Martin Splitt of Google offers tips on how to improve SEO audits so that they are more useful to web developers.
A number of pointers are provided in the second episode of Google’s SEO & Devs web series on YouTube, which is devoted to SEO audits.
Bartosz Goralewicz, CEO of Onely, joins Splitt to offer recommendations based on first-hand experience with his team and clients.
This episode is well worth listening to in its entirety because you will undoubtedly learn something that will improve your working relationships with developers and stakeholders.
Here’s a taste of what’s in the 30-plus-minute video.
Get Rid of PDF Reports
Splitt suggests that PDF reports be replaced with more efficient forms of communication.
The problem with delivering SEO audits via PDF report is that they frequently state what’s wrong with a site without mentioning what needs to be done to fix it.
Another issue with these reports is that they are not always aligned with the website’s goals.
Splitt explains this with an example from his days 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.”
Now that we’ve established what’s wrong with traditional SEO audits, let’s look at what can be done to improve them.
Bartosz offers some practical advice in the following section.
Improve SEO Audits by Improving Communication
According to Bartosz, the key to providing better SEO audits is to communicate with stakeholders and developers more thoroughly.
“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 withthem, but we know how this might go. So we’re going to start with that.”
Beginning the audit process with stakeholder goals can help you avoid delivering useless SEO audits, such as the ones Splitt discussed in the section above.
According to Bartosz, his team only looks at a client’s website after learning about their goals.
“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 process result in better audits, but if the goals set forth in the initial meeting are met, it will be easier to demonstrate the ROI of SEO.
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