Our special guest for episode 332 of the award-winning EDGE of the Web podcast was Aleyda Solis, Founder of Orainti. Host Erin Sparks spoke with conducting SEO audits in a way that really maximizes growth. Here’s what we learned:
Aleyda Solis: His Background and Experience
Aleyda Solis is an international SEO consultant and founder of Orainti. She’s been providing international SEO consultation services for seven years, and she’d been doing search engine optimization for European, American, and Latin American companies, having worked as an in-house specialist as well as an agency consultant, and also as an independent professional. Aleyda has also become quite the star on the international SEO and digital marketing speaking circuit, showing up at conferences all over the world – in the US, UK, Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Chile, Israel, Belgium, and many other countries.
Aleyda got her start in SEO in 2007 when she was working for an online marketing agency that offered SEO as one of their services for the client. She was put in charge of running the agency’s websites, monetizing them, developing content, and SEO as well. After she taught herself how to do SEO right, she started taking on work clients as well, many of which were international and needed the SEO work to apply in multiple languages. As she gained more experience, she started writing and speaking about her experiences. At first, she only presented in Spanish but in 2012 starting presenting in English. Aleyda has built up a huge audience on Twitter with more than 70,000 followers. It’s a relatively new phenomenon for SEOs communicating through social media networks, but it is definitely the trend now and seems to be replacing many of the other forums that were used in the past, where commenting is now largely gone these days.
SEO Audit Tools to Up Your Game
Aleyda recently made a fantastic presentation at SMXL19 all about SEO Audits that Maximize Growth and had a great slide that really laid out many of the options out there for tools under specific pieces of the SEO audit puzzle:
Aleyda was quick to point out a few things missing from this set of tools. One is Google Data Studio to help you bring in data and visualize it for reporting. Another would be monitoring tools. There are several great monitoring services available that can be configured to send you alerts about all sorts of specific configurations in your website. A good one Aleyda uses is Little Warden. You can set up alerts of expiring domains, robots.txt changes, SSL certification expiration, Google Analytics changes, redirect checking, and many others.
There are a lot of tools on the list, but the ones Aleyda uses more than others right now are those that have the highest level of integration to Google Search Console and Google Analytics. When the tool can bring in all the Google data and aggregate it in a logical way, it makes it much easier to decide where you should focus your SEO efforts.
A Good SEO Audit Reflects the Context
It’s great to have a comprehensive checklist for every single thing that can go into an SEO audit, but how much time you spend in developing fixes and actions has to be driven by the context of the client and site or you will end up wasting time on some things that aren’t important for a particular site/client. The site of the site, its maturity, how much SEO work has been done on it in the past, and so on. A small site just starting out isn’t going to need a lot of pagination optimization, but a large complex eCommerce site might very well need a lot of time and effort on the issue and related areas of configuring facets and filters.
You’re not doing yourself or your clients any favors if you just crank out giant audit reports that cover every single thing on a huge master checklist. In this sense, it’s not about how you generate a report, it’s about thinking through how a report is going to be used. What are the priority issues a client needs to address? Relevancy is more important than comprehensiveness. Before cranking out a grotesquely huge report, you should be asking a question like these: What’s the unique selling proposition? What’s the business model and the goals? What are the previous SEO results and the challenges experienced? What are the platform restrictions?
Prioritizing Elements of the SEO Audit
In the final analysis, the outcome of your work as an SEO is not delivering a report – it’s to see your recommendations being implemented. If your report is too long and complicated and comprehensive, your client is likely to be frustrated and confused and won’t properly implement the most-needed recommendations. Focus on a limited set of clear recommendations that will get to the client’s objective, which is typically to grow traffic to their website(s). And this means you have to have all this communication with the client before you plan out and execute your SEO audit. You should collaboratively map out the SEO audit with your client so you’re both on the same page about what will be covered and why.
The other reason you have to prioritize everything with client input is that the client might not have the resources to do some of the recommendations. You have to know what resources they have and then make sure they will be able to devote sufficient resources to the highest-impact recommendations they can also afford to make. You have to pick and choose not just the most critical pieces with the biggest impact on the final goal, but also what the client can actually implement given their resources. But it’s also with the understanding that SEO is an ongoing effort and there will be additional issues to address down the road.
Connect with Aleyda Solis and Orainti
Twitter: @billsebald (https://twitter.com/billsebald)
Greenlane Marketing: https://www.greenlanemarketing.com
Greenlane Twitter: @greenlane_team (https://twitter.com/Greenlane_Team)
Greenlane Facebook: @greenlaneteam (https://www.facebook.com/greenlaneteam)
Greenlane Instagram: @greenlane_team (https://www.instagram.com/greenlane_team)
Greenlane LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/greenlane-marketing
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