In October 2017, our team uncovered some of the challenges that SEOs face in our “The State of Enterprise SEO” survey.  As a member of our Pro Services team, I continue to hear teams struggling with everything from resource allocation (the average SEO team consists of 2 to 5 people) to prioritization of resources to deliver the optimal impact.

For Enterprise SEOs, the challenge is even greater; teams are monitoring thousands of critical landing pages versus 100s.  I hear from teams that are becoming much smaller in size than ever before and staying abreast of key changes including Google algorithm updates and industry-wide updates sometimes becomes a real challenge.

In SEO, attention to detail is critical. An unnoticed Google update whether it include page allocation to organic listings or algorithm updates, can impact organic rankings, traffic, conversions/revenue and assisted conversions to other marketing channels. In order to reduce the overall impact, our team developed Micro Audits to assist teams in identifying core issues/concerns, responding to core issues before they happen and help minimize such risk.

Our clients’ success is our success.

This “Micro Audit” is a game-changer for our clients as they are getting a detailed explanation of issues and how to fix them.

This has been saving tremendous amounts of time and letting enterprise SEOs and digital marketers focus their time and effort on sections of the site that drive the most value for the business.

What are Micro Audits?

We call them Micro Audits as they allow us to identify and explain in detail any issues our clients’ sites have that are hot topic concerns among SEOs as well as provide solutions that they can easily communicate cross teams.  While a regularly scheduled full site technical audit focuses on the site a whole, Micro Audits are designed to notify teams of how to utilize our platform for further analysis, types of custom crawls we recommend clients set up and are taking advantage of for very detailed and specific core areas of their sites.

Micro Audits focus on both technical items as well as on-page optimizations — the key is that the topic offers clients increased performance as well as prevents site’s from key critical changes, challenges or updates.

Below is a list of some of our most recent Micro Audits delivered to clients.

Micro Audit Type #1: HTTPS

Our team created a Micro Audit around HTTPs in order to ensure that our clients are prepared for the July 2018 update in which Google announced that all sites that haven’t migrated to HTTPS will all be listed as “not secure.”

In September 2016, the search engine revealed HTTPS as a ranking signal. A couple of months later, it started marking pages that collect passwords or credit card details without the SSL encryption as non-secure.

But soon, Google will begin marking ALL non-HTTPS sites in a similar way.

And this change might have significant consequences for brands. After all, sites labeled “not secure” might experience decreased click-through rates. Not to mention that the label might also spark negative brand sentiment.

As a result, many organizations have moved their sites to HTTPS promptly. However, some still experience various issues connected with the migration.

This particular Micro Audit helps us to identify and help eliminate them before they affect our client’s click-through-rates and search visibility.

Our analysis discovered that while most clients have already made the migration prior to January, major brands as well as smaller sites overlooked many critical changes including:

• Updating their robots.txt file to reference https as opposed to http
• Problems with analytics tracking for https
• Internal links not updated to https and thus not passing link equity and value
• Loading of critical third-party assets
• Absolute URLs that are referencing http as opposed to https throughout source code, and many more.

By providing a thorough analysis, tips on how to create custom crawls to identify core issues as well as solutions assists our clients in identifying issues before they happen.

Micro Audit Type #2: Structured Data

Structured data helps Google classify and understand a page’s content. It also provides a broader semantic meaning and context behind the content, helping pages rank better and boost their organic click-through rate.

But it can also impact voice search. In one experiment, Martin McGuire discovered that Google uses reviews and ratings schema to determine what information to display to a voice search.

But why Structured markup for voice search?   Martin makes a strong point in the article:

“[…] when it comes to voice search results from technologies such as Google Home, sometimes only a single and the most relevant answer will be provided. This means that competition for that top SERP position will become even greater.

Having the most highly rated reviews, an updated address and all content marked up correctly is what will determine this result.”

Now, most sites experience little or no problems with the structured data but so many miss out on the opportunity to boost their results with it.

