How to do an SEO Audit - Full SEO Tutorial for Beginners || seo in 15 minutes
I am welcome to how to do a professional SEO audit this is a video on how to do a professional SEO audit it's a full SEO tutorial it's a full SEO course how to do SEO for 2018 before we get started I should tell you who I am that's being my name is Josh Franceschi you may know me from other SEO video such as I've been putting SEO videos out for five years I have lots of experience in the SEO industry more than most I have a 10x talk actually in the search industry called the future of Google search and ethics I also have a soon-to-be-released documentary film called don't be evil Google secret war I've been doing that's a picture of me at the TEDx talk I've been doing SEO for a very very long time I have SEO experiments SEO secrets SEO leaks I talk with Google I'm an SEO guy here before we get into that though I just have to give you a little bit of information look at a free advice you might want this video to be very quick sorry it's not professional SEO takes time you don't want amateur SEO you want professional SEO and quite frankly a 15 minute SEO audit a little SEO quickie is not good enough a 15 minute SEO audit is going to miss 90% of the important stuff you should ask yourself would you want your medical doctor to only study before 15 minutes before operating on you before putting you under the knife no I don't think you do but do not worry in this video in this SEO tutorial of how to do a professional SEO audit I'm going to show you all the factors and all the secrets for free that's right I'm going to show you all the factors and all of the secrets for free I would be my pleasure to do so I like giving out free information I'm an SEO consultant so I make my reputation by on how accurate how good my SEO information is I'm selling my consulting services at the end of the day and so if something that I say here is wrong or just completely off-base then I wouldn't make any money and so that's how you know you can trust what I'm saying but here's another way you know you how you can trust what I'm saying and this is going to be the most important SEO information I'm going to give you all here quite frankly before you're doing any SEO this is the most important SEO factor that you need to check out and what is it drumroll you need to ask your s you know what their evidence is for their beliefs their SEO beliefs quite frankly this is this applies to any SEO you have doing work for you or any SEO you're following here on the youtubes you need to ask them what evidence they have what is their source of evidence for their beliefs cuz you might assume they know what they're talking about and you might assume they've done the research but quite frankly they have not done the research okay Josh fine it you know evidence is important you know we don't listen to scientists who don't have evidence so you shouldn't listen to any SEO it doesn't have good evidence either but how do you know what good evidence is or not well I'm a very quickly show you how to find out what good evidence is what questions to ask them so you know how to qualify your SEO and then we're going to move on to the professional SEO audit so you can see how to do some SEO on your own so for those of you who have seen my this is my five ranks of necessary SEO evidence for those of you have seen this you can just skip ahead until you don't see this screen anymore and just go ahead and click ahead if you like to get right to the professional SEO audit but I wouldn't do that if you haven't seen this this is super important quite frankly in SEO we like to rank things so our ranked evidence and from best evidence to worst evidence now here's where most of the SEO industry operates on its on the opinions of other people that's right they go read a blog or they go to SMX Advanced or West and some jerk-off up there says that well I pointed some links of my website I don't know wait down there for links your back this is the worst kind of evidence you need to vet what they're saying there through common sense not only that but everyone else here on YouTube why are they making these videos out of the kindness that there aren't no I'm making this video as eventually so that people who need SEO services can contact me I give away free information that's accurate good so that people who want to do it themselves they can do it themselves and the rest of the world is too busy to do it themselves they can contact me for the services I do SEO audits I rank sites I do monthly services I do it all so you need to vet so I fully admit that I'm I'm not necessarily selling you this information this information is free but I do sell my services but everyone else on here who has a course or they're selling an e-book they are selling you something and of course they're gonna say it's true and of course they're gonna say that they have evidence for it well you need to find out what evidence they actually have and this is how you would find out so you've got to vet what these people this conference is say through common sense and you have to ask well what's their proof where'd you get this information from the next level of so this is just the common SEO heard here the next level up of SEO information of SEO evidence is what Google says now it's slightly better than the common opinion of other SEO is because well people at Google they work at Google it's a little bit better they're little closer to the actual information source of how do you rank in Google but again they are a for-profit company they are not your friend you need to vet what they say through common sense as well quite frankly stop going on to john wheelers hangouts and asking him what the ranking factors are he can't tell you that he will get fired he will literally get in trouble if he tells you what their ranking factors are so I listened to Google there are a source of evidence I have John Mueller's email he answers my emails in 5 to 15 minutes but I vet what he says through common sense because they at the end of the day Google is not a friend they have to protect their algorithms they have to protect it from us 20 figuring out how the rankings work and they have to protect their jobs and so when they give you a warning saying you know I wouldn't do that it's probably not a good idea you can listen to that with a grain of salt but when they directly say you know when they say that you shouldn't worry about keywords anymore and all you should worry about is is as differentiating your brand that's not the best SEO advice because quite frankly at the end of the day Google is not here to give you SEO advice and all the SEO is who just listened to Google they're just as bad so it's like a terrible cycle of Google says something SMX West repeats and they just keep going in circles what's the next best kind of SEO evidence well you know it's in the field observations in the field observations are not too too bad it's you know what and you feel that observations are it's where you're running your your ranking your own 20 sites and you make a change on a site and some we later something happens the problem within the field observations and it's non-scientific it is not done in a controlled laboratory so to speak it's not done in a controlled environment now I am an SEO consultant I I audited as ins of live sites per month I see hundreds of sites per year so I have a pretty good sampling of what's going on very good sampling of what's going on probably better than most and even I admit that's not enough that in the field observations are not enough it's not a high enough quality level of evidence for me to say for a fact I know what's going on that's all I could really this is what most of the SEO industry goes off what they other what their friends say at conferences would what Google might have cryptically said in a tweet and then what they think they observed on their own sites they're ranking the five sites they rank or whatever it is as opposed to the hundreds of sites I rank the thousands of tens of thousands of pages I rank that's where they make their their judgments as to what they think the SEO factors are the most don't even get past number three so this is this is only where you generate hypotheses this is not regenerate facts what is a better way of doing it well here's a better way of doing it here's a better kind of evidence is correlation studies so for example at the software called core now I'm going to mention this software here I'll put it up here you can check it out if you want it's kind of a do everything for you SEO software it's called chorus you can get it here with a discount I think of 25% or something like that now but before you do that let me explain you what it is correlation studies are a massive kind of study where Moz puts one out of the use two they don't anymore and searchmetrics used to put one out they don't anymore either interests put one out thoroughly recently SEM rush put out further recently basically they take a look at millions of different search results pages and they see what's the same about all those pages that are ranking on page one and they that's called a correlation study and then they say well these factors correlate very highly with rankings what's the problem with that well they don't do them anymore one two they're few and far between - it's too broad right the piece of corn at alternately Cora is a piece of software it allows you to do a correlation study just only on your serve only on your search results page so for example search metrics will check 10 million different search results that's too broad because it has globalization that has personalization that has different different quality queries of diversity coordinators freshness algorithms at play and it's across the sales funnel as well or the search funnel between information based queries and sales based queries so at the end of the day those those correlation sees are way too broad to draw any specific scientific conclusions if you want to draw scientific conclusions with actual scientific statistics that are that I don't understand that are far too complicated but they're in there Cora is the piece of software you want to use it is the closest thing we have to the do everything for you piece of software you just run Cora it says you let's say you want to write for a divorce lawyer Los Angeles you would type divorce lawyer Los Angeles in Decorah it would give you all the correlations it would check over 500 factors for all the websites ranking in the top 100 spots for for your search query it would say all of us all the sites on page 1 have this do this you need to add these many keywords here you need to add this many keywords here you need to tweak your title tags you need to add this many links you need to add this much social it checks all of the offsite factors and all of the on site factors every single one over 500 factors more factors in Google's probably using your etiquette test them all so if you want anything that's as close to that do everything for you kind of SEO software that you want I would go and get Cora and it's better than in terms of evidence it's better than all these other kinds because its scientific it's going to give you the correlation of the actual pages and it's gonna check a hundred different pages for 500 factors in the space of 5 minutes what you can do this manually if you wanted to but of course a piece of software what would greatly speed this now but why is it not number one what's the problem with this well here's the problem it's called the COS correlation fallacy this is you hear this title in the SEO industry all the time so for example let's say you you talk to a divorce lawyer Los Angeles in Decorah and it told you all the correlation factors it's going to check everything it's just a piece of software and so it says everyone on page one as the meta keywords filled out so you need to add 20 more keywords into your meta keywords tab okay that's fine that's correlation but just because it's correlating with rankings doesn't mean that the meta keywords are being used by Google as a ranking factor maybe it is it quite often correlates but we know what we don't know we we Google has told us that the meta keywords are not a ranking factor so you have kind of conflicting evidence in both cases so you might you might correlate some some issues with with a causal factor that you might correlate some factors ranking factors with with with cos and you might think that it causes you to rank but it doesn't so the only way to know for sure is to do single variable experiments this is the best level of evidence and this is what myself and other people that I associate with in the industry do and it's very time consuming what we do is we make a garbage kind of served like a nonsense word by QWERTY nine four eight two six ampersand you know and that's a keyword that Google's never seen before we make five pages based on that we control all the pages in that search results page there's no traffic there's no social there's no links there's no visitors coming so we control every single variable in the experiment and when we change one little thing we know for sure that it's ranking factor or not especially when we replicate that experiment five or ten times