick-ass Audit cover?
4. What you should demand from your SEO audit
5. What to do before you sign off an SEO audit
6. How much should an audit cost you?

Note:
Depending on your circumstances, you might not need a full-blown SEO audit. For example,

• If you know your data tracking is set perfectly – you don’t need to analyse it.
• If you spent £1mil on speed optimisation last month and your site is super-fast – you don’t need to analyse it.

You get the point.

The below list includes all areas the audit should analyse in the event you decide on a full-blown analysis. They should be negotiated beforehand to suit your individual needs.

1. What is an SEO Audit?

An SEO audit is a complete examination of a website aiming to detect any errors that would prevent the site from proper indexing or ranking in google. It is run in order to evaluate the current state of SEO. It’s the foundation for any activity around improvements of organic visibility. Often, it’s the first thing your digital agency will do when you decide to work with one.

2. When you should do an audit?

An SEO audit should be conducted on a regular basis, especially if you run a large e-commerce website with ever-changing products and categories. You might not need a full audit every time, but you should have something running on a regular basis. It will allow you to spot any issues that might hinder your organic visibility. An audit is also recommended in the following circumstances:

1. Site migrations
2. Brand acquisition
3. Expansion to other countries under the same domain ( or not )
4. Any other activities that required a mass redirection

Post go-live, an SEO check is essential with large redirection projects. Unfortunately, in most cases, an SEO audit is only triggered by unfortunate events such as:

1. A sudden loss of traffic or rankings
2. Issues with indexation
3. Manual or algorithmic penalties

3. What areas should a professional kick-ass Audit cover?

An SEO audit should examine all aspects of the site in terms of SEO. It should be divided into:

1. Technical SEO audit – indexation and crawlability, tracking
2. On–page audit – the state of your current content
3. Off–page audit – google subscriptions, backlink profile
4. Site speed audit – site’s performance in terms of load time.
5. Marketplace audit – competition and keyword visibility online
6. E-A-T, NAP, GDPR audit – brand authority and GDPR compliance
7. Data quality and tracking

Under each of the headings, you should find a thorough, relevant analysis of all elements of your website.

1. Technical SEO audit

Looks at indexation, JavaScript, sitemaps, robots, schema, excessive redirects, canonicalization, internalisation, language, security and all these complex areas, which are important and often can provide quick fixes to your problems. This section should answer the following questions:

a. Indexation

• Are there any obvious error in the search console?
• Is my site indexed properly in major search engines?
• Are many versions my home page indexed?
• Are my search and filter urls indexed or not?
• Are my no index pages also no follow?
• Do I need 404 recovery management?
• How many empty pages do I have on the site?
• Do I have pagination management in place?
• Is my test site indexed?

b. Crawlability

• Are there any obvious errors in Google Search Console?
• Is my site crawled properly?
• Do I have proper canonicalization across the site?
• Do I have a robots.txt file in order?
• Do I have a sitemap in order?
• Is JavaScript blocking any content from crawling?
• Do I have excessive redirects on the site and what type?
• Is my website structure SEO friendly?
• Is my mega menu SEO optimised?

c. DNS checks

• Is my DNS pointing to a ONE version of all pages ( www vs non-www )
• Do I have http & https pages indexed at the same time?

d. Internalisation ( if applicable )

• Do I have hreflag tags executed properly?
• Do my urls include proper language mark-ups?
• Does my site declare the local language properly?
• Is my Geo Targeting setup correctly?

e. Schema markups

• Do I have product schema executed properly?
• Do I have FAQ schema executed properly?

f. Security

• Are there any signs of my website being hacked?
• Do I have a valid security certificate?

g. Other

• Other significant issues that might come up during the audit
• Anything else we are not doing, but we should

2. On-page analysis

Looks at the quality and format of your content. Your content is your brand and a top-ranking factor. You need to ensure that all your content

• Adheres to the highest standards
• Solves people’s problems and
• Is optimised for best visibility

The list should include metadata, format, length, internal linking recommendations. This section should answer questions like:

• Are my top landing pages optimised?
• Do I have any thin content that needs to be addressed?
• Are my meta titles and descriptions optimised across the whole site?
• Is quality, format, order and length of the content optimised?
• Do I have any duplicate content issues?
• Are my images optimised with ALT tags?
• Do I link out to authoritative websites within my content?
• Is my inbound linking strategy optimised?
• Is my content unique or copied from suppliers’ websites?

