We get asked quite often: what tools do you do to perform an SEO audit? The short answer: we don’t use many tools, we mainly use our brains. The long answer: we use a bunch of different tools in conjunction with our knowledge to produce a manual SEO audit.

Before we go any further, I want to clarify that when we talk about an SEO audit, this varies greatly from an SEO report. An SEO audit is generally done before we start working with a client, while an SEO report is something that is generated weekly, monthly, daily, etc. Our full manual SEO audit is based off of our 24 point inspection that analyzes 24 very important indicators based on SEO factors we feel are important in conjunction with what Google says is important.

There are many great tools out there to do automated audits, we’ve used a few different ones over the years. That said, there is truly no replacement for a manual audit. A good SEO audit will take at least 60 minutes for a website under 100 pages and progressively longer the larger the site gets.

Project Management and Organization

From the moment we make the first phone call or email, everything is documented in our project management system. We do this for 2 reasons:

  1. so that we can stay organized across our entire team
  2. so that we can give our client a proper report any time they are looking for it.

Many companies don’t keep all of their information, analytics, logins, etc in a central location. At the very least, at the end of our contract we will deliver a proper “package” of information in one central location.

Getting Access

In order to perform a proper SEO audit, we need access to the website, amongst other things. The more access we have, the more thorough we can be in our audit.

Ideally, in order to do a proper manual SEO audit, we need the following access:

  • Google Search Console (formerly known as Webmaster Tools)
  • Google Analytics
  • Any other analytics they might have
  • Server access (SSH, cPanel, etc) or Cloud Access (AWS / Google Cloud)
  • CMS or eCommerce access (WordPress, Magento etc)

seo info report

Sometimes, we don’t have any access. The potential client hasn’t been onboarded and we need to produce a report for them. Many times they will give us temporary access, but sometimes the trust just hasn’t been built yet. If we don’t have access, we’ll continue with the understanding that they know this report is a “limited access” report. If this is a current client, we normally send them an SEO questionnaire to fill out.

Step 1: Company Research

A lot of people skip this step. Learn about your client! At bare minimum:

  • where is your client located (address)?
  • what is their primary phone number?
  • who is on their team?
  • how long have they been in business?
  • how many locations do they have?
  • what is their phone number and address?
  • lookup their corporation on their local state website

seo company

This phase doesn’t really have much weight on how well a site will do in Google or how they will rank, but it is necessary information nonetheless that we need..

Step 2: Keyword Research

Keyword research is an essential part of any SEO audit. During the audit phase of the game, we normally don’t do a full keyword research report, we do enough to cover the main keywords, normally the primary keywords they are targeting.

For instance, if our client was Apple, we would target:

  • iPhone
  • Macbook
  • Apple TV
  • MacBook Pro

and not the longtail keywords such as “black iPhone 7” or “buy Macbook Air.” For a local company, obviously we would attack this a little differently. Local companies would normally include local keywords such as “website design company Boca Raton.”  The purpose of the SEO audit is to give a breakdown of how the website is performing, and how well it is optimized not necessarily how well it is doing for each of their keywords.

There are many, many ways to tackle keyword research, and many tools to help you accomplish keyword research both free and paid. We personally like a combination of Ahrefs and SEMrush, but Google’s Keyword Tool (Adwords Keyword Tool) will do just fine as well.

Here is a small snippet from an example keyword research report.

Sometimes clients come to us wanting to target very specific keywords, other times clients have no idea what to target and we assist them with this.

When clients know what they want to target, we still give them numbers to show the possible effectiveness of their chosen keywords. Sometimes keywords sound great, but end up not producing a lot of volume so we go in a slightly different direction.

Step 3: Citation Audit

If the company has a local presence, we do an SEO citation audit.  An eCommerce store that only sells online for instance, we skip this part completely as they do not want to drive people to their address. On the other hand, a local company looking for a presence in “Google Local” (as we still like to call it) we’ll put a heavy focus on this section.

Citations carry a ton of weight when it comes to local SEO.  During the SEO audit phase, we don’t do an exhaustive citation audit, but we will take a brief inventory of them and check for obvious errors. Examples include:

  • do they have 2 separate Yelp pages with the same address?
  • do they have an old citation with old address not marked as “closed”?
  • are there crazy NAP inconsistencies?
  • are they severely lacking citations

Once complete, we will add our findings to the report and make our recommendation. Local SEO is a totally different game than regular SEO, so we definitely want to pay attention to this phase. In the end, at the very least we’ll have a much better idea of where they are at.