and then we have five or ten other friends do it so you can do that you can run these experiments yourself you can follow me on YouTube you're following if you're already following a guy who does his experiments everything I'm going to show you in this professional audit video has the benefit of all his experiments I've already run and the sa a group we've run over a hundred and sixty one hundred and seventy experiments so far and you can see this experiments to if you like if you don't have time to do a few sets you can join us on a here used to use a coupon code Josh for a discount as well and that's what you can do and quite frankly it's best with all these levels so all these levels of evidence are probably the best thing to go with but it's only at the top here where you're starting to Cora corroborate facts as opposed to guess new hypotheses you please understand when when you're friend at a conference says unicorns or a ranking factor or google says unicorns are a ranking factor or unicorns would not a ranking factor and you-you-you add some unicorns to your page and you think maybe it's ranking factor this is all guessing this is nothing but guessing you don't get SEO facts until quite frankly you start doing this upper level of evidence we start listening to someone who does this upper level of evidence which is myself and people in these groups so quite frankly if your SEO doesn't use all those five levels on there as evidence don't listen to them because they do not have the most robust level of evidence all they're doing quite frankly is guessing okay so enough of that I'm noting that that rant on evidence but it's very important you got to make sure your SEO and remember anyone on here anyone on the youtubes anyone you're hiring to do SEO ask them okay what are the five levels of evidence they won't even know they wouldn't be able to name them for you never mind say that they've done experiments they know they haven't they have knowledge in each of these levels of evidence here quite frankly no one no one except for a very small group of people has this kind of level of knowledge and I'm one of them and the people I hang out with an SLA are one of them the people I do my Hangouts with my white out versus black podcast with all those kinds of people but you need to ask your SEO what level of what evidence they have for their for their SEO theories and quite frankly if they're like well I read it on a blog somewhere or well Google told me I wouldn't believe them that's not good enough evidence anyway Google is only a fourth level of evidence you need higher level evidence than that okay so speaking of which here's all the benefit of the evidence that I've done here is the professional SEO audit that I'm going to show you now most SEO audits most people think SEO audits only cover technical factors like this but quite frankly SEO audits cover far more than technical factors they cover on page and on site factors professional SEO audits cover off page factors as well professional SEO audits cover quality factors and a professional SEO audit will also analyze your competition to see how you may need to differentiate yourself in SERP so I'm going to go through all five levels here for the professional SEO audit SEO tutorial about to give you you see I got about 100 20 slides hundred twenty-six slides left there to show you of how to go through all these things canonical crawling indexing server URL parameters robots geo targeting hacks etc I'm not going to read this all out because I'm going to go through it all for you so with that in mind if you are ready we're going to get started right away with technical factors so technical factors can be anywhere in my professional opinion from 16% to a hundred percent of your rankings and that's basically 16% if you get it right and a hundred percent if you get it wrong if you get your technical factors wrong it can tank your records completely it could be a 100 percent the problem of tanking your rankings so you need to get your technical factors correct but don't worry I'm going to go through all of it for you so this is a big one SEO tutorials the big SEO course this is all the knowledge you need for 2018 and beyond I would get your coffee I'd get your notepad and let's get ready here we go with the first factor the first factor is the canonical what is what does canonical mean the canonical page is supposed to be the one original page you want to be responsible to represent that particular text or content so for example you can have all kinds of copies or variations of the same content on your site or some other site it doesn't matter and the canonical version is the original main version of that text or or or main page or main version of that text if you will it's super important to set up but it's super easy to check so to check it all you have to do is go to the header view the source so if you are in a chrome you would do command option you and if you're on the Mac or probably control-shift you if you're on the PC and you would view the source of the page and you would just search for kind of the words canonical ctrl F type start typing and canonical and you'll find it and this is what the tag looks like and here's the rel canonical tag in action here it is and it's going to tell you what it's going to tell Google what is the canonical version of this page you're looking at and it can be the same page a canonical tag can be reciprocal it could be it could be the same page pointing to itself but you just don't want here is any URL parameters question mark or anything after this you just want the main page of the version of the text you're pointing to so it could point even to yourself now remember every page needs this or very very bad negative SEO attacks are possible if you want more information about that it would take too long to explain here just email me at Josh Wyszynski at gmail.com for any SEO questions you might have again if you have any any questions about the professional SEO on it or how to do one or if you want one done email me at Josh which is Josh whiskey at gmail.com alright here's the next technical factor crawling crawling is extremely important crawling means the ability for Google to crawl or access each of your pages and index your pages in its massive search database of course this is required direct if you don't have this you're not going to be ranking now Google accesses each page with an automated Chrome browser and as of 2017 remember for high-traffic mobile sites Google will crawl as if it is a mobile phone so Google is gonna crawl your pages as if it's a mobile phone a mobile version of a Chrome browser and I have a little asterisk there because actually interestingly we did an experiment and it doesn't report it as a Chrome browser it says it's Mozilla but but they but but Google is that it's a Chrome browser so that'd be an interesting little point need to check out anyway as of October 2017 you need to make sure that you are your your website is mobile phone friendly because Google is going to be indexing and crawling the mobile version of your site and so if you have anything weird going on there like a stripped-down version or mobile site that's gonna be a problem if you're not sure if you have a mobile-friendly site with a sexy mobile design just email me at Josh but schinsky at gmail.com and I can help you with that okay so how do I check crawling Josh well it's very easy all you need to do is check search console first need to install it so to install Google search console it used to be called webmaster tools don't worry it's a free and harmless and you need to diagnose it first you need to have it to diagnose SEO issues if you don't have Google search console installed on your website you can't tell if you have a Google penalty because that's the only place they tell you so make sure you install Google search console and then you need to check what it says so once you have Google's word cause we'll installed you need to go this is the current version of it they are upgrading the version when they upgrade the version of it I will tell you but currently as of the time of this video which is February 15 2008 teen this is what this version of sort of search console looks like for this portion anyway you check the clip crawl clip crawl stats and you can see how well they crawl now check in now there's two things here you want to check you want to make sure that the the high number here is not zero and the and the low number is not not zero either this can sometimes tell there's a problem either with your speed of your site or quite frankly with the quality of the site or how often the site updates so how you cannot make Google crawl your site faster I know this is going to be sound as a news flash for some people but news flash you cannot make Google crawl your site faster they will determine your crawl way your crawl rate based on the quality of the site how many pages you have how frequently they update and the speed of this site so the reason why they're not crawling this site which is my blog which I never update because I don't care too busy to blog that's just the examples that I use for for this for this video the reason why they don't crawl it because I never updated it's a perfectly high quality and it's fast enough but they just I'd never update it so they never need to come back and crawl but if you update your site on a regular basis and this number is still zero you've got a problem because that means your speed is too slow or your quality is too low and you want to check this information here to see how long it took you took them to download it in milliseconds you do not want to see this number be over one millisecond right now it's under 600 it's around 150 on average that's about what you want to see this is how long it took Googlebot to download your page in milliseconds the longer this takes the lower this number is going to be ostensibly the worst your rankings are going to be or at least the slower your rankings are going to update I think it's entirely possible and they've Google is mentioned remember the five levels of evidence on the fourth level John Mueller is mentioned that speed is a ranking factor for mobile and we are testing that now in the first level so I will let you know as soon as I know that so that's how you check your crawl rate here's the next technical factor you need to check indexing and filtering so after they crawl up they're gonna index it and Google regularly filters websites with thin content duplicate content or low-quality content and they do that on two levels they do that on when they crawl and I'm going to do that on search now to see what they've filtered on search all you need to do is use the app and filter equals zero in the URL parameter what's a URL parameter soon as URL up here if you could see where my mouse is move around if this was a Google search a page you'd put and the the ampersand filter equals zero that's where you would put this filters equals zero that doesn't make any sense email me I'll explain and I have to go fast cuz there's a lot of lot of lot of slides to go through here so here's how you check it what is it so the question is what does Google indexed from my site there's two ways to check the first way is search console that's the easiest way you go into search console you click Google index status and I'll tell you how many pages they have indexed my massive site I was checking here it's only seven pages that's the easy thing to do sometimes this is not going to give you the correct number though a second way to check it post filters is you can do a little check if you have a site that's under 400 pages you could check it here you can use Google a check it you can go to Google com you can type in site colon your site comm and you can go to the URL bar at the end of that you type in and ampersand star equals 990 it's gonna you put that right there like this and you see it's gonna give you a little bit of a result here and so I did this for Walmart comm and it said 818 results and then after I put in the so I did cite Walmart comm and then I put it in a and start 990 after that it gave me this screen here where I clicked it and it said here are the 397 results of actual pages after all the filtering that Google has for Walmart com isn't that kind of neat it's interesting after filtering that Google only has 397 pages now this doesn't work for any website that's higher than 400 if it goes to 40 and just says 400 that means you have more than 400 pages post filtering a post post sorting in Google's index they recently made that change so my end start a 990 trick is not as useful as it used to be but it is still useful if your site is under 400 pages for you to tell exactly how many pages post sort and post filter that Google has in their index and you can always use search console as well okay here's the next technical factor that we need to check Kitty's its server codes you need to check the server response code this is actually super important that most people miss and they do not check a healthy URL responds with a code 200 that's just don't ask me why it's 200 if that's just the number they give it 200 the healthy URL it will spawn with the HTTP status code 200 as an HTTP status code of 300 like a 301 or