Whether you’ve used Swydo for years, months or are just getting started, you may have not found the time within your day-to-day schedule to learn and take advantage of all its features and keep up with all of our product innovations. Bloom Digital Marketing co-founder Carlos Obregon shares how his team was able to unlock easy, turnkey SEO audit reports by using Swydo’s template functionality.
We’ve shaved off 40% of SEO audit report prep by largely eliminating the time required to pull data from multiple sources and formatting.
The Importance Of SEO Audits Reports
Besides offering SEM services, Bloom Digital Marketing often runs SEO audits for clients, which we recommend for all new clients as well as existing clients that have had a major website redesign. Sometimes these audits are requested by the client and other times we suggest them. The whole idea behind an audit is to build a solid foundation for future SEO efforts, so we review these websites to make sure they are following SEO best practices.
As part of our SEO audit process we follow a checklist of items that we analyze. These items can broadly be described as on-page and off-page SEO. To audit these items we pull data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Google Business Listings.
SEO Audit Report Checklist
We focus on evaluating different elements on the website that have an impact on SEO. The main items we review are:
- URL structures vs Old URL and impact on search
- Dedicated vs shared IPs
- W3 compliance
- Schema compliance
- How to get rich snippets (for voice search too)
- Unfriendly coding
- Title tags, meta-tags
- Images (file size, alt tags, keyword inclusion)
- Html coding and heading tags
- Word count of key web pages
- Incoming links analysis
- Duplicate content
- Robots.txt file
- Google search console settings
- Responsive site capabilities
- CMS features and plugins
In the past we would have to separately pull data from each platform into spreadsheets. After analyzing the data, we then had to format and cut and paste into a Word document, adding our insights and recommendations. This process was time consuming as each audit had to be created from scratch and we often had formatting issues with the spreadsheet data.
Depending upon the complexity of the site, we would spend anywhere from 4-12 hours on a single report. It was also challenging to create a professional looking report dealing with different types of data and creating visualizations to improve client understanding.
We Had The Solution Already – Swydo
While perusing the Swydo reporting functionality, we came up with the idea of creating an SEO audit template by using the existing widgets and configuring the filters to show all the data points we measure during our SEO audits.
The process to set up the SEO audit template was quite simple, and immensely time saving once we finalized the report to be used across all of our clients.
- We started with the pre-built SEO report template, selected a client and connected their Google Analytics, Search Console and Google My Business data sources.
- We reviewed our audit checklist and added the appropriate widgets.
- We alternated the widget templates with text boxes, which we used to further explain the data, add comments and recommendations.
- We include any screenshots as needed for further explanation. This is important for third party data sources that don’t have an existing Swydo integration – although we understand that new Google Sheets integration will help make this more seamless!
- We save the customized report as a template, and change the name and logo to include the client’s info.
- Now the report template is ready to be copied and used for other clients. Stick with the same widgets, just need to adjust data source connections, text recommendations, screenshots, branding and any other additional customizations needed for the client.
An added benefit is the option to send the reports directly via email from the Swydo interface, or download the pdf and even provide a link to see the reports on the browser. A majority of the time we will have a conference call to review the audit in order to ensure all parties are interpreting the data in the same way, plus another opportunity to engage with the client.
For each of the items mentioned in the list above we provide an opinion on whether the website has this SEO best practice implemented and if there is anything missing, we provide an action item for the client with specific instructions on how to get it done. We’ll then follow back up with the client to ensure the recommended action has been taken.
The Impact Of Using Swydo For SEO Audits
Without a doubt the number one benefit for using Swydo to run our SEO audits is efficiency. It is tremendously helpful to have all your client templates and reports in one platform, easily accessible to everyone on the team, particularly if your team includes remote co-workers and/or contractors.
It is also super simple to share results with clients, as the sharable link eliminates the need for emails with attachments, and we know the data is clean from any possible human error cutting and pasting data from different third party providers.
Most importantly, Swydo has saved us hours upon hours of staff time we spent on these audits. Remember that stat about 4-12 per report depending upon the site? By deploying Swydo we’ve shaved off 40% of SEO audit report prep by largely eliminating the time required to pull data from multiple sources and formatting. Now we can focus our energy on data analysis and recommendations, creating information packed, beautiful documentation for our clients.
Bio: Carlos Obregon
Carlos’ enthusiasm for social media, link building, and search engine marketing drives him to uncover new and cutting edge strategies at Bloom Digital Marketing. Since 2004, he has had the opportunity to work with some of the largest e-commerce and information portal sites in Vancouver, including Infomine.com and HealthPricer.com, where he wore many hats. He has implemented search engine marketing and social media solutions for organizations in a multitude of industries, and developed online awareness campaigns for the Learning Disabilities Association of the Yukon and the Heart & Stroke Foundations Quitters United program.
Carlos is a regular speaker on the topic of search engine marketing and optimization in Small Business BC’s seminar series and Google special events. He received his B.Comm from the renowned Tec de Monterrey in Leon, Mexico in 1994; and his MBA in International Business from the University of Guanajuato in Guanajuato, Mexico in 1998. You can get in touch with Carlos via LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook.