When I bring on a new SEO client I do a thorough audit. I’ve noticed that many SEO audits overlook some important factors. We look at the current status of a website, but we don’t always ask about past events. If we don’t have the history we can’t properly interpret the performance we see today.
When we pop open Google Analytics and notice a big organic drop or boost we check the date against our algo list and hope for a correlation. But what if the client no-idexed a bunch of pages on that date. That’s why you have to ask up front.
List of important Events for SEO audits
Use this checklist with your SEO audit to capture important dates and actions that could have impacted historical analytics data.
- Site launch / migration, relaunch, refresh
- Change to new CMS (new site)
- Major CMS update
- Structural changes (url,navigation)
- Indexing changes (noindexed a bunch of pages)
- Subdomains added / removed
- https transition
- Change hosts
- Add CDN
- Any technical mishaps in the last 2 years that would impact traffic
- New technologies added
I’ve probably missed some here. Let me know what you think. Was this post helpful? Share it @SERPquatch.