3. Off-page analysis

This section looks at your backlink profile. The list would include links to be disvoved, anchor text and geo-location analysis of the links pointing to your website. Off-page analysis would also investigate local visibility on google products like maps and GMB. This section should answer questions like:

• Do I have a healthy link profile in terms of domain and link metrics?
• What is my do-follow vs no-follow ratio?
• Are my anchor texts distributed properly?
• Do I have any spammy, low-quality links that need to be disvoved?
• Do I have any broken links?
• What are my opportunities to improve my link profile?

4. Site speed

Site speed is a fundamental part of modern SEO.
A fast loading time has an immediate and significant effect on rankings and Google is actively suppressing rankings of sites with a slow loading time.
This section looks into the overall performance of the website in terms of load time, rendering, first bite, imagery and video execution. This section should answer questions like:

• Is my Cache optimised for best performance?
• Do I have CDN?
• Are my images optimised for best performance?
• Are my videos optimised for best performance?
• Are my CSS & JS files optimised?
• Are there any render-blocking issues?
• Do I need to lazy load my content?
• Is my server response time optimised for best performance?

You should expect more from your SEO than just; “reduce your unused CSS, delay JS” bla, bla, bla talk!
Demand real stuff that makes a difference. Anybody can run your site in free performance tools, copy recommendations and pass to you. In some cases, they will make some difference but mostly won’t. The point is – You need to have a lightning-fast website to get ahead online in 2019 and beyond.
You and your developers should learn from websites like:

https://www.smythstoys.com/
https://ninjaoutreach.com/
https://www.nhs.uk/

These guys did some impressive stuff to reduce their load time. Use them as a benchmark and aim to be as fast as them.

Here is a list of some popular performance checkers you can use
Webpagetest – https://www.webpagetest.org
Test my site – https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/testmysite/
GT Metrix – https://gtmetrix.com/

5. Marketplace analysis

Should look at your positioning in the marketplace. The list should include an array of keywords you currently rank for, your closest competition and their positioning. The list should include a thorough analysis of the marketplace and include recommendations on keyword targeting within the current content. This section should answer questions like:

• What is my current visibility for a cluster of keywords?
• Do I rank for the right keywords?
• Where do I rank vs my competition?
• Do I suffer from keyword cannibalisation?

6. E-A-T analysis

Should look at how authoritative your content is in the eyes of Google and your customers. This should include an analysis of your reviews and reputation online.
This factor became super important for the YMYL (Your Money Your Life) after a range of core Google updates. The first major one this year was Google Core Update from August 1, 2018, followed by a number of updates in September. This section should provide recommendations to improve E-A-T SEO across your content and across online platforms. It should address:

• WHOIS Lookup information
• About us page
• Physical address, telephone
• Disclaimer
• Company info
• Author bios
• Any awards
• Online reviews analysis

7. GDPR

• Is my analytics software masking IPs?
• Do I collect any PPIs?
• Do I collect email addresses in my site search?
• Do I display an email address or a used ID in the source code for logged in users?

8. Tracking and data quality

This part should analyse your tracking setup like GA, GSC, goal tracking, checkout abandonment, e-commerce tracking. It should answer the following questions:

• Do I have Google analytics tracking setup properly?
• Do I have Google Tag Manager setup on the site?
• Do I track transactions, signups, abandonments, other actions properly?
• Do I have AdWords conversion tracking properly set up?
• Do I have Facebook pixel properly setup?
• Do I have Google Search Console setup?

What you should demand from your SEO audit

Priority – what’s first to fix?
Context – Why is it first to fix?
Impact – What is it going to do when fixed?

You should expect a professional format easy to digest and include:

Description of the issue
Reasons to be actioned
Screenshots
Recommended solution
Links to more resources about the issue

Unfortunately
My experience with SEO audits over the years can only be described as poor and disappointing. They were a joke and a pure ripoff.
No structure, no priority, lack of understanding, cheap approach, scare tactics, recommendations beyond possibility are only a few words I can use to describe what I experienced during my career.

In all cases, the audits I got were little or no help to our rankings or a website’s health.
They were an export from screaming frog and some ahrefs dumped into an excel sheet with a few notes for discussion. Unfortunately, I’m not the only one with such an experience.

Kevin Moore – Deputy Head of SEO @ Wolfgang Digital
Some audits are simply automated tools and no individual attention paid to the specific site being analysed. A fine tooth comb method is required and specific actions with impact/effort metrics are required to make it worthwhile. I completely agree there’s a substandard approach by some SEO’s out there. It gives the industry a bad reputation

Yep. It’s out there!
In most cases, all points in the audit were either not true, obvious to us, of little significance to rankings or simply recommending things that are impossible to implement.  To avoid the above scenarios, you must do a few things to get your ROI and get something actionable from this exercise that improves the SEO of your website.

What to do before you sign off an SEO audit

Communicate your concerns
Before you sign off an audit ensure your priorities are clearly communicated to your SEOs. I bet there is a reason you decided to run an audit of your site. It could be that:

• you noticed a sudden drop in rankings
• you got a manual or algorithmic penalty
• you are expanding abroad
• you are migrating a domain
• you are upgrading a software your website runs on etc

Whatever the reason is, make sure you tell your SEO people your main concerns and what is the reason you are doing this audit. Point them to the areas you worry about
instead of having them waste time on things you know are right, recently fixed or of a low significance, not relevant to you right now, for example:
If you just upgraded your platform and redirected an entire website from one URL pattern to another, you want to know the state of the redirected content.

• Are pages properly pointing to the right locations?
• Are the rankings affected by the migration?
• Do we have broken pages?

In this scenario, the focus needs be on redirects and rankings, rather than looking into metadata or content quality. These have not changed during the migration exercise.

You get the point.

If you want a full all-in audit, make sure you say it at the start too. Structure your project from the start. How should the professional audit be structured? You can simply follow the steps below:

• A call to establish objectives and concerns.
• Decide on areas of priority.
• Establish ETAs and follow up presentation

My personal notes for you is:

I always want to hear about only the most important things we need to fix to get the results, including

• JavaScript issues which are not visible to the user
• Cornerstone content which is not indexed but it should
• Any DNS, security or GDPR exposure issues
• Anything we are not doing but we should to get ahead of our competition

But I never want to hear about:

• Things that won’t move the needle for us.
• Things which are impossible to accomplish like a total website re-design or a url structure change.
• Schema reporting errors in GSC that have 0 impact on rankings
• Millions of redirects because ahrefs says so (it’s not true. Come on!)
• That our search and filter urls are no-index. We know that!
• A few duplicated H1 tags on some pages. So what? Google is smart enough to figure this out.

How much should an audit cost you?

It will depend on the company you are working with, the size of your website and the scope of the project. You can expect to spend anything between £1,200 to £8,500 and you will need to wait a few weeks for the job to be completed. If you have a large e-commerce website, a good audit will require a significant amount of man and PCU power to complete. Nobody can deliver a top-notch audit for a large website for $1,200. Your SEO guys will need to scan the entire website using software like screaming frog. The volume of pages will reach 100s of thousands for large brands. The crawler will take days to complete such scan and this is only the technical part of the audit. Analysis of link profile, keywords landscape, quality of content and reputation is a manual process and simply takes time. Only experienced SEO professionals can really deliver high-quality reports for you on all these areas. So, my advice is:

If you are in a pickle because your rankings and traffic tanked,

• Get a thorough, top quality audit.
• Go with the best crowd
• Request a sample of an audit beforehand to see how the final product looks like
• Agree on areas of priorities and a follow-up discussion

I’m sure, an audit will deliver resolutions to your rankings issues.

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