Comments on: SEO Audits: What You Need to Know

By: Paweł Rabinek

Paweł Rabinek — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 08:18:44 +0000

This is great article and it’s still accurate. There are some tools for making seo audits simplest and quicker. For example you can use http://www.seoptimer.com for fast check your on-page SEO factors.

By: Kyle Lelli

Kyle Lelli — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 17:45:23 +0000

Great post Rhea. I always enjoy reading your stuff as it seems to come from a very honest place. Reminds me of Wil R. in a way.

Even after the super actionable advice is served to the client on a silver platter, they still need to implement. Hand-holding with the client through the [implementation] process is a great way to ensure that it goes smooth (usually) and has helped us on many occasions to grow our relationship with the client.

By: Akash Kumar

Akash Kumar — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 15:29:16 +0000

Hey Rhea,

Just wondering, don’t you do competition analysis in the audits.

By: Rick Ross

Rick Ross — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:02:09 +0000

does anyone have an example of a small SEO Audit? I can’t seem to get things structured right.

By: Aaron Weiss

Aaron Weiss — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 18:24:08 +0000

Any article about SEO that has a Zappa quotes is gold to me. Great article.

By: Scott Skurnick

Scott Skurnick — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:07:55 +0000

Rhea, love how you were able to work a Frank Zappa quote into an article on SEO. I think you hit the nail on the head. Great Post.

By: Rhea Drysdale

Rhea Drysdale — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 01:08:40 +0000

Marty – I hear ya on some of the exhaustive points. It amazes me how some of the most important things are two sentences and others take pages. Whatever it takes though!

Matt – thanks! And, keep me posted on how your process evolves. We’re still coming into our own, I change things up almost daily, which probably drives the clients crazy except that things get better and better.

Sashi – good point about confusing clients. As soon as you present them with something, they come to expect it regardless of the actual value. Do both of yourselves the favor and start simple growing into your rhythm from there. Of course automation is the key to gettin’ paid! Find the sweet spot.

We price by time and scope. Bigger problem = more time and more brain power.

By: Shashi Kapoor

Shashi Kapoor — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:20:20 +0000

Haha, love the Pink Floyd reference Rhea. Admittedly we tried a number of different off the shelf packages to generate material to put in reports (don’t shoot me!) when we were starting out in the SEO industry.

We soon found that that approach only served to confuse the hell out of clients and bombarding them with 100 pages was a ridiculous idea in the first place.

They’re now all hand written and only relevant material is brought up. Again as above, pricing for them is the most difficult part, as people can get 300 page reports for £50 ($80 or so) but ours are now usually less than 10% of that size.

Do you price for the time that goes into one of your reports or just assign it a standard price based on the size of the site, or even just a fixed price?

RE writing something subliminal in your work to see what effect it has, I’ve done the same with a teacher I used to have, I even took it a step further and drew something in the middle of my text that they didn’t notice on a longer piece!

By: Matt Davies

Matt Davies — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:38:45 +0000

Good stuff Rhea, got me thinking about how we audit here and I might be making some changes based on your ideas. I mostly audit in my head, going through the site and making changes as I spot problems but really should start documenting them beforehand – I just don’t like to wait, want to get stuck in straight away!

Re: Ian’s point, think we’ve all had that before. I’ve seen huge-looking documents with just 1 paragraph of large type on each page, just to pad it out so it looks like they’ve done more preparation. Thankfully most clients see past it, and as you say, those that don’t are probably best avoided!

By: Marty Weintraub

Marty Weintraub — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:53:24 +0000

Thanks for this post Rhea: I love the Zappa quote. Some of the most important changes we can recommend to a website owner don’t take much ink and paper. Others require exhaustive documentations, long lists of URLs, etc…