Our Micro Audit helps identify not only the common issues with schema but also suggests ways to use structured markup to increase voice search visibility.

Micro Audit Type #3: Hreflang

The hreflang tag is added to sites in order to provide Google with the preferred version of your site to display to searchers by language or region.  In order to add an hreflang tag, your site must have multiple versions of the site, each targeting a different location or language and the hreflang tag is then used to indicate to Google that there are duplicate versions.

We found that most sites and brands are utilizing the hreflang tag but in most isntances are not using the tag correctly. In fact, we’ve noticed first hand that sites without the hreflang tag implemented had lower rankings and poorer search visibility.  Most recently we saw US sites beginning to appear more frequently in search results internationally as well as International sites appearing in search results for additional countries.

What’s more, the effect of errors in hreflang implementation goes beyond just displaying the wrong domain version in the search results. We’ve noticed Google listing pages displaying prices in a wrong currency (EUR vs. USD for US customers). As a result, those customers couldn’t purchase their desired items, at least not without changing the currency first.

This UX flaw, however, could easily lead to a greater bounce rate, poor quality signals, and lower rankings as well.

That’s why we’ve designed a Micro Audit that helps identify potential issues with the hreflang implementation.

Some of the issues we commonly identify when performing this Micro Audit include:

• Multiple English language sites that contain the same content without a canonical pointing to the preferred EN versions,
• Sites that are missing reciprocal links (if you reference hreflang on US site to Australia site then Australia site must have hreflang pointing to the US, etc.).
• Mismatches between a canonical tag and the page’s URL that affect the hreflang tag directly,
• Pages with noindex tag that prevents Google from seeing the hreflang tag.
• Language encoding metadata is not matching the page it is on.
• Missing or wrong x-default.

Micro Site Audit #4: Pagination

Pagination helps sites provide a much better user experience:

• Ecommerce stores use it to make browsing lists of products easier.
• News sites split articles into separate pages to simplify the reading process.
• Forums divide discussions into pages to help manage long threads, and so on.

But to help ensure rankings, send visitors to the first page, index content on subsequent pages, and crawl links plus consolidate the link equity, pagination must be done correctly.  While pagination has been around for years, our team continues to uncover various methods in which teams apply canonical tags but also in how Google perceives and ranks paginated content.

Some of the most common errors this Micro Audit revealed for our clients include:

• Having one URL listed as an on-page link and another page listed in hreflang tags or canonical tags.
• Not creating a stopping point on the last and final page.
• The page referenced in rel=prev/next is different than an actual page in navigation links.
• Having canonical pointing to page 1 as opposed to the self-referential canonical (pointing to the page it’s on), among others.

Micro Audit Type #5. Mobile Page Speed

As of July, Google will finally use mobile page speed as a ranking factor. And it openly admitted that pages providing the slowest experience will see their rankings affected.

While many websites optimized mobile performance prior to January of this year, many websites still have not optimized their sites for mobile page speed.

Common issues include websites that fail to render under 2 miliseconds on mobile devices. Many haven’t reduced image size, optimized 3rd party scripts or implemented browser caching. While some companies have launched AMP pages, they still have issues preventing them from availing of the technology fully.

Which means that soon, the Google’s Speed Update might negatively affect their search visibility.

This Micro Audit helps to identify all issues affecting the mobile page speed, provide a detailed explanation for each, and suggest solutions or workarounds.

Conclusion

As a conclusion, let me tell you what I believe is the biggest benefit of conducting Micro Audits:

Saving a ton of time while speeding up greater results

Being an SEO professional for the past 16 years, I am always surprised by the amount of articles and LinkedIn posts by SEO practicioners who are not defining ROI or who claim that SEO results cannot be achieved in a couple months time.

Instead of trying to identify issues among thousands of pages, SEOs need to focus their attention on key areas that drive the biggest results first.  Our Micro Audits help teams communicate and deliver on key challenges and reap greater incremental monthly results.