a 307 or a 302 is various versions of the page has been moved so you're like oh okay that's what that means if you ever hear people in the SEO industry talking about a 301 or do a 301 or 200 302 or do a 307 they're talking about HTTP status or server response codes that they give along a web server will give you a page and a code the code tells you some information and the page is what people look at so if the server gives you a code of 200 and a page they're telling Google hey Google this is a healthy page if they give Google any page at all and in response a server responds of 301 they're saying hey Google this page has moved to this other page and that's what that response code means a 404 response code means the page is temporarily gone before 10 response code means that the page is permanently gone so you've heard all these before and I just know what they are HTTP webserver response code that Apache web server will give out or I asked the Microsoft based web server will give out all web servers will give out it's a it's the same language for all and the worst one is the 500 level server error you definitely want to make sure your webpage is not giving them out so these ones are a different color these are the problem 404 can be a bit of an issue for a choral budget a 410 means that page doesn't exist anymore it can't rank a 404 means that page doesn't exist anymore it can't rank and and PageRank can't pass through them either by the way and a 500 level error if you have enough of these within a 24-hour period Google will D index your entire site I repeat if you have too many 500 level errors in a 24-hour period Google will D index your entire site I thought they were moving for ranking and when they put it back it won't necessarily be at the same place it was before so he might be like okay Josh holy how do I check this well it's pretty easy you can check most of them in search console so just go to search console go to crawl crawl errors and it'll show you here the 404 response codes and I'll also tell you any 500 level error response codes here as well you definitely want to make sure that when you check here you don't see any 500 level response codes if you see four 4s this is fine you might want a set of 301 for these so that you retain any link juice because remember the only reason why Google is crawling these pages is because they found a link to it somewhere so if you want to retain that link juice because 404s will kill link juice if you want to retain that link juice you need to set up a 301 for these URLs you don't want to do that email me at Josh Brzezinski at gmail.com okay I was gonna move right on folks here's the next technical factor if you need a break pause it if you need a break pause it you know stretch get some coffee come back to the video this is a long course here's the next factor we're gonna look at guy's URL parameters what is a URL parameter I mentioned them earlier well here they are this is the URL parameter Ural parameter is quite frankly a parameter on the URL that's going to change the meaning of the URL somehow or has some programmatic some some value so programmatic value it has some some meaning for the web server that's processing this you're like shoes type equals red or type equals blue type equals blah so there's your shoes page and you use URL parameters to differentiate and show blue shoes or red shoes or green shoes now the problem is this is the problem for Google that xyz.com slash shoes question mark type equals red is and buh-buh-buh column slash shoes keep in mind these are totally different URLs as far as Google is concerned so that's a problem because you could have duplicate content between those two URLs quite frankly that's called cruft and main navigation and Google is said not to have that in your main navigation and this could cause the two levels of filtering that I was mentioning right when I told you how to use the site colon to search for filtering and also to use you'd have to use the site colon for filtering that's why you would use it because of the Google's not going to tell you that they filtered those they may not tell you they filtered all of you euro parameters so they can filter your URL parameters down you know the day Google doesn't always want your your type equals read kind of content here they don't want to see this in main navigation and they don't want to see this in your rel canonical as I already mentioned and they might not want this caught this because this could be duplicated content from your shoe's page and so they're gonna filter this out so the question then josh is ok well how do I fix it yeah boy I'm gonna fix the PC how do you fix the URL parameters well as I do you would check first off you would need to check it you go to crawl your old parameters and here it's gonna show you all your own parameters that you have you could definitely add a parameter if you want quite frankly I would mostly leave this alone mostly leave this alone it's kind of dangerous to start sticking you all parameters in here because google it would probably a better idea to let Google decide but you should check in here to see and if you see like ten thousand URL parameters filtered and you had our ranking drop recently that very well could be the reason why because all of your e-commerce you know variations they decided to to filter those URLs so if you have any question if that doesn't make any sense email me at Joshua schinsky at gmail.com and I can help you sort this out here is the other place you can find URL parameters that are kind of an issue for example you would go to search appearance on HTML improvements and you would click pages with duplicate title tags this sometimes will show you pages like this UT m equals sort UTM source that has an equal title tag this is also duplicate content that I wouldn't want to have on my site because I'm forcing Google to make a choice again duplicate content is not a penalty a duplicate content is not necessarily a ranking problem it's just forcing Google to make a choice what page they want to rank index dot PHP or index dot PHP question mark whatever the URL parameter is and as you can see here you can get URL parameters from all different kinds of places some social sharing will link to URL parameters I might use URL parameters as a link router if I want to be able to get rid of link juice really quickly you know those kinds of things right if you wanted more information on that just email me at Josh but risky at gmail.com that's Jo sh b ACH YN s ki at gmail.com or just google me google knows who I am Google knows me all too well so you can get all kind of URL parameters in here completely innocently that you have nothing to do with your website because people are linking to these URL parameters like that's how I got this here someone was linking to my my article about Google and how bad it is blah blah blah blah blah what they do to us and they put for some reason the social sharing a program just put this you out parameter in there that's how I got it so that's another reason why I need a canonical to preserve that link juice or I could have used a 3 or 1 for this UTM source to go back to index dot PHP so that's the second place you want to check it and that's that that might be what you want to do to remove duplicate content as well and then once you have checked it and then you can fix it you can fix it by check to see if you're responding 200 I would use this chrome plug-in it's quite a Emma or Amy I don't know how to pronounce it but it's a beautiful little chrome plug-in that will tell you what the server response code is for every page and it would respond 200 it's great I would just install it and if it's not responding 200 you don't need to do anything about it at all it's not responding 200 if this URL is not responding 200 response for then Google will not spider this page indexes page and you don't have to worry about it but it won't filter through any link juice either you can put a canonical in this page and to make sure that the URL parameter Canonical's to the shoes as i already told you how to do and that's the last thing there so that's how you would fix it either check to see if your 2200 if it is I would put a conical in to make sure in shoes that responds to shoes so in the shoes page I have a canonical it points to shoes and not anything after the question mark that's not what you want to your navigation and that's not what you want in your canonical tag ok here is the next technical factor we are going to look at it is the robots.txt robots.txt is file on your web server that gives instructions to search spiders about what directories and files they are allowed to crawl and they cannot crawl on your website but the problem what is the problem with robots.txt well here's the problem the problem is you don't want to block Google form important design resources that Google wants to access Google processes every page and you don't want to block them in fact Google demands to see every design resource code on your site so you don't really want to block Google anymore so how do you check your robots.txt well here it is there's two ways to check it very simple just go to your website slash robots.txt and any FTP or browser and you'll be able to read it or and if you see in there in your robots.txt disallow colon or allow slash or if for a force then you're likely getting crawled so that's fine so if it says if in your file you see disallow colon and there's nothing there that you're telling it to disallow nothing that's great or if you're saying allow slash is the same as saying disallow nothing you're probably being crawled that's great or if you don't have a robots.txt and it just 404s then you're likely getting crawled and that's not a problem at all why am I not gonna spend any more time or talk about this because here's a pro tip for you no one really needs a robots.txt it is a fool's errand quite frankly in these days it causes more problems than it solves so it's not really a factor anymore it's not really important thing so this is what really is important actually this is what you want to check and there's two things you want to check in in search console you want to check the blocked resources to make sure that Google can see all of your design files and you're not blocking any resources from Google and you want to see we're finding if they can fetch as Google so you can check the block resources when you go to fetch as Google here you want to check mobile smartphone and say fetch and render once you say fetch and render you're gonna get a little question mark here once you get the question mark and it's done processing you want to click it in search console it's the only place you can see it and it's going to show you quite frankly what what's being blocked and the severity and it's going to show you that's going to show you how it's being processing so here's the key the robots.txt is not important it's only important if you use it if you don't use it great if you do use it you have to make sure that this what Googlebot saw here is the same version of how it looks to a visitor on your website you don't want it to be any difference there cuz they cooked about you a little slight demotion for having a difference there because google has warned us not to do that okay here's the next technical factor rolling right along geo-targeting what is geo targeting well geo targeting is making sure Google understands what country to rank your site hiring slash what language you are there are multiple ways to do it you can use h hreflang code you can use a domain suffix that's called a ccTLD like like in Canada would be GA in France would be dot F R in Italy bie or IP rather and you can also check your search console setting to check your search console setting you just go to search traffic click international targeting and then it's gonna say whether you have any href link tags or not and then you click on country and it's gonna tell you what country you're targeting it was gonna auto select the country it thinks is best and if it's not actually best all you need to do is click here and change what and choose your country in the drop-down list just to warn you whatever country you put in here that's gonna give you a slight ranking boost so if you want to rank in just the United States that's great you would just select the United States and it's gonna give you a slight boost there but the problem is is gonna give you a slight drop in all the other countries like Canada or England or Australia all those other english-speaking countries and it's trying to rank you for it'll give a slight drop so if you don't want the slight drop you want to select no country selected and you won't have a drop anywhere so here's another technical factor that we need to check server hacks server hacks are super important it's super easy to get hacked and so you've got to make sure your server doesn't have any of these problems here as I said sadly there's many ways your server can be hacked or compromised so first off you can have a DDoS making your server serve that 500 level server error that I talked about and that's a very good way to to get a negative SEO probably the worst way content injection on your page they can hack your site and then insert links or they