Martin Splitt of Google presents suggestions for making SEO audits more relevant to web developers. In the second part of Google's SEO & Devs online series, which is dedicated to the topic of SEO audits, a number of recommendations were offered.
Bartosz Goralewicz, the CEO of Onely, has joined Splitt to offer advice on what works best, based on his team's and clients' first-hand experience. This is an episode worth listening to in its entirety because you will undoubtedly learn something that will help you enhance your working relationships with developers and stakeholders.
Here's a taste of what the 30-plus-minute video has to offer.
Get Rid of PDF Reports
Splitt advises using more effective communication methods instead of PDF reports. The problem with sending SEO audits as a PDF report is that they frequently explain what's wrong with a site without specifying what has to be done to solve it.
Splitt elucidates this point with an example from his time as a developer:
“I remember being a developer. I had so many different things on my plate already and then, out of the blue, in the middle of a sprint, someone from the SEO department descended upon me and said: ‘Martin, here is a PDF with all the things that are wrong. Bye!’
And then they flew off and I’m like — uh okay it says we are using JavaScript, which is very accurate because what we are actually building right now is a VR application that runs on your phone in the browser. You will have to use JavaScript to do that.
So, the recommendation is to not use JavaScript, but that’s not really a thing we can do because then we don’t have VR capabilities. And because then that’s our product we kind of have to build our product to have our product with the technologies that enable the features of our product.
A lot of these things are so unhelpful and so not reflective of the circumstances that I, as a developer, work in.”
Let's look at what's wrong with traditional SEO audits and how to repair them now that we know what's wrong with them. Bartosz offers some practical recommendations in the next section.
Improve SEO audits with Better Communication
According to Bartosz, the key to effective SEO audits is greater communication with stakeholders and engineers.
“Usually, we start with stakeholders… we talk to the stakeholders; we hop on a call before creating any offers or anything. We hop on a call and talk about what’s the KPI, what’s the problem, what are the challenges, why are we even doing that.
Why is this so important? Why do you want to fix that? Because if traffic is the only metric, we still will work with them, but we know how this might go. So, we’re going to start with that.”
Starting the audit process with stakeholder goals will assist you to avoid providing ineffective SEO audits, such as the ones Splitt outlined in the previous section.
According to Bartosz, his team only looks at a client's website after learning about their objectives.
“Then, after the call, we look into their website and we create a statement of work. So, we tell them — OK this is what we’re going to do. This is the list of problems we’re seeing with your website; this is how we want to fix it.
Prioritize, so the first month we solve all of the most terrible aspects like internal 404s or, I don’t know, 10 seconds to load the page, whatever.
And with that it’s extremely transparent because we tell them this project is going to take four months, we’re going to hop into a PM (project manager) like Jira or Trello with your dev team, and we’re going to make it happen.”
Not only will this procedure result in better audits, but it will also make proving the ROI of SEO easier if the goals set out in the original meeting are met.
Watch the whole Google video below for additional information on how to improve SEO audits:
Disclaimer: This blog post is contributed by the Mediawire SEO team
To Know More About Author, click below
Rishika-https://www.linkedin.com/in/rishika-singh-4a556b160/
