SEO Audits
These audits are designed to be efficient and straightforward, with a maximum of 2 hours spent on each.
- Crawling the Site
I run a crawl with Screaming Frog, capped at 10,000 URLs, to get a structural overview of the site and cover the SEO hygiene 101 - Analyzing Traffic and Key Pages
Using SEMrush or Ahrefs, I identify current and historical traffic trends, pinpoint the most important pages, and check for subdomains or multiregional implementations. - Assessing User Experience
I browse the primary templates, focusing on mobile. I disable adblockers to see the true user experience, including ads and potential distractions. - Evaluating Content Quality
Content is king, so I review key pages to gauge writing quality and compare them to top competitors. This helps assess whether the site is addressing user intent effectively. - It depends
As much as I don’t like saying it, every website is different so…
Note: While this approach is enough for a high-level overview, it’s not suitable for in-depth client projects, as it doesn’t cover every detail. I wouldn’t like you to think every SEO who charges $5-10k for similar audits is a fraud.
Traffic Reports
I’m mainly using the estimated organic search traffic from AHREFS.
I have a growing list of 259 domains (and counting) that I follow either because they are the domains that bring the most traffic in the US or because they are part of a publisher I’m keeping an eye on. Let me know if you believe some very important are missing.
Note (domains missing or excluded): I usually exclude the NSFW domains; they always appear at the top of the lists and after the first couple of giggles, it gets old very quickly.
Also, AHREFS wouldn’t let me download the data of a few titans:
- google.com,
- youtube.com,
- instagram.com,
- facebook.com,
- walmart.com,
- ebay.com,
- twitter.com,
- yelp.com,
- pinterest.com,
- tripadvisor.com,
- indeed.com,
- zillow.com