can insert links or content on your page they can do a Content injection on your URL parameters so if you don't if you're not using a canonical tag like I showed you how to do they can point 40,000 yourwebsite.com slash question mark viagra equals yes kind of URLs and if you serve 200 on those you're telling Google remember what I said you're telling Google that's a positive page it's a good page that you're doing a viagra on your site and this I Google has warned specifically it can be a ranking problem and quite frankly they can take your server down for a long time they can make it super slow there's all different kinds of things you can do so if I haven't scared the crap out of you oh and they can also make your own list that's brilliant this is a nasty one they can make your robots.txt respond a 500 level error and this will actually de-rank you and a lot of people don't know this and know how to check this if your robots.txt actually responds a 500 level server error because your server is so slow or so busy dealing with a DDoS attack that it cannot respond that when Google goes to crawl your site the Google will actually direct the entire site because they can't read your robots.txt they don't know what pages you want to be to be crawled or not so there's more there's even more that can be done so I don't know if this hasn't scared the crap out of you how do you check it Josh I'm scared well there are some things you can check in search console it's much more difficult to check all that stuff but you can check one thing you can manually go and check your robots.txt to see if it if you've got the a there a my plugin that talked about you can see if you're at one in two hundred you can check your URL parameters I showed you to do that you can check your canonical is I showed you how to do that and you can go to your robots.txt and manually check to see if it's responding two hundred or four or four that's fine as long as it's not responding five hundred and to see if there's any content injection you can go to security issues and Google will tell you if they've detected any uh content injection or any malware on your site that they can detect they can't detect everything but they can detect a little bit so it'll tell you right here in the security issues whether you have any problems if you won't need any more help with that if you're if you're scared crapless like this guy oh no how do I check maybe I'm being hacked who knows email me at Joshua schinsky at gmail.com and I will help you out I'll check things out okay again they can only check for content injection they can't check for everything so this is the finland technicals their this is basically all the technical factors that I think are important to check now you might be like well what about hold on a second there Josh what about these other factors that these other SEO talk about yeah the ones that I slacked off and said they have no evidence and no idea what they're talking about what about site maps they talk about site maps all the time what about duplicate pages well quite frankly should you check for those things no they're not important duplicate content much like the robots sitemap is largely a waste of your time it's only useful for sites with either a craft navigation or 1 million plus pages as I told you you can't make Google crawl your site faster right so a sitemap is a waste of time quite frankly if you ever get your sitemap wrong even once Google will no longer trust it and they might come in if you if you put on a sitemap up they might come and crawl your new pages so that they might find new pages a little bit faster but if you have a good navigation and you have a fast site and a quality site remember how I told you how to calculate your call rate it was how long are you off and you update your pages times how fast your site is times how the quality your site is so if you have a fast site that is high quality already which you should for ranking then they're gonna be maximally crawling your pages you can't make them crawl your pages any faster than that so a sitemap is a complete waste of time it is complete soma if you've read the book that I'm talking about it's as a complete placebo I SEOs cling onto their precious sitemap as if it does something it does not unless you have a site that has like a million new pages a day you do not need a sitemap and quite frankly you're not gonna make google crawl your site faster with a good sitemap anyway you need to have a quality site that is blisteringly fast that's the only way to improve your crawl rate that's gonna improve your rankings - okay well what about duplicate pages aren't duplicate content isn't that a big problem not really it can be a minor issue if all of your text is duplicated across many domains and it could be a reason for them filtering you and it makes Google think it makes them respond if there's two pages like I said if there's page a and page B and they're both duplicated you're making Google make a choice between page a they want to rank this page we write this page you never want to make Google make a choice here's a quick way to check just go to a page here like a blog page or randomly highlight a sentence then copy and paste that sentence put it into the search bar I'm in Chrome so I just put it into the URL bar and search for that and it'll tell you right away whether or not there's an a duplicate content and whether or not there are filtering that information and look they are they are filtering this information this is what Google will show you if they're filtering the information but it's not a problem Google as who knows what page to rank where I'm talking about if whether or not map causes a fraud a personal conversation I had with Matt Cutts with her he's a black hat or we are they know a page to rank because it's the page everyone goes to they have tons of other signals so for most sites like this little blog I was checking here it is not a problem it is only a problem for a bigger sites if all your pages are duplicated and you and you have no other value whatsoever then it can become a problem so that will be our intermission and that's the end of the technical factors next you guys can go ahead and take a break stretch stand up move around you know whatever get some coffee next we're going to be moving on to the on-page and on-site factors so the on-page and on-site factors as you can see we're at slide 56 of 138 so we still got plenty more to go for this SEO tutorial for this SEO course on page and on site factors this is another thing that a lot of people don't even check in in their tech nothing they're professional SEO on it but I'm going to show you all the factors here they they basically range anywhere from 16 percent to 100 percent even rankings if you get it wrong so again it's a super important factor you can't ignore this and so grab more coffee or at this point why don't you grab some beer and grab your girlfriend or your boyfriend's notepad and discuss it because you need more room to take notes and let's jump right into the on-page on-site factors okay the first one we look at is the SEO tags what is the HTML that boosts ranking well after scientific testing and massive correlation research and the SEO tags that still rank and I can tell you what they are in this order you want the exact keyword in the page name and the title tag you want the exact keyword in the top h1 tag with a proper logical structure you want h2s underneath and you want it close to the top of the body tag and you want that in the first 100 words so ideally on your page if this was the body tag here the HTML tag would go right here would have the keywords in it and then there be an h2 tag somewhere underneath so just think of like a logical Roman numeral structure you know point 1 you know this is my page a little introductory paragraph point - that's an h2 you know blah blah blah blah blah that's not even do it that's kind of how you want to build your page out this has if you can flush your page out this way this has the most ranking and you want the exact keyword exact match query if you're trying to rank for divorce lawyer in Los Angeles the exact keyword would be divorced lawyer Los Angeles no deviations no changes you could do a divorce lawyer LA that'd be the same kind of thing if you did divorce lawyer Los Angeles whatever Palmetto County or whatever it is that would be different that would not rank you for a divorce lawyer Los Angeles that would be ranking you for a divorce lawyer Los Angeles Palmetto or whatever that area is so it's not the same it has to be no more and no less than the exact keyword do not listen to John Mueller when he says don't worry about the keywords anymore he's wrong we've tested this maybe he's gonna be right maybe in six months they're gonna change her algorithm it'll change well we'll test it then and we'll find out but for now you definitely want to be using keywords don't listen to anyone else who says otherwise they just don't know what they're talking about they don't do that the empirical testing now here's another key thing you do not want repetition perte and plural doesn't matter so you definitely want to write for humans you don't want to just have like divorce lawyer Los Angeles divorce lawyer Los Angeles divorce lawyer in Los Angeles you do not want to do that you want the tag once no more no less no no extra no no no no minimization you want the exact keyword you want to rank for in those places and remember only one page per keyword or what page for topic you can vary slightly in the different h2 sections if you want I wouldn't use a bold tag it correlates with poor rankings I don't know why maybe Google is is it's hitting you for over optimization with a bull tag so this is basically how I would do it so here's the title if I wanted to rank best red apples get the best red apples in 2018 here here's the body h1 is right under it right under it best red apples in Vermont and then a paragraph tag I'm talking about the best red apples and then optional h2 later on and more information that's basically how it would look now remember with cascading style sheets you can make this h1 tag go anywhere but for Google's ranking it should go right under the body and the first hundred words should mention your your your tag a couple times and I'll talk about keyword density a little bit later in fact I'll talk about keyword density right now no Josh I'm too tired oh we're only we're about we're not even halfway through I've got so much more SEO knowledge for you coming you're gonna know everything about SEO ok I'm going crazy I'm going crazy you're going crazy all right keyword density here's why here's the other thing not only about on page factors like this but what your keyword density should is a factor as well so on page keyword density after numerous rounds of testing we have discovered how to boost your page with keyword density alone yes that's right we can boost your page with keyword density alone this is a fact we have proven this time and time again in scientific experiments and in correlation studies in general you want your keyword density to be 50% higher than the sir package and no more than a hundred percent higher I repeat if the average keyword density for everyone else is 1% you want to be at 1.5 21.9% you do not want to be at 2% and that would be a hundred percent higher charge of breaking my playing with math I'm sorry but if you get the math you know what I mean you want to be you don't want to be double so how do I check it ok well it's very easy download sir quark surf works is a great little a SERP overlay that I like to use at super calm it's an overlay for Chrome and when you click it it is not clicking here is going to tell you the average keyword density of the SERP and so for this particular case it was 0.3% so these guys were moss was hey they're right on there right on there right on where they want to be there's a little bit over the average right these guys are too high that's why this could very well be why SEO book is worse than these guys they're PA is the same these guys have a much better trust flow the the number of links doesn't matter it's the PA that matters so very will keep you the keyword density these guys SEO book may have over over optimize slightly they do have a two percent keyword density though that could make a difference anyway I'll stop speculating I'll get back to the video so for the purposes we know this is a fact don't forget what I just said here we know that keyword density ranks we've tested it scientifically so you want to be at 50 percent to a hundred percent more so if you want to compete for this keyword whatever it was you would want to be at no more than 0.7 because that's what 0.35 would double is brown 0.72 you would want to be at 0.7 to you know 0.65 that's where you would want to be this is too high that's how I would check it what about the in URL keyword density and how would I check that than the date the domain director keyword density well these days Google will only rank an EMD if it's perfect in every other score in metric Google does have a filter for AMD's I've done the test AMD's is still a ranking factor and it works like this ee MD is slightly higher than than a subdomain which is slightly higher than a