Site audit. Collection of information about the project from the Client

It doesn’t matter what stage of promotion your site is at, it is necessary to do an SEO audit, and according to various parameters, from once a day to once every 3 months.

In a series of articles about site audit, I would like to talk about the theory and practice of site analysis. Explain why SEO agencies understand website audits in such different ways, why it takes from 1 day to 3 months for each, and the price ranges from FREE to $ 1,000.

I. General site analysis

1. Collection of information about the project from the Client

Basically, this part is written in the contract. Something without which there can be neither a full-fledged analysis nor promotion.
An excerpt from a standard SEO contract:

“The CUSTOMER provides the data necessary for the work:

1. ftp access to the site;
2. access to the site administration system (if necessary);
3. access to existing site statistics systems, tools for webmasters;
4. description in free form of the socio-demographic portrait of the target visitor;
5. list of competitors’ websites;
6. a list of priority business keywords for which you need to optimize the site;
7. other information necessary for the quality performance of work to promote the website.

Problem. The more data provided, the better. But in fact, the person who is responsible for the promotion on the part of the customer is always very busy and therefore the data is provided either for a very long time or very briefly.

The way out of the situation is as follows: we connect via TeamViewer (software (software) for remote access) to the customer’s computer, configure our own access. Another option is to call the Client and verbally interrogate him about competitors, target audience and other questions on the brief (a brief is a questionnaire that specifies the main parameters of the project). At the same time, do not forget to record the conversation, and after that make a record of it and send a summary to the customer by mail, suddenly there will be some changes or additions.

The most conscientious Client I have turned out to be Irina Piskovaya, marketing director of BondarenkoDesign interiors studio. I will give a small excerpt from the completed brief.

And so on for each item! This is of course the ideal client!

What else is needed besides the brief to promote the site?

1.1. Access to Yandex.Metrica and Yandex.Webmaster.

1.2. Access to Google Analytics, Google Webmasters Tools.

1.3. SEO reports from previous experts. At the same time, sometimes you are simply horrified by the reports (or rather, by the fact of their absence), something was once done, only the positions that the site had last year remained from the report.

P.S. If you make normal reports, then include in them:

1. report on the work done (full details of which specialist did what, preferably with an hourly rate);
2. site visibility report in search engines;
3. traffic report;
4. conversion report (reports 3 and 4 are submitted in comparison with the previous period and year in quantitative terms and percentages).

1.4. semantic core. There are also a few nuances here. The first is that they usually give the core in the form of a list of keywords with positions that, in fact, have a frequency of about 0.

The second is a more or less normal semantic core. It can be seen with the naked eye what was collected in the Key Collector (a program for creating the semantic core of the site) at the end of the last century.

In general, it is necessary to work with the semantic core constantly! If you haven’t rebuilt global semantics for more than half a year (in some niches it can be even more dynamic), then do it right now!

1.5. Uploading or better access to link exchanges and, in general, any other exchanges in which the site was promoted, the price of which can vary significantly.

For me, the ideal situation is when a separate corporate mail is created for each Client. Those. mail is created, such as marketing@site.ru for the person who is engaged in promotion. All link exchanges are registered to this mail, all communication on the project with other contractors takes place, and so on! When a Client decides to refuse the services of an agency, then exchanges, mail, and communication with contractors, bloggers, media, etc. remain with him. Accordingly, no matter what decision the Client makes – to go to another agency or give his site to a full-time specialist, the accumulated data, connections, etc. will be preserved!

1.6. Has the site been filtered by search engines? In order to understand whether the site fell under any filters, it is necessary to carefully analyze the site. Of course, there are services that can help with this, for example, Site Diagnostics (SeoLib for Yandex and Google) and Panguin Tool (only for Google), but this does not cancel manual verification.

1.7. What has changed on the site in the last 2 years? With this question, in general, everything is very bad usually. At best, there is a history of the programmer’s work in Asana (software for collaborating on projects) or other similar software.

If you do not have the opportunity to use paid / free programs for setting tasks, tracking the process and results of work, I recommend using just Google Doc with shared access. An example of the header of such a file is in the screenshot.

1.8. What human resources does the Client have? If the project is large, then obviously it is better to keep a full-time programmer and copywriter. But in any case, you can find resources even in the state, even on freelance.

1.9. Project development plan for the next year. This information is also provided very rarely. For example, from what I heard and saw: “make an adaptive layout, switch to https, change the design of the main page.” When you start digging deeper, it turns out that, for example, you need to make additional filters on the site (to increase semantics), add new products, because. in this segment they will soon be at the peak of popularity, etc.

1.10. Does the company have other websites? It is important to understand here that in the recent past it was fashionable to clone online stores in order to monopolize the search results, but such manipulations are quickly recognized by search engines and sites are affiliated (the affiliate filter is applied to a group of sites and lowers their positions, except for the most relevant domain).

From practice. There is a large online store of household appliances, the owner makes a number of sites, only for brands according to the template, such as bosh-kiev.com.ua, electrolux-kiev.com.ua, etc. As a result, the main site cannot take the first positions in any way, although it has a domain in the .ua zone (its own TM is registered), it is larger and older. What to do in such a situation will be prompted by an SEO specialist. there are several strategies here: glue 301 redirects; glue rel=canonical; to unify sites so that they have everything different: from hosting, design, and other visual components, to content and promotion methods. But I hope you understand how much the fee for SEO services increases in this case.

1.11. Has the domain owner changed?

From practice, the revelations of the customer when moving the site to https: (domain data is not real, but replaced for confidentiality purposes)

“Initially, our site was on the http://site.ru domain (but the domain is not registered to us, and we can’t put the squeeze on this person and transfer the domain to us – he claims that this is very difficult to do … ), and we have this name in all promotional materials. When we were making a new site in 2013, we wanted to link it only to our domain www.tel-007.rf, but something did not work out, and we decided to leave the site on two domains: the main site.ru and additional tel-007.rf. And now I don’t understand at all what we have with the tel-007.rf domain. And what are the prospects if we suddenly lose the opportunity to use the site.ru domain?

Those. in this case, the SEO specialist will think about the advisability of moving to https, because if the Client loses his main domain, then many of his works will go to hell, not only the annual purchase of an ssl certificate.

In the following articles, we will talk about manual site analysis, CMS (site content management system, for example, WordPress, 1C-Bitrix, Joomla, OpenCart, etc.), the starting point for site promotion.