Hudson Creative Documentation

Technical Website Audit Process Document

Goal: Before closing a project that includes SEO services, it’s important to verify all work completed and view the public website or URL as a search engine would. Sometimes we publish changes that are not visible in the correct format on the public URL because of technical complications. It’s important to go through each step on this list and manually verify that it is working correctly so that we’re sure we’re not submitting changes that will negatively impact the website a few months down the road.

This process is particularly important for Search Engine Optimization projects because search engines can take months to recognize website changes, and submitting changes without verifying them can set a project back three times that amount of time (time to fix the mistake, time to resubmit the changes and then time to wait for search engines to reindex those changes).

Analyze Screaming Frog Crawl

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a fast and advanced SEO site audit tool. It can be used to crawl both small and very large websites, where manually checking every page would be extremely labour intensive, and where you can easily miss a redirect, meta refresh or duplicate page issue. Using the Screaming Frog SEO Spider can be an efficient way to go through these items without having to click through everything on the website yourself.

Screaming Frog SEO Crawl Process:

  • Check for missing Page Titles
  • Check for missing Meta Descriptions
  • Check for missing Alt tags on Images
  • Check for H1s – Missing and Duplicate
  • Check for 4xx errors (redirects and broken links)

Web Pages Export:

  1. Load up Screaming Frog (from your computer’s Applications).
  2. Paste the website’s URL that you want to crawl in the top bar and click Start.
  3. Screaming Frog will slowly populate as it crawls the website.
  4. Wait until the bar to the right is fully green (Crawl: 100%).
  5. Wait until the bar to the right is fully green (Crawl: 100%)
  6. On the right, click SEO Elements > Internal > All
  7. Click export at the top-left.

Images Export:

  1. On the right of Screaming Frog, click SEO Elements > Internal > Images
  2. In the spreadsheet area of Screaming Frog, Shift+Click to select all of the images
  3. Every image should now be selected.
  4. Click the Image Details tab underneath.
  5. Click export at the top-left.

Response Codes Export:

  1. Click on the Response Codes.
  2. Click export at the top-left.

Creating the Google Doc/Spreadsheet

  1. Make a copy of the Screaming Frog Crawl Template and save it to the client folder.
  2. Title This “[Client] Screaming Frog SEO Results”.

HTML Tab:

  1. On the first tab “HTML”.
  2. Export/Copy the information needed on the “HTML” tab or you may use the VLOOKUP to export the exported data from the Screaming Frog.
  3. Sort Column B by A-Z. Remove any rows that do not contain “text/html” in Column B, “Content”. Remove text/ccs, image/jpeg, Application/Javascript & etc.
  4. Go through the columns “Title 1”, “Meta Description“, “H1-1”  and mark any empty cells and duplicates in red.

Images Tab:

  1. On the second tab “Image”. 
  2. Export/Copy and paste the data from the exported file of images.
  3. Sort Column C by A-Z.
  4. Mark any rows that do not contain any alt-text in Column C, in red and orange for duplicates.

Response Codes Tab

  1. Open the third tab “Response Codes”.
  2. Export/Copy and paste the data from the exported Screaming Frog Response Codes.
  3. Remove any rows that don’t have text/html or text/html;charset=utf-8 in the second column (Column B – Content Type)
  4. For any rows with “Status Code” 2XX, highlight it green
  5. For any rows with “Status Code” 3XX, highlight it yellow
  6. For any rows with “Status Code” 4XX, highlight it red

ASANA’s Note:

  • Page Titles – looks good but needs to be optimized
  • Meta Descriptions – No meta description at all.
  • Alt tags – Majority of the image alts are duplicate and some don’t have Alt tags.
  • H1s – Missing and Duplicate
  • 200 – All are 200’s

Semrush Audit

Semrush’s Site Audit allows you to analyze the health of a website. It will provide a list of issues that makes it easy to see where exactly a website is struggling. Fixing these issues will help boost the SEO of a website

Site Audit

  1. Create a project.
  2. Enter the Domain and add the Project Name.
  3. Click Create Project.
  4. Under Site Audit click Set up.
  5. You will be prompted to Site Audit Setting. Click Start Site Audit.
  6. Take a screenshot of the following “Site Issues, Notices, Warnings and Errors”.
  7. Upload it in the Asana task.

Google PageSpeed Insights

We do the site speed to make sure that the Mobile and Desktop scores are above 85. If not we need to fix the score and may include minifying HTML, CSS or Javascript files. Moving the DNS to Cloudflare can help with this.

As a rule of thumb images should not exceed 1200px for width and 800x for height, and should be optimized for reduced size (export for web and devices in Photoshop).

Site Speed

  1. Go to Google PageSpeed Insights.
  2. Enter the URL. 
  3. Click Analyze.
  4. Take a screenshot of the Mobile and Desktop “Opportunities”.
  5. Paste/Upload the screenshot in the Asana task and don’t forget to note the Mobile score and the Desktop Score.

www. and https:// checks

The purpose of this task is to make sure that there’s only 1 www format (with or without ) https:// or http://. 

www redirects

  1. Check both homepage and (1) internal page URL with or without the https:// or http: 
  2. Make sure that it will always go back to 1 www format.
  3. If the format changes to http:// instead of https:// then take a screenshot and upload it in the ASANA task.