Google’s Martin Splitt provided suggestions on how to improve SEO audits to make them more useful to web developers.
Google’s second episode shared some tips SEO and developer A web series on YouTube dedicated to the topic of SEO audits.
Onely’s CEO Bartosz Goralewicz joined Splitt to provide advice on what is most effective based on first-hand experience between his team and clients.
This episode is worth listening to in full, because you will definitely learn something that will improve your working relationship with developers and stakeholders.
This is just an example of the content included in the 30-odd minute video.
Ditch the PDF report
Splitt recommends replacing PDF reports with more efficient forms of communication.
The problem with providing SEO audits via PDF reports is that they usually state what is wrong with the website, but not what needs to be done to fix it.
Another problem with these reports is that they do not always align with the goals of the website.
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Splitt elaborated on this with an example from when he was working as a developer:
“I remember I was a developer. I already had a lot of different things on my plate, and then suddenly, in the middle of the sprint, someone from the SEO department came to me and said: “Martin, this is a PDF with all errors. Goodbye! ‘
Then they flew away, and I was like-well, it said we are using JavaScript, which is very accurate because what we are actually building now is a VR application that can run in the browser on your phone. You will have to use JavaScript to do this.
So it is recommended not to use JavaScript, but this is not something we can really do, because then we don’t have VR functionality. Because that is our product, we must build our product so that our product has the technology that supports our product function.
Many of these things are unhelpful and therefore do not reflect my working environment as a developer. “
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Now that we know what is wrong with traditional SEO audits, let’s see what can be done to fix them.
See the next section for some possible suggestions from Bartosz.
Improve SEO audit through better communication
Bartosz said that the key to providing better SEO audits is more thorough communication with stakeholders and developers.
“Usually we start with stakeholders… We talk to stakeholders, we make a call before creating any offer or anything. We answer the phone and discuss what the KPI is, what the problem is, what the challenge is, and why do we To do this.
Why is this so important? Why do you want to solve this problem? Because if traffic is the only indicator, we will still use them, but we know how it might be. So we have to start with that. “
Starting the audit process by establishing stakeholder goals can help prevent you from providing useless SEO audits, as Splitt discussed in the previous section.
Bartosz said his team would only check their website after understanding the client’s goals.
“Then, after the call, we checked their website and created a job description. So we told them – well, this is what we are going to do. This is the problem we saw on your website List, this is the problem we want to solve.
Prioritize, so in the first month we solved all the worst aspects, such as internal 404, or, I don’t know, 10 seconds to load the page, anyway.
And it is very transparent, because we told them that this project will take four months, we will jump into a PM (project manager) like Jira or Trello with your development team, and we will implement it. “
This process will not only lead to better audits-if you complete the goals set in the initial meeting, then it will be easier to prove the return on investment of SEO.
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For more insights on improving SEO reviews, please see the full video from Google below:
Featured image: Taken from YouTube.com/GoogleSearchCentral, December 2021.
