Bill Hartzer explores optimizing your WordPress website using search engine optimization best practices. He also discusses performing an SEO audit of your website, including on-page and off-page strategies. Originally presented at the DFW WordPress Meetup on January 27, 2017.

1. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Optimize Your WordPress Site:
How to do an SEO Audit

2. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
About Me
• Senior SEO Consultant, BillHartzer.com
• Founder, DFWSEM Association (2004)
• US Brand Ambassador, Majestic.com
• Practicing Organic/Natural SEO since 1996
• Formerly Senior VP, Advice Interactive (Advice Local)
• Senior SEO Strategist, Globe Runner
• Director of SEO, Standing Dog

3. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Overview
• Get Access
• Optimize WordPress Settings
• Gather Data
• Analyze
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4. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Before You Begin – Info to Gather
• Access to WordPress admin section of site
• Google Analytics, Search Console access
• Bing Webmaster Tools access
• Prior history: What SEO was done in past?
• Prior history: Domain Names used
• List of Domain Names owned, redirected
• List of Competitors
• Ask: anything else we need to know?
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5. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Optimizing WordPress Phase
• Access /wp-admin/ on the site
• Let’s review settings first
• Let’s make some tweaks, look at plugins
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6. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Optimizing WordPress Settings
• Permalinks end in / , news sites need no. in url
• Use Categories or Tags
• Move Site to HTTPs
• No calendar, archives, or links to posts by date
• WordPress notorious for duplicate content
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7. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Recommended Plugins
• Akismet
• AMP
• Cloudflare (if used) or WP Rocket
• Imagify
• Related Posts
• Simple 301 Redirects
• Wordfence Security
• Yoast SEO Premium or All in One SEO Pack
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8. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Move Site to HTTPs ASAP
• Change address in settings
• Search and replace plugin – http to https
• Edit .htaccess for 301 redirect http to https
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9. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Content – Optimize Content on Site
• Google Search Analytics
• SEMrush.com Keyword Research
• Current Rankings
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10. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
GSC Search Analytics Pages Trick
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11. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Featured Snippets Keyword Research
• http://seorave.com/find-featured-snippet-opportunities/
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12. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Current rankings, Focus on Pages
Ranking 5th to 20th
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13. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Gathering Phase
• Gather the Data
• Save the Data (MS Excel, MS Word)
• Start making notes (Notepad)
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14. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Google Searches
• site:domain.com
• site:domain.com –site:www.domain.com
• Click last page of SERPs to get page count
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15. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Screaming Frog
Adjust memory to crawl large site over 100k pages
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16. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Integrity (aka Scrutiny)
What it does:
• Crawls site, reports redirects, 404 errors
• Mac only, finds more errors
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17. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Siteliner.com
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18. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Bing Webmaster Tools
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19. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Bing Webmaster Tools
• Spot issues to fix
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20. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Google Search Console
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21. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Google Search Console
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22. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
SEMRush Site Audit
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23. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Website Log Files
• Weblog Storming, AwStats
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24. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Audit Site Structure
• Internal Link Structure
• Manual Review of Site
• URL Hierarchy
• Grouping of Topics
• GA: In-Page Analytics
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25. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Gather Off-Site Data
• It’s not all about on-site and on-page.
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26. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Google Search Console Links
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27. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Ahrefs Links
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28. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Majestic.com Links
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29. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Majestic.com Topic Review
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30. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Majestic Trust Flow, Citation Flow
• Trust Flow = Number of clicks from a seed set of
trusted sites to a given URL, or Domain
• Citation Flow = Number of citations to a given URL, or
Domain
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31. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Majestic Anchor Text Review
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32. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
URIValet.com
• Check Server Headers
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33. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
WebPageTest.org
• Page Performance
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34. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Miscellaneous Data to Review
• All sorts of extras
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35. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Site Speed, DNS Health
• Tools.Pingdom.com
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36. Site Speed Review – Google Analytics
Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