subfolder I repeat red apples comm will beat out red apples blog spot.com which will beat out Josh's food emporium comm slash red apples HTML but keep in mind that John Mueller has warned us that that did you have special filters for exact match domains and so don't just go out and buy ten thousand exact match domains cuz it does rank higher in testing it does but John Mueller has warned us that exact match domains can have a filter so this is a perfect example of where we have to plan all the levels of evidence we're number one told me it's a better ranking factor but number four John Mueller says don't do it so you have to weigh those two pieces of evidence against each other and that's why I cos who have all five levels of evidence are better namely me yes so anyway in general you know you could do a kitchen domain name with your page and then do a subdomain uh you know I'd be very careful what AMD's only if you know you can nail the quality for this would be a pretty good signal for biruté apples if you already own a domain for sure do not go by an exact match domain but exact match domains can still rank and so this is I'm only saying this to be careful if you want to be a little risky go ahead and do the exact match domain so byron apples this will be like a ninety percent signals for buyer at apples this would only be like a 75 percent signal because quite frankly it's not telling them to buy the red apples so if you had just red apples it could help rank for byron apples but this would be a better signal if by red apples is what you want to rank for so remember avoid repetition if you already have by red apples calm you don't want to do Apple's calm / red apples dot html' we've tested that as well and definitely demotes you you you don't want to do that repetition that's another problem with doing the exact match domain as quite often you have too much repetition it is a demoting factor now if you come back to me and say now josh but i found a website yes okay I'm saying it's adding factor I'm not saying it's the biggest one so you don't want to do that ideally and don't go or as I just said don't go already changing your ranking URLs if you already a page ranking on page one if you were to have a site ranking on page one you don't want to go changing that because remember any URL change causes Google to reprocess your LSI your entity and your Quality Score all which I'll show you how to check and can cause temporary even permanent ranking losses so you do not want to do that so only change your URLs as a last resort or on non ranking pages such as pages that aren't ranking on page one yeah or websites you just started okay here's another on-page factor you want to check its the schema markup schema are microdata is extra HTML or JavaScript you put into your page to further define your content type like it's an article page it's a page describing an event it's a page describing a person it's a page describing a business it's a page with product listing on it etc our testing is shown a boost and at least the product schema and google has said not to allow errors in your in your schema because that might hurt your rankings or your featured snippets so if you have any products on your site you should definitely be using product schema and you if you're using any schema at all make sure you do not have any errors because Google is warned against that so how do I check it well to check your schema markup it's pretty easy to check for errors you can use the Google public schema markup validator just Google that you'll find it or search console so in search console it's very easy to do you just go to search appearance structure data after you had any structured data it would show up here okay here's the next it right there thanks thanks Josh thanks for the air thank ya you know when you're making these PowerPoint so you go crazy okay so here's the here's another on-page factor we need to check internal links why are internal links important internal links are super super important by the way if you guys are getting tired if your brain is full up pause the video walk around do some jumping jacks go kung fu fight some ninjas get some more coffee come back press unpause here we go why are internal links important ok internal links are important there it's extremely important for ranking they tell Google what is your most important pages what your site is mostly about and they flow PageRank to your internal pages quite frankly it's one of the biggest ranking factors that most people overlook you want to make sure your most desired ranking pages have these things they have to have the most internal links on your site and preferably they're also linked from the main content of your index page it's very important for flowing PageRank and ranking your sub pages on Google most people overlook that so to check that all you have to do is again of course use search console in search console you just go to search traffic internal links and it's gonna show you how many internal links each of your pages have and then you'd have to manually eyeball your index page to see what web pages you're linking to and yes that's where you would see that the page is thanks Josh and that's how many links they have and I would also watch out for blogs quite frankly a lot of the time I see like a sales site that has five sales pages and 600 blog pages that's not helping you rank any of your sales posts on a local site it's fun because the local ranking factors are different as well blog on a local ranking site can help if you're talking about stuff that's on your topic like a law blog if you have interesting articles about the law like like how difficult it is to get a divorce or watch the ten top tips for family law or whatever that would be as long as people are enjoying it if people are not enjoying it that's a huge problem but if people are not on a local site that's fine it's one ranking factor it's not the best way of ranking it's not even my preferred way but it's a way if you want more ideas on how to rank local site so I have a rank any sites quite frankly email me at Josh menisci a gmail.com I'd love to talk to you about but for blogs for an e-commerce sites are not great because you want to convince Google in the search funnel or otherwise known as the sales funnel where they should be ranking you and they should probably be ranking you closer to the sales end of the funnel because that's where you get higher conversions but again it's totally up to you I've seen people you make blogs work it's just it's so popular for my two thousand seven and everyone thinks you need to use a blog you don't and if there are some problems it is planned to be if you don't do your blog right which I see 99% of the time and I'm going to show you how to check this later on in the course if you don't check if you don't write your blog correctly it will get you nailed for panda and you will be crying because your rankings will be gone okay here's the next on site or on-page factor you need to check manual actions otherwise known as Google manual penalties Google gives one of those well quite frankly Google being the nice guys they are they give a number of ranking penalties which they psychologically style as manual actions so as not to appear to me that complete assholes that they are that will destroy your rankings in general they give it for obvious bot links obvious spam or low-quality or affiliate or thin content and more that's basically what it's about if they have find some links that looks obviously purchased or you're obviously a spam site obviously low-quality obviously an affiliate site are obviously thin content and a few other things but that's basically it how do I check pretty easy of course you just go to search console you cannot tell if you have Google penalties if you do not have search console so just go to search traffic click manual actions and I'll tell you if you have any listed manual actions that is any manual actions that you have accrued while you are the owner of the site if you were not the owner of this site when the manual action was accrued they may not show them but there could still be manual actions yes Google are jerks yes thanks Josh that's where you'd find it that's where your eyeballs need to go if you've got any penalties or you have any questions about how Google could be a jerk and how they might be affecting your site and what hidden penalties they might have on you or the actual penalty listed here just go ahead and email me at Josh majeski a gmail account okay here's the next factor mobile design what about design and errors remember Google is moving to a to a mobile first index they already have but I made this video made this PowerPoint we're working on this for months they've already done it by by this time October 2002 2017 is when they moved over to it so there are two there remember I told you they're indexing your mobile pages and ranking your desktop site and your mobile site based on your mobile pages so if you have any mobile rendering errors both your mobile and your desktop rankings can eventually suffer from this so how would you check it well it's pretty easy again you just go to search console you click search traffic and mobile usability and it would tell you if you have any mobile rendering errors it would tell you here after you do yes right here if you do I was thrown around fixing them if you don't know how to fix them or don't know what that means just email me at Joshua Chesky at gmail.com okay now we're not intermission folks that's all the on-page and on-site factors you need to test we are more than halfway through my massive SEO tutorial how to do a professional SEO audit my SEO course II you can go to the lobby and get yourself some popcorn you can do jumping jacks you go fight those ninjas again and we are gonna you can pause it take a break and we're gonna move right on to the off-page factors here they are off-page factors off-page factors are very important for SEO there you can see their bigger share they're anywhere from 33% to 80% of your rankings you can rank a site without off-page factors and so they're not a hundred percent of your rankings like the other things were but they are a bigger chunk for positively ranking I'd say at least a third of the ranking factors at least so get ready just forget the coffee get tequila and grab forget to notepad just go and grab your girlfriend or boyfriend or your transgendered lover whoever that might be and get ready for some off-page factors all right so the first one is social metrics social for ranking our social social factors a ranking factor yes they are we've tested this in the essay group and I've tested it myself Google tracks a few things when it comes to social they track your clicks from social so your traffic from social they definitely and there was a delicious little little accidental leak from Google when they accidentally leaked this information as well um they also tracked shares of your pages so on Facebook on Twitter on Google+ they do track shares your pages nofollow links do give a bit of a boost and when you're sharing your pages shared on social does give you a little bit of a boost it's not a huge signal but it is one that we've detected and we've tested in in a controlled single variable environment so we know for a fact it works at least it did when we tested in a couple of months ago and they will also track organic and active social profiles linked to your website and vice-versa so for example if on Facebook you have a lot of likes you have a lot of conversation a lot of discussion a lot of Plus Ones or whatever they do on Facebook I have no idea I hate Facebook my parents are on they will if you have in your website field you want to put your website there and we know that Google will also associate your page with your Facebook page if you have a links to your Facebook page on your web page or if you have a GOG tags those are our original gangster tag so they're not ice-t tag sorry that's that's a night that's a deep cut reference for a deep 1990s rap CD reference for you I'll tell you the time the ice-t saved my life for beats down but was stabbed and ice-t concert one time actually ice-t saved my life I'll email me I'll tell you the story that's the true story actually by the way getting back to the point sorry this is a long video getting back to the point if you have on your webpage if you have your Facebook page listed or your social profile pages listed and make sure that your social profile page link back it is a ranking factor we know for a fact Google uses it so how would I check that well surprise surprise not a search console this is now we're moving away a little bit from search console in this case we can use a different Google free Google product it's Google Analytics I do not work for Google disclaimer I do not work for Google disclaimer no children were harmed in the filming of this video you do check this stuff you can very easily use Google Analytics you click on acquisition install Google Analytics is free you would click on acquisition click on social overview and I'll tell you how many clicks you get from social and remember there's all kinds of social networks more than just Facebook there's YouTube there's LinkedIn there's MySpace I don't know