We store this information in spreadsheet format:

seo citation audit

Again, this isn’t meant to be a full citation report, only a basic audit. Here we are just giving a glimpse into the what assets the company has, and any glaring issues that might arise. For newer companies, you might not have any citations, so this section might be empty.

Step 4: Perform a Basic Google Search

Performing a basic Google search for your target company is really the first step. It sounds really basic but getting a look at the front end of Google to see how it is branded is very important. Here, we will take a close look at their branded search results. This will reveal quite a bit of information about how well your SEO performance is going. We need to see not only where they are ranking but how they look within the SERPs as well. At the very least, we perform a 3 step process.

  1. Search for the brand name in Google – Knowledge Graph, How it appears in Google (Title, Description) site links, etc
  2. site:example.com – how many pages does the website have indexed?
  3. Search for a few keywords they might be targeting

During the Google Search phase, we also look out for signs of a Knowledge Graph. Another lesser known (but growing in popularity) service we offer is Knowledge Graph optimization. A lot of companies and brands are becoming more and more interested in what we call “SERP sculpting” or “SERP curation” i.e. not exactly where they rank, but how they look.

serp report brand

In the above illustration we queried the brand name “Publix” a well known supermarket chain here in the South East. Publix has a very healthy SERP. A knowledge panel, sitelinks, even an app. While this might not seem like top secret SEO information, it will be really helpful in the future.

This is also the time you should be looking out for signs of bad and negative press. Keep an eye out for negative reviews also. If your client has tons of negative press, this might turn into a reputation management client instead of an SEO client. In most cases if we encounter tons of bad press, we’ll refer this to another company.

Step 5: Domain Research

A domain name can tell a long story about the website. We love doing domain research here at Elite Strategies. Other than a standard WHOIS query, one of our favorite domain research tool is: (aptly named) Domain Tools. Domain Tools does a great job of doing some undercover domain sleuthing. This tool does a great job of finding out private WHOIS registration as well, or at least making a good guess of who it is.

Let’s start by looking at the domain itself.

Domain Length and Readability

How many letters are in the domain? Can you take a quick glance at the domain and read what it is?

w0rrd.com

word.com

Domain readability is key, and while it doesn’t really play a huge part in SEO it plays a huge part in the overall UX of your website.

Where and by whom was the domain registered?

Is the domain “private” or is their a registered contact? Again, this may or may not be a ranking factor. At this point we are just “taking notes” for when we do the real SEO work.

When was the domain registered?

Has the domain changed hands over the years, or has it stayed the same? A domain that was registered in 2016 vs a domain that was registered in 1998 will be a huge difference when it comes to SEO. We always get a little excited when it comes to older domain names, because they are so much easier to get traction with Google than newer domains.

Where does the domain point?

If the domain points to Godaddy we know its not on the best hosting environment whereas if it is hosted on Rackspace we are dealing with an expert host. A host in and of itself isn’t a ranking factor, but it can help answer some questions later on such as website speed issues and more.

If you are serious about this step in the process, I’d highly recommend using DomainTools for research. It is one of the most thorough tools when it comes to doing domain research, and will give you a serious glimpse into the inner workings of a domain.

During the domain research phase we also look for signs of old-school style SEO such as the use of 10’s or even 100s of different domains for the same companies used to rank. Generally we will recommend cleaning these up (deleting them) from the web. There are times when it is ok to have several websites but most of the ones we come across were old black-hat style domains that generally don’t work anymore and could pose a penalty risk.

Step 6: Backlinks / Off-Page

This is where things can get truly arduous. If a website has 20,000 backlinks from 14000 different domains, it is going to take a long time to sort things out.

One solid tip is to look for clues your potential client is running a private blog network. Last year I wrote up a guide on identifying private blog networks, and how to find them.

  • Were the backlinks acquired within a few weeks / months or have they been acquired over a period of time?
  • Is there domain diversity in the backlink profile?
  • Is there IP diversity in the backlink profile?
  • Is there niche diversity in the backlink profile?
  • What does the anchor text look like?

You can go deeper and deeper down the backlink rabbit hole if you want. Our recommendation for a report is to be thorough, but don’t spend all day analyzing every last backlink. It is most important to focus on the referring domains not every single last link within them.

