Google‘s Martin Splitt recommends how to improve SEO audits, more applicable to web developers.
Several recommendations were made in the second section of Google’s SEO & Devs online show, which is dedicated to the issue of SEO audits.
Bartosz Góralewicz, the Founder of Onely, recently joined Splitt to offer guidance on what works the best, based on first-hand experience from his team and clients. It would help if you listened to this episode from beginning to end because you will undoubtedly discover something that will improve your collaboration with programmers and stakeholders.
Here’s a sample of what’s in store for you in the 30-plus-minute film.
Contents
PDF Reports: How To Get Rid of Them
Instead of PDF reports, Splitt suggests employing more effective communication techniques. The issue with distributing SEO audits as a PDF file is that they often explain what’s improper with a website without stating what needs to be done to address it.
With an instance from his experience as a developer, Splitt elucidates this point:
“I used to work as a developer.” I did enough on my plate, and then, out of nowhere, amid a sprint, someone from the SEO department appeared and said, ‘Martin, here is a Document with all the things that are wrong.’ Bye!’
And then they flew away, and I’m like, “Uh, okay, it says we’re using JavaScript,” which is correct because what we’re working on currently is a VR application that works in the browser on your phone. To do so, you’ll need to use JavaScript.
So, the suggestion is to avoid using JavaScript, but we can’t do that because then we won’t be able to use VR.
Better Communication Will Help You Improve SEO audits.
According to Bartosz, greater involvement of stakeholders and engineers is the key to knowing how to improve SEO audits.
“We usually begin with stakeholders… Before making any offers or anything, we speak to the stakeholders; we get on the phone. We go on the phone and discuss the KPI, the problem, the hurdles, and why we’re doing it in the first place.
What is the significance of this? What is it that you desire to change? We’ll still deal with them if traffic is the only metric, but we’re aware of the risks. So that’s where we’re going to start.”
Beginning the audit work with stakeholder goals will help you avoid giving ineffective SEO audits like those described by Splitt in the previous section.
Bartosz claims that his staff only visits a client’s webpage after finding out about their goals.
“Then, following the call, we research their website and draft a statement of work.” So we say, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do.” This is a list of issues we’ve discovered with your website, and this is how we plan to address them.
Prioritize such that we fix all of the worst problems in the first month, such as internal 404s or, oh, 10 seconds to display the website, or whatever.
And it’s apparent since we tell them this project will take four months, we’ll go into a project manager such as Jira or Trello with the development team, and we’ll make it happen.”
Conclusion
This method will lead to better audits, but it would also enable showing overall SEO ROI quickly if the initial meeting’s goals are reached.
For more details on enhancing SEO audits, see the entire Google video.