there's all different kinds there's all different kinds of ones that Google will include here and Google tracks tons of different kind of social networks for signals they're very very sneaky so it's a good stuff if you can be social it's just a good thing to be social this is where your eyeballs should go to look at that kinds of things and here as well ok the next thing our social reviews you want to get reviewed it's another great off page factor it's more important for local and e-commerce is an authoritative third-party reviews they do help rank you have tested this in the field you want to be getting as many stars from Yelp Facebook Google my business Amazon service reviews and other high authority brands and sites you know in your air if you're a lawyer fine law and all those different kinds of ones you want a good positive Better Business Bureau you want a good positive review for as many places as you can get them as possible so here's some notes about reviews I would use the review schema and link back to reviews came from so that Google could use the Google can actually put your star reviews in the Google search results remember to link back to where it came from however the review has to be associated with the thing in question so a review of you should go on your index or your about page and that's different than a review of your product which would go on your product page that's a very important distinction quick frankly more third-party more police bigger equals better so you know a Yelp Amazon Facebook these are huge sites that are third-party you can't control obviously or not you have super control of it and so Google trust those reviews more those are the kind of reviews that you definitely want to get and you always want to respond to or fix or delete bad reviews wherever possible and yes you can use your own made-up star ratings on your site with schema but they won't trust it if you have any quality problems at all so to check your tech implementation in Google schema verification tool go to bitly slash Google scam and you could chest you can test your scammer there I made that no one had made that yet I made that I'm so proud of myself I'm the first one made that yes the life of the SEO is super super boring and if you have any quality problems that will also be an issue if you don't know if you had a review scam and you don't have it anymore if you had a knowledge snipping you don't have it anymore and if you if you're know your skin was working properly but it won't give you the review snippet or the notes knowledge snippet that means you for sure have a quality problem email me at Josh Brzezinski at gmail.com and I will help you with an SEO audit of final those problems we'll fix them right up for you okay here's the major off-page factors links both do follow links and off nofollow links so the off site they're called off site links incoming links or backlinks of course links continue to be necessary for Google's algorithms they are ever losing juice in my opinion interestingly as I said nofollow links seem to have some juice but of course do following do follow links remain the king how do I check for backlinks well there's a bunch of different ways you can use hrx or SEM rush these are paid tools and they're pricey but they will show you your backlinks there's also majestic in-laws as well you can use to show your backlinks or you can use search console for free that give you a sample of your backlinks as well so you would you just open up search console go to search traffic links to your site and it'll show you all the links that come to your site where they're coming from and what kind of links they are so here's some things to point out it'll show you that that's where your I should go to see the total number of links but here's something else important I've done a lot of testing in in backlinks and trying to do negative SEO of backlinks and quite frankly negative SEO with backlinks is is a myth it doesn't exist the only time it hurts you is when they actually make you get a manual action and that will only work if you've been doing a whole bunch of blackhat linking yourself that looks obviously paid and spammy remember I told you about paid spammy links so you just want to watch out about links from these kind of areas that's the probably useless or really low power links anyway I wouldn't pay for these kind of links don't ever pay for a web 2.0 kind of wordpress link because it's it's so low-power that's probably not worth it it is gonna send you some juice but it's going to look really really bad when you bubble up to the manual team you want to check to see how your pages are linked as well you definitely want not to have too much exact query Google will tell you if that's the case anyone check to see what pages are linked to as well if you need any help with this you can always email me I just would like to point out this is I got this this is if you're doing white hat linking this was the the website I released when I had that scandalous article about cuts the black hat and I talked about penguin 3 it's a few years old now I got twelve hundred and fifty links without trying so if you have something scandalous to write about if you have an interesting topic the old what ye oldie white hat build it and they will link to it it does work I got twelve hundred links without trying and it does rank for some queries but but you know so that may not that may be enough for your niche it may be way more than you need sometimes you only need like 20 or 50 good links to write these days so I just wanted to point out that you know we talk a lot about buying links hush-hush or acquiring links but you can do what at linking here's a primary example of where I get that so if you want more from need helped for any of that to check your links to get links either the white hat way all you have to do is email me at Josh Brzezinski at gmail comma I can help you out with any SEO thing you need okay let's move on to the next off-page factors mentions and sentiment so what about this thing called a bat merchant algorithm and what about your entity although tax management's do not seem to push the needle in one or two or many thousands of in one or two mentions many thousands of mentions can definitely affect your rankings i did a test where it seemed to be based on the quote the query deserves freshness especially if there are negative mentions so remember google does have the bat merchant algorithm they announced a few years ago and so if they do something called sentiment analysis the determine if mentions are positive or negative and if you have a bunch of negative mentions they they they have said in the past that they can demote especially ecommerce sites that have a really bad reputation so if you want to check your mentions a sentiment it's pretty easy I would search google for your entity this is a really interesting thing I like to do it tells me a lot of stuff so basically check rankings for your biz with no domain extension or whatever so and also I check your autosuggest for your bids reviews so for example when I check the moral concept you notice that the first thing to come up was do they buy my entity or business you want to make sure that your entity or business comes up first if not this spells a potentially a quality problem if your if you if your site is not the first thing that comes up for your entity search that's an issue that means you have a quality problem for sure and you should have site links as well if you don't have any site links showing up for your your entity search that spells a potential quality or a relevance problem as well so I would definitely check that out too and then make sure there are no and it lastly we're talking about sentiment make sure there are no bad reviews in your entity search if so I would fix or remove them I would answer them you may need to change business names quite frankly and make sure to the same for review so that the business was called the moral concept I would search for the moral concept dot reviews so make sure to search for these things to know what the entity is now if you're wondering what is the entity well I would refer back to Plato this is Plato the entity if you're wondering kind of what is an entity remember Google wants to know about things and on strings so this is Plato from of course the School of Athens this hangs on my wall and he's carrying a book and he has a finger so those are the things that are entities Google wants to know about all this stuff so they should know about all this stuff about your entity and I should about should be all positive and not negative information and like poor old Plato okay what is the next thing entity searches so how good of a brand are you so again still talking about entities goo has long had patents out detailing it as a ranking factor how many people search your brand and click on your result I'm doing experiments on this right now to try and prove it but Google is seem to confirm this you definitely want have brand searches so how do you check that well it's pretty easy you go to search console go to search traffic search analytics make sure you click impressions CTR or position and search for your entity to see what the click-through rate is for people who click that so for example if this was by red apples comm I would want to see by red apples I would want to see by red apples right here and we want to see our click-through rate of at least 50% and I want to click click-through rate to list it from best to worst and now will tell me if people are searching for my entity say no Google knows who my entity is and if this site is good from an today and people are clicking on it and getting that result so if you don't and I for exact match domains you often don't see that so that's definitely kind of a problem there that you want you would want to address if you have a kitschy brand name like Josh's food emporium and people are not searching that and and clicking it or even worse that people are searching it but they're not clicking it if Josh was free Emporium showed up here but at the CTR was only 12% I want to do a search to see why are people when they search Josh's true Emporium what is showing up down here is there some bad reviews showing up down here that's what I would want a check finger okay so that's how you check that move it on to click-through rate so is your surf click-through rate or ranking factor I it's rumored to be a ranking factor or at least it gets you more traffic now so I would trust I would I would use it as a ranking factor it's very important to make sure you're getting click-through rate what what good is the number one ranking in Google if you only get 3 percent click-through rate you know so whether it's a ranking factor or not I would definitely check it so it's easy again you just go to search traffic search analytics you can use the new version of Google they've got a new version which goes back for 12 months or you can use the old version here which is easy to use and you would click position and yes your eyes would be guided to the click-through rate column which you can clearly see there and quite frankly click-through rate of 12% is great a click-through rate of 0% is terrible so I would definitely want to see that being higher if you've got a click-through rate of 0% or 1% that's a problem I would definitely want to be higher on that kind of on that kind of a query that the site's not doing too well from that regard I need to up I need to update it from that perspective totally ok here we are with another intermission go grab yourself a hot dog and a beer or whatever else you want and we've got only about 40 slides left our 50 slides left here and we're gonna move right on to the quality factors again the quality factors are about 33 to about 80% of your rankings again quality is super important in my opinion it's just as important as links to writing so we're gonna talk about the quality factors so forget the coffee and and booze you should grab the mess and just start to smoke the crack pipe because we're gonna get starting to get crazy and get into the deep SEO factors disclaimer Josh PLCO does not formally abdicate to getting a bath okay didn't I just say that link so that are a big factor and you might be saying hey Josh you know like this young SEO here saying can I just get links do I really need quality yes you need quality quality is the terrible Panda you remember Panda remember everyone in the SEO industry freaking out about panda it hasn't gone anywhere it still exists it still exists and pounded this minute is the terrible algorithm that Google has that is going to kill you if you just try and get links you know maybe it's my links that's why I'm not ranking no it's panda it's quite often quality so what you need to worry about in checking your quality is that traffic matters the question is is your traffic satisfied did they find what they want on your site how do you tell if the traffic is satisfied basically I see a quality it boils down to a few factors one did your page convert so I'm sorry did your page content answer their question or solve their problem did it convert in the general sense of the word did your design your speed get in the way and finally um I said a few factors when we put - I should have said two factors so it boils down to two factors did you page car that adds other questions on their problem and did your design or speed get in the way so oli satisfying so remember Google tracks all real traffic and all major modern browsers analyzes user signals to determine if they were satisfied unsatisfied or was indeterminate do I have proof for this yes I do we have actually tested the quality factors and here's the proof I have one common sense links are always a tertiary signal at best oh it makes sense that they would always move on to traffic as being the main signal I have direct and indirect Google admissions from John Mueller on Tralee Pat's F Gary Ilyas and more Google employees it indirectly telling me and directly telling me in private that that traffic has a ranking factor I have the 2012 Panda patent talking about the quality score and how they would track users clicks and determine a quality score based on this and quite frankly they are moving to machine learning and artificial intelligence so it's really common sense they're going to move in that direction anime of the SDM rush 2017 correlation study saying the traffic as a ranking factor and quite frankly sih on them blocker oxpecker nfg SEO and my independent testing proves that it's a it's a ranking factor for crying out loud so stop emailing me and saying is it really a ranking factor is traffic really your ranking factor are they really tracking traffic yes they are I have every level of the the level of evidence chart every level telling me that it's a ranking factor so and here's my search here so here's my test was also I did here on July 6th we pointed on my test page it was ranking number 3 pretty much consistently for months we pointed traffic had about 60 people to it and this period here and nothing happened for weeks but later on remember Panda is running on real time now and as John Wheeler has told us every few weeks to a few months it refreshes so it processed the quality score based on with traffic did and it gave us a boost to number one nothing else happened on this surf there was no links no no other traffic than the traffic cent there was no social no content change and it's still ranking number one for months and ever since July so I know for a fact it and we've we've repeated this test in numerous times and other people have done this test as well so I know it is a ranking factor the question is does the traffic like what they found on the page is the question now but Josh how can they tell what a user does on page isn't this only bounces can't I use crowd search drop me to sandbox to my site no no you cannot traffic matters so remember Google is tracking everything you do on the page they're going to go to Chrome histograms to see all those different stuff that Google is tracking also on chrome and Android the most popular browser by far far over a 50 percent share they have long been able to watch your mouse movements and keystrokes and an account history to tell with a very high degree of certainty whether you are a bot or not so you cannot use you know do not use crowd-sourced op me do not use any robots do not use micro workers they can track all this pretty easily to tell if you're a really human being so it's like as if I tried to go on tinder you know if people are swiping left oh my god get this guy out of here my tinder if they're saying they don't like it Google will they hella tell that's the case okay Josh fine how do we check this well it's very easy we use the Google Analytics kit no no no children were harmed in the filming of this video we made this kid was armed I made him pause and therefore the picture for like five hours stay there kid oh no sorry never mind I'll see you good youko to Google Analytics this videos been going on a very long time you're good if you go to if you need a pause just pause it do some stretches smoke the math I mentioned come back if you need to check how good you're doing with your users there's a couple places you can check there's a whole bunch of stuff you can do so first off you can check the new visitors the returning visitors rather sorry the returning visitors is a good indication as to whether or not people like your site that's a good thing to check the next thing to check is how many page procession do you got quite frankly if they're only going to 1.3 pages that tells you they do not do you have to take should they like the pages should they keep going on that's an important thing bounce rate is important they're bouncing around a lot on this site that's not a good sign and they only stayed on average 47 seconds depending on the site if this was a blog site that would not be good if it was long-form content especially if it's 2,000 3,000 words I guarantee they did not read that content in 47 seconds here's another way you can tell now here's a problem with the average duration is that out of the box Google Analytics does not accurately track traffic what I know you're surprised like this this kid here Google Analytics is crap into the box yes out of the box is crap it does not track the actual time on page why well because sorry Oh someone needs to oil this chair sorry anyway why it's REO that's all the meth I was smoking why is because when the Google Analytics JavaScript loads it fires when the page loads but if you don't reload the page they have no idea how long you stayed there because the JavaScript doesn't load again so that's why we need to use this really handy Google Analytics hack so this is a little piece of code you can install into your Google Analytics now this is not Google tag manager for Google tag manager all you need to do is email me and I will send you the code for Google tag manager so email me at Josh Brzezinski at gmail.com I'll send you the code for Google tag manager it doesn't work out of the box in Google tag manager either but all you need is I'm just interested in real code if you want me to actually if you want type it from this and you want me to send it to you just email me as well and this will set an event that will track a page one page visits with real time on page and then bounces under five seconds so what that code will do is it will track in with with what it will track the users that are on your page they don't track one page visit and it will also make your bounce rate a measure of who bounces under five seconds and that's important because if your users are if you have a 20% bounce rate of users who bounce under five seconds again I guarantee you you've got this this tinder josh face problem okay now what's the next one here here's another two way to check bounces and usage so this is you would check it to check on people use your site use Google Analytics it's free or something like crazy egg is a paid heat mapping software but it's fantastic you would check it bounces from site so they go back to the source that's the one bounce it's important the second bounce that's important is the on site pogo-sticking so what is the on site pogo-sticking well you can check both of them in Google Analytics here you'll go to audience and user flow so you would check the user flow yes that's what you would click you would check the user flow you do make sure you're selected all users for this all their tracking all Google is tracking all traffic and you would see how many people in the United States you could tell where they're coming to the United States United Kingdom or Canada and so that's good information now this is how you would check in to the first one this is the back to SERP or Ridge inator the ideal visit keep in mind is one page is a visit only one page and there are a hundred percent satisfied so when you look at the starting pages there which is just directly to the right of this this one I just mentioned here you see to the right from the I just move the screen over so they have room you would see out of 193 sessions we had a hundred and sixty-eight drop-offs that's not fantastic so you also want to check the drop-offs on each page and that's not good either if you have 15 sessions on one page of fourteen drop-offs that tells you when they're dropping off on the site and they're bouncing back to Google and that's not fantastic so if you also want to get a better sense of your other pages they're checking what you would do is you'll go to the green area here and you would right click and you say group details and it would tell you the drop-off rate per page with the time on page if you and this would be the accurate time on page if you've installed the JavaScript code so I repeat you would go to the green area here you'd move your mouse over it you'd right click you click click I think it says left click or right one of the other you click group details and you would see if you've installed the JavaScript code that I talked about you would see the actual time on page they spent and the drop-off rate so the information yeah no it depends if you have an information page or a sales page what's important here do you think they were satisfied for your information page or if was a sailor page did they call them by you it did they could the date did they buy you ha did they call them by you were you for sale what kind of what kind of sorry you're running I'm sorry just just just a little prostitution joke this deep in the course if you're running a sales page did they call or buy your product or service that's what you need to check so so for the sales page it's a this is only anecdotal like they could have only been there for five seconds and the drop off rate could be 90% but they all called you on the phone and bought so that's not a problem but I guessing I'm guessing that's not the problem so you want to check this to see how long they were on your page they're only here for five seconds and you have an 83 or a high drop-off rate like this this is not going to be a good thing so I would definitely check the percentage of traffic that dropped off and at what time because that could be very important information for you for sure these so this is the bounce back to SERP or bounce back to source that you'll be checking that's the first tip that's the number one important bounce the right to check here's the second bounce rate you want to check that's important to check and it is the pogo sticking look at this here people went from the pandalus page to the index page back to the panelist page back to the index page that is not what you want that's called pogo-sticking and that is what the two thousand twelve pound a patent is written about and so the ideal visit again remember the ideal visit as far as Google is concerned is they just go to one page and they got their information and they go and they turn it to search right they wanted the Panda list they clicked panda list in the result they read it and then they go and they search for cookies or something totally different than what they were searching for before you do not want this kind of pogo sticking pattern because that's exactly what they talked about the 2012 panda patent that would reduce your quality score and so let me tell you exactly how that would work so every time if they just went to one page that would be a perfect quality score of 10 out of 10 quality scores like PageRank it's a number of 10th that'd be a perfect quality score but every hop they go to the way the 2012 panda pattern is written would be another minus 10 so this would be 9 9 to 10 8 out of 10 at past 7 and 10 at best for a certain percentage that just keeps bouncing around the site because apparently they can't find what they're looking for so remember the ideal visit this is not sure the ideal visit and there's a good chance that google is using this as a ranking algorithm and quite frankly it just shows that people are not enjoying your site and you're not converting as bit as well as you can you're not making this sales as you can so you should definitely want to fix this this would definitely be part of your SEO audit you definitely want to fix this anyway okay here's the next off quality factor we're going to check and it's traffic matters when design is its when designs attack so sometimes the issue is not your content it's your presentation you need to check your design for too many ads that would be more than 30% screen real-estate above the fold you need to check your site for too much fluff above the fold you need to check to make sure you're selling well that you have a good call to action that you have sales value propositions and places people can read it and finally you need to check check the site speed on webpagetest.org so if you want help with your design you don't know if your design is any good you don't know if your design is getting in the way of your conversions email me at Josh machine skini at gmail.com I will help you out but you for wanna check the speed on webpagetest.org i'll show you how to do that it's super cool so basically this is web page test I don't work I put in your site here you select your location if applicable if you have a local site if it's not applicable I'd select Lincoln Nebraska or Oregon so that you're tight you just show your test is faster there's less people doing tests in this area you also want to select 3G because that's on average Google tells us that's what people use