Site Audits: Evaluating the SEO, Content & Social for 3 Websites

The SEJ ThinkTank hosted our second live site audit webinar on March 4.

This time, we decided to cover just three sites (instead of four like we did in our first audit), which would allow the panel to spend more time drilling down into issues the sites might have.

This article will cover the tools and recommendations we covered.

The audit was moderated by SEJ’s Chief Social Media Strategist Brent Csutoras, and the SEJ panel included the expertise of our:

• Executive Editor Kelsey Jones.
• Lead News Writer Matt Southern.
• Social Media Manager Debbie Miller.

For this audit, we choose two sites to audit. The team spent time before the audit researching the sites and noting recommendations:

AllstateFoundation.org

This site was particularly interesting because we really enjoy working with nonprofits and this particular foundation is tied to such a big brand. The site owner said they have been performing their own site audits, but were looking for tips. A few of the issues noted by the panel included missing robot.txt files, minimum social presence, and a lack of CTAs on the home page.

MeasurIT

This Irish-based B2B company was chosen because many B2B businesses struggle with online marketing. The site owner was wondering if the website was providing enough information about their product Tideflex Duckbill Valves. A few recommendations from the panel included including a location page, moving the social buttons above the fold, and increasing activity on the blog.

Wild Card Site: Olympus-Tours

One of the most exciting parts of doing the live site audit is our Wild Card site! This is a site that is chosen live from the webinar audience – which none of the panelist have looked at before. No prep, no rehearsals, just an audit in real-time!

This week’s selection was a tour and shuttle company focusing on Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Panama. A few suggestions the panel had for Olympus Tours included focusing on promoting consumer created content, making sliders on the homepage clickable, and extending company branding to its blog.

Watch the full webinar here:

Tools of the Trade

Through out the site audit, the panel mentioned several tools that can be used to check different aspects of your site.

Screaming Frog

This is a free program allows you to swiftly analyze and audit your site from and onsite SEO perspective. Matt uses it to uncover a wide variety of SEO issues, including duplicate content, missing robot.txt files, and missing H1 tags.

Page Speed Insights

This Google Developer tool offers insights into how your website could run faster. This is another free tool that looks at how fast your site load on both mobile and desktop computers. It also rates your site’s problems in order of urgency.

Mobile-Friendly Test

This is another free tool from the Google development team. This will look at how mobile friendly your site is, which will be a big deal in the coming year according to Matt (and Google!).

Visit our #SEJThinkTank archive to listen to other SEJ Marketing ThinkTank webinars.