technical seo auditing: how healthy is your site?

Technical SEO Auditing: How Healthy is Your Site?

William Nye. Senior Technical Consultant. william@builtvisible.com williamjnye

Today we’re going to review an affiliate site from an organic search perspective.

1. Historic performance

2. SEO issues

3. Recommendations

How Do We Identify SEO Issues?

playslotscasinos.com

Domain Info:• Domain registered on

14/11/2013

• First crawled by web.archive.org: 10/3/2014

• 343 indexed search results

• Static HTML build

• Responsive

Historic Performance

Historic Performance

Is It Still Ranking?

Ranking in the top 10 for 408 terms monitored by SEMrush. Ranking in the top 30 for 14219.

1-5 6-10 11-15 16-20 26-300

2000

4000

6000

8000

10000

12000

14000

109 299 5251719

11567

Desktop Organic Rankings (US) – Po-sitions 1-30

# o

f Ke

ywor

ds

Current Rankings

Total opportunity only around 3k p/m for ranking keywords – but this doesn’t include long tail.

Search Opportunity

1-5 6-10 11-15 16-20 26-300100002000030000400005000060000700008000090000

100000

1530 1460 39008940

89700

Organic Search Opportunity (US) – Po-sitions 1-30

Sear

ches

Per

Mon

th

Top SEO Issues

Link Profile

Large quantity of linking domains discovered October 2014 - Jan 2015; big increase in visibility.

Link Growth Overtime

01/08

/2014

01/09

/2014

01/10

/2014

01/11

/2014

01/12

/2014

01/01

/2015

01/02

/2015

01/03

/2015

01/04

/2015

01/05

/2015

01/06

/2015

01/07

/2015

01/08

/2015

01/09

/2015

01/10

/2015

01/11

/2015

01/12

/2015

0100200300400500600700800

Referring Domains for playslotscasinos.com

Link Attrition

Only 11% of the links recorded are still alive. Low quality usually results in high attrition.

Low quality linking root domains with low topical relevancy and commercial anchor texts.

Link Quality

Link Quality

Unsurprisingly most linking root domains are < 10 Trust Flow (data from Majestic).

1-10 11-20 21-30 31-40 41-50 51-60 61-70 71-800

10

20

30

40

50

60

Trust Flow Per Domain

Link Profile Recommendations• Quality: Site needs better links to rank effectively, over the long term

• Anchor Text: Commercial anchor text usage should be minimal

• Topical Relevancy: More relevant links needed

Next steps: Full link profile should be reviewed and the worst links disavowed

Site Quality

Quality Updates

Panda 4.2Phantom 3 Core

Update

Later decreases correlate highly with updates aimed at content quality and user intent.

Emphasis on E-A-T – expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness

Google Quality Rater Guidelines

Source: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//insidesearch/howsearchworks/assets/searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf

Signs of Lowest Quality Pages:• Pages or websites that are created to make money with little to

no attempt to help users• Pages or websites created with no expertise or pages which are

highly untrustworthy, unreliable, unauthoritative, inaccurate or misleading

• Violations of the Google Webmaster Quality Guidelines.

Site Design

Low quality templated design doesn’t inspire trust. This leads to bad user engagement.

Unique textual content but it’s very low in quality. Updates like Phantom have been punishing sites were textual content doesn’t match user intent.

Quality of Textual Content

Quality Recommendations• Textual Content: Rewrite copy, only including text that matches the

intent of the page. Emphasis on quality of content produced

• Design: Improve the design for both mobile and desktop users with an emphasis on trustworthiness and usability

• E-A-T: Continued focus around E-A-T throughout the site

Why Should I Care?

Because the opportunities are rapidly diminishing

The Elephant Penguin in the Room

• 85 weeks since the last refresh on 18/10/2014

• Next update is supposedly “real time”

• Apparently it’s coming soon

What Should Affiliates Do?

Focus on producing websites that provide real value

The Best Affiliate Sites Already Do This

Try and find a point of difference – whether it’s the quality of the site, exclusivity in what you offer or another USP.

Final ThoughtsWhatever Google does, someone, somewhere, will always find a way to beat the system.

But using these tactics will always be higher risk.

Affiliates need to pick the right model for their business.

Thank You

Slides @ builtvisible.com/blog/

William Nye. Senior Technical Consultant. william@builtvisible.com williamjnye