for mobile traffic which is interesting so you want to select 3G to see how long it takes to download on a mobile browser because again remember they're ranking all sites based on mobile factors these days and after when you're done that you'll get the speed test back you want to check the first bite time annual check the render time that's what's important so basically you want the first bite time to be below one second and you want your start render time to be not too much of a distance between the two and that's that's not what you want so this would not be that great it's good because it's starting to render pretty fast but I would want this to be faster this is a whole second in between why is that the case well it could be the case for a number of reasons if you want to scroll down you'll see that they tell you what all the requests were taken up with and what your bites were taken up with it quite frankly look at this 65% of the bites here were from JavaScript that's not good so there's no reason for a simple blog site like this to have 65% of the bites of this site be in JavaScript that's just because my designer was getting lazy and he copy and pasted all the JavaScript from his last design he did to this to this page so what else can you look at you can also look at here and here's where look at all the JavaScript it's being loaded here look at all this crap look at all this fluff this is definitely not what you want to load this is why the page takes so long to load that's the kind of stuff you definitely don't watch the time of first buy it wasn't too too bad but then it's all this stuff that's being loaded here so that's the kind of stuff you can you can fix when you're doing the quality that's how you would check the speed I love webpagetest.org it's a great speed test to use so that brings us to the end of what kind of quality thing is to test there's a few more things you can obviously want to look at when it comes to design it'll be too long for me to go over and this this this sem tutorial so if you have any questions about that email me at Josh pitches give Geno calm and here were having a smaller - mission go and grab your girlfriend or boyfriend or a transgendered lover whoever whatever your thing is man whatever your thing is dude it's not good and crap grabs and stop smoking and that's put down the crack pipe and drink some water and we'll go into the final area of the ticket pause take a break and then we'll go into the final area here of my a professional SEO audit is the SERP analysis is to see how much stuff there is check for a professional SEO analysis the serpent alysus I would say is not a ranking factor per se but it is going to equate to 30 to 50 percent of your success if you do not check the landing pages you're going to end up on if you do not check the search results pages the Google pages you're gonna end up on you have no idea so roll up your sleeves we're going to look at the serpent now how to do its proper syrup analysis and forget the coffee get your gun disclaimer I do not formally advocate the getting of quote/unquote your gun okay so query so the serpent Alice what is this well QT d stands for query deserves diversity QT f stands for deserves freshness the known snippets and the competition analysis so how do you read the SERP the final component in any professional SEO audit should probably include an audit of your SERP landscape you can do everything listed before write everything I talked about you can do right and still not rank due to the SERP you want to appear on because you did not plan for where you're going to end up so anyone who does an SEO audit if they don't do a competitive analysis they have no idea what they're doing if they don't know their evidence sources they have no idea what they're doing either pretty much everyone else in the industry has very little idea what they're doing you need to listen to the people I have on my blog we're really the only people you could trust so for example the SERP could be dominated by Google products and ads for example look at this images where this how many things are a Google product here you know on this little this is a Google product Google product Google product so if you don't you know or the knowledge panel for best PHP CMS here's the knowledge here's the knowledge a carousel that will go for that or knowledge snippet can show up you need to check to see what your SERP is gonna look like so if you want help doing getting in the knowledge panel or getting of this stuff I know how to get it email me at Josh which is Quixote mail calm but you definitely need to check your syrup to see if it's got those kinds of features and if it does you're going to want to get them now even if that's not the case you the SERP may also be dominated by big brands that would be tough even practically impossible to beat for example look at what I just do a search for search shirts every single result is giant essentially a giant brand right hmm Nordstrom Macy's LL Bean JCPenney these are all huge brands you know rose wholesale Foot Locker Mark's work warehouse and in Canada the Hudson's Bay Company is a big brand which you might be learning about if you're watching the the TV show frontier with Jason and Momoa so uh what about the spammy serves and what about spammy search as well so it all depends on the SERP you want to rank and you've got to check this stuff out it's the very it's very important for for a proper professional SEO audit so you need to check your SERP how do you do that well again I would use a SERP overlay like SERP work so you don't have to use soap works there's a moss there's moss has one a truss has one they all have different have one but none of them have the keyword density thing because I asked Richard to make it who makes the SERP works overlay so he did so that's why I use it because I asked him to do it he did it so I told you I know everyone in SEO I've been in SEO for ever everyone knows me everyone who knows what they're doing anyway who doesn't live in a little bit vacuum it's something I see oh whatever it goes anywhere or seasoning so you I would use a server overlay like SERP works there that's where you would click it and it's gonna bring up this kind of result for you and again you could check the number of links it gives you a pretty good glance of what's going on here and these are the most important factors as far as I'm concerned for in my opinion these are the important factors you need to check for the competitor analysis I would check the keyword density I would check the page Authority because that's a pretty good of the page the domain authority doesn't matter it's only the page authority the domain authority only matters insofar as the domain authority of that domain filters down to the page authority and the trust flow matters as well those two are very very important ah idea secondarily I would also check these things as the spam score is it far as maz is concerned house family links are well it's basically just going to tell you how much of this trust flow and page Authority you can trust based on the spam score there fern domains is another factor and the anchor text the anchor cloud the exact match query anchor text pointing back to this domain is fairly important as well then the next thing that's important is whether or not they got any h1 or h2 tags because remember I told you that's how you do a proper on-page SEO if all the competitors don't have any of these that's a pretty positive thing but of course it's not it's not the it's not the only factor I've shown you tons of different factors it's not the only factor but it's an important factor if I finally gonna surf and I see hey these guys haven't filled out there they're on page factors that's one little feather in my cap that I know that I could beat them on that because they haven't filled it out and also last but not least the the social is important as well to see what kind of social they have there again it's not the biggest factor but it is a factor and then last but not least you can check the key this one I like I think is important the keywords that are ranking for an SEM rush on the traffic for example like look at this site down here they have just a little bit of traffic you could check if what else is P and DA of course so sorry going back to this one so this K this site here just a little bit of traffic and a little bit of keywords these guys have more rankings so you know they're in a bigger site they have more keywords ranking and they have more traffic you know that they're a bigger site and so you know if you want to take these guys out or if you have to deal with these guys that's going to be harder to do so for let's say this this little so this little slide here but this little site here has the has the snippet the featured of the site links so that is telling me that they might have a little bit more quality than these guys these guys hippie shop calm who might watch my show they should be improving their quality for sure because these guys are getting the the site links and these guys are not sorry that's a little diggit the guys who watch my show I'm trying to get them to improve their quality getting clients to prove their quality on their website is like herding cats difficult to do so again you should check out the trust flow in PA for all the other competitors as well as I've said remember you do want to be fifty percent above the surf keyword average density no more or less and remember you need to check if you're a small or a bigger site and you could make an educated guess as to whether or not bigger sites do rank better so if all you see are big huge sites on the SERP like that branded one I did previously it's gonna be very hard to rank theirs and be very difficult to rank there for sure so another thing you need to ask yourself is did you do proper keyword research you know notice how I did this whole search on purpose hippie clothes what these guys might be optimizing here for is not what the main search is so you want to make sure that you're optimizing for what the main search is so do the proper keyword research is important also that will include checking to see how how lucrative this keyword is anyway if this this keyword is only worth forty four pence if I'm reading that correctly my UK friends please correct me if I'm getting your weird currency incorrect but this is only worth forty four pence so it's not even a full pound you know is this the keyword you really want to spend a lot of time and money on and the final pro tip I'm gonna give you when you're doing a serpent alysus is whenever there remember whenever there's two or three pages on the cert from the same site this indicates that there's a quality differential between sites it's a big opportunity to get your quality above everybody else's and get the ranking boost so even though I said these guys might need to improve their quality because these guys are getting the site links they got at least two they have two results for the search query hippie clothes they very well could be doing better than everyone else down here lower down on the server so always remember that quality is a relative term just like gravity just like Einstein said a equals MC squared that gravity is relative that has nothing to do with e equals MC squared by the way but I'm getting really tired so just pretend it does but he did say gravity was relative so to quality is relative Einstein said about Google ranking that quality is relative to everyone else on the SERP check the quote that's what Einstein said that's not I started to not say that in any way shape or form okay so that is the end of the professional SEO audit that covers everything we've been over the technical factors on page off page quality and the serpent alysus that and this and nothing less than this is what you need for a professional SEO audit remember to keep in mind all the levels of evidence if you do not have this evidence you do not know what you're talking about quite frankly and/or you're just guessing because these are only guesses down here and you want to find an SEO who does you can corroborate facts you can do these chorus studies and who can also do single-variable experiments like myself and all of my other friends I talked to you on white out versus black hat SEO show and finally if you need more help that's my big fat smiling face you can come onto the show and see those other smiling faces and we will help you with more SEO videos at bitly Josh subscribe you can subscribe to my youtube channel and you can get more SEO help by emailing Josh which is ski at gmail.com and that is the end of the show 138 slides whoo we did it and it only took coffee tequila grabbing our girlfriend or transgendered lover and smoking some meth to get through it all so I hope you don't mind my my off-the-wall sense of humor but that was all good information based on serious SEO evidence and I just like to deliver in a funny way because look at look at this picture I'm a funny kind of guy so accept any substitutes do not do not accept any lesser SEO evidence do not accept a lesser professional SEO audit and as I always say good luck in the SERPs thanks folks and we'll see you next time.........
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