We realize the title of this is “manual SEO audit” but even in a manual audit we must use some tools. For backlinks there are a few tools that we recommend:

  • Ahrefs
  • SEMRush
  • Moz

The best way to go about doing an off-page SEO audit is to let one of these tools do the initial work for you. There are a few metrics we like to look at when doing off-page. Mainly what we are looking at here are backlinks. We look at backlinks, the IP diversity, the anchor text diversity and everything in between.

Referring domains is normally a big tell. Taking a quick 5 minute check of the referring domains can tell a lot. For example if you come across a local company with 100 *.blogspot.com domains or 100 *.ru domains you can tell they’ve been spammed or have done some shoddy blackhat SEO in the past.

As of 2023 we really don’t advocate for the disavow tool anymore, unless a manual penalty has been imposed.

Step 7: On-Page

For the bulk of our on-page SEO reporting, we use Screaming Frog and of course manually perusing the site in question (both front-end and back-end). The great thing about Screaming Frog from an SEO perspective is you can export it to Microsoft Excel, where you can then turn it into a chart, graph, or just a pretty set of columns.

What we are looking for here: basic inconsistencies:

  • meta / title tags too short or too long
  • image optimization – are they “over optimized” are they empty? do they not make any sense?
  • URL / permalink – are-there-too-many-words? do they make sense? are they a helpful que? do they match the title?
  • 404’s
  • H1 / H2’s – again, are they present? optimized? over-optimized?
  • checking  for link rot as well as doing a complete check for broken links.

In our audits, we will export the information from Screaming Frog and beautify it in Excel. For quicker reports, we’ll simply paste different aspects of the report into our audits.

Screaming Frog has oodles of different options, ripe for the picking.

If it is a deep audit, we’ll do a full scrape and interlink scan.

In addition to this, we look for signs of other SEO stuff such as an optimized robots.txt file, a properly made sitemap.xml file and more.

The on-page portion of our manual SEO audit is generally the most time consuming and comprehensive, especially depending on the size of the site.

For an extremely large site with 1000s’s of pages, we will pick a portion of the site to audit.

Step 8: SEO Penalty Risk Assessment

Let us be very upfront about this part. We do a penalty risk assessment just as much for our benefit as it is the clients benefit. We need to make sure the website doesn’t have some sort of Google penalty attached to it. This way there are no surprises when it comes time to do the job.

The first part of our penalty risk assessment is the Penguin test. This test basically checks for spammy backlinks. The output usually looks something along the lines of:

manual penalty assessment

Nice and pretty. It is just meant to be a basic test. The next part of the penalty assessment is a content analysis check. We now take a particularly hard look at AI generated content. Stuff like keyword stuffing, doorway pages, affiliate links, and spammy advertising is what we are looking for here. By this point in the assessment we’ve probably already spotted this stuff.

There really isn’t a graphical representation of a Panda risk assessment, so normally what we do is insert some sort of statement along the lines of:

“During our process, we’ve found several instances of web spam that could be a risk factor for Panda in particular URL1, URL2, etc.”

If we didn’t find any risky pages for Panda, we’ll leave this part out of the process completely.

Step 9: Framework Audit

As an SEO in modern day world wide web world, you’ll most likely be working with a system such as WordPress, Magento, or even something non-ideal such as Weebly or Squarespace.

Here, we’re looking for basic things:

  • the version of the framework
  • any plugins installed
  • addons installed
  • customizations made to framework

For a quick audit, we like browser extensions such as Wappalyzer and Built With, but we also use good old fashioned source code browsing to verify this. Identifying the framework of a website can unlock a lot clues about the SEO worthiness of a website. For instance if the website was built using an older version of Joomla, we know there is most likely going to be some challenge. Same goes for plain HTML websites last updated 10+ years ago using Flash.

Putting it all together

It doesn’t matter how much work you’ve done, or how much research you’ve completed, if your audit doesn’t come in a pretty package chances are no one will care. I know many of you are looking for an SEO audit template but the truth is, we simply don’t use one. Each audit we do is different from the next. On average they come out to be about 10 pages including images. We do them in Microsoft Word, and save them as a PDF. Some audits for new websites are 2-3 pages while others for more established websites are dozens of pages, it all depends.

If you are interested in a manual SEO audit, let us know!