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37. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Robots.txt Issues
• Default CMS file?
• Disallowing wrong?
• Using “allow”?
• Not specifying sitemap.xml URL
• Directives conflict with other signals
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38. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Sitemap Issues
• Google Search Console sitemaps
• New pages not updated on sitemap
• Issues with multiple sitemaps
• No sitemap file?
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39. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Subdomain Issues
• Duplicate content?
• Using subdomain rather than directory
• Wildcard subdomains turned on?
• www versus non-www issues
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40. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Canonical Issues
• Review canonical tags
• Not using canonical correctly
• Conflicting signals with canonical, others
• Canonical tags to help with dupe content
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41. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Use of Structured Data
• Taking advantage of Schema.org
• Not just for local addresses
• Reviews and Events
• Person, Place, Organization
• Products and Offers
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42. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Local Listings – Audit the listings
• Google My Business
• Bing Places for Business
• Yahoo! Local
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43. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Local Citations – Separate Audit
• Are citations correct?
• Same address, suite #, phone number?
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44. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Analysis Phase
• Analyze the Data
• Make Assumptions
& Recommendations
• You’re Fat!
• You need to exercise!
• OK, well maybe not like that…
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45. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Analysis Phase
• Analyze gathered data
• Look for Obvious Issues
• Look for Odd Data Points
• More notes!
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46. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Analyze Google Analytics
• Changes over time, year over year data
• Conversion Data
• Bounce Rates
• Pages Per Session
• Drops in Traffic:
Panda or Penguin
in past few years?
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47. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Panda or Penguin Issues From Past?
• Verify with SEMRush, Google Analytics
• Moz Google Algorithm Change History
moz.com/google-algorithm-change
• Panguin Tool
barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/
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48. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Analyze Keyword Data, Rankings
• Look for keyword opportunities
Anything ranking on 2nd page?
• Review SEMRush Keyword Data
• Review GSC Search Analytics
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49. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Analyze On-Site Data
• Title Tags
• Meta Descriptions
• Headings H1, H2, etc.
• Internal Anchor Text
• External Links (outgoing links)
• Google Pages Indexed vs. Crawled
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50. Performing Technical Enterprise SEO Audit
Analyze On-Site Data
• Conflicting signals? Overall Topic focus
• Conflicting signals?
Robots.txt vs. Canonical vs. Meta Robots vs. Nofollow
• Internal Duplicate Content
• Not Enough Unique Content
• Internal links within content present?
• Review Navigation
• Review Footer, footer links, copyright
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51. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Analyze Off-Site Data
• Link Velocity Matters (getting new links)
• Review anchor text (over optimized?)
• Diversity of anchor text
• Look for Toxic, Low Quality Links
• Run Link Risk, Link Detox report
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52. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Presentation Phase
• Present the Data
• Show the Results
• Make it look great!
• Action Plan
• Implementation Plan
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53. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Present The Results
• Use internal or formal doc needed?
• Who will implement?
• Implement changes in-house?
Outsource?
• MS Word doc, spreadsheets with data
• PowerPoint needed for presentation?
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54. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Present The Results - Document
• Cover Page
• Table of Contents
• Overview (summary, positives, negatives)
• Website Crawlability (404s, 301s, One-Page issues)
• Content Optimization (site arch., keyword issues)
• Linking (Internal links, externals links, link profile)
• Overall Recommendations
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55. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Finally – Additional Lists
• List of Priority Issues
• Present Action Plan for Implementing
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56. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
SEO Audit Toolset
• Google Page Speed Test
• Mobile Friendly Test
• Google Search Console - time downloading a page (if
slower than 2 seconds to get the code, they'll
abandon the crawl)
• Webpagetest.org (diversity of testing environments is
helpful... browser types, locations, connection
speeds)
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57. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
SEO Audit Toolset
• WebPageTest
• Google Search Console
• Google Analytics
• GPSi page speed insights
• G Structured Data Test
• GSC Disavow
• GSC Fetch & Render
• Marie Haynes' Disavow Blacklist
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58. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
SEO Audit Toolset
• Google Mobile Test
• Google AMP Test
• Bing Mobile Test
• W3c mobileOK Checker
• Deep Crawl
• Google AW Keyword Planner
• Moz Keyword Explorer
• What is my IP
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59. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
SEO Audit Toolset
• Builtwith
• Server Software Detection
• SEO Server Header Checker Tool
• SSL Server Test powered by Qualsys SSL Labs
• Redirect Checker
• Serpstat
• semrush
• GA Code Checker
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60. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
SEO Audit Toolset
• W3c CSS Validator
• W3c Markup Validator
• hreflang testing tool
• tracker map
• OSE, Majestic, A hrefs, Link Research Tools
• Bing Webmaster Tools
• Kerboo
• Panguin tool
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61. Optimizing Your WordPress Site: SEO Audit
Contact
Bill Hartzer
Senior SEO Consultant
Email: Bill@BillHartzer.com
Phone: (214) 236-4378
Web: https://www.billhartzer.com
Twitter: @bhartzer
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/bhartzer
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