Brutally Honest SEO Audit feat. Alan Bleiweiss
Alan Bleiweiss gives insights and tips on SEO audit in the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3Rcj41DpH0
Below you’ll find a summary of the video. It reflects Alan’s approach towards making SEO audits.
About Alan Bleiweiss
Alan Bleiweiss is a highly respected professional in the field of Search Engine Optimization. He is particularly known for his comprehensive and honest SEO audits. With a career spanning over 23 years, Alan has held various roles in the industry, including building and managing websites, leading a team of SEO professionals, and working as an audit consultant. His ability to continually expand his knowledge and adapt his role has helped him avoid burnout and maintain a successful career.
In Memoriam
Alan Bleiweiss passed away on August 22, 2025. He left a lasting mark on the SEO community through his forensic audits and his generous mentorship of countless practitioners. I am honored to have captured his thinking in this interview, and I keep this page online in his memory.
Disclaimer and TOC
Everything below is my paraphrazing of what Alan said for readability. Hope you like it. Let me know if not in the comments or find me elsewhere.
What Should Be the Length of a Normal SEO Audit?
Striking a balance in presenting information in an SEO audit is crucial. Too much information can overwhelm, while too little can leave gaps in understanding. Some audits are disappointingly brief, lacking the necessary depth to be truly beneficial. The goal should be to equip clients with enough knowledge to make a positive change without overwhelming them.
If clients are bombarded with too much information, they can become lost, unsure of where to start. This can lead to a standstill, with no decisions being made due to the perceived enormity of the task. Typically, Alan’s audit documents range from 35 to 80 pages. In extreme cases, such as an 80-page audit, it was necessary for the site owner to completely rebuild their website and change their previous practices.
In such cases, the audit can be divided into two documents. The first identifies the mistakes and explains why they are problematic. The second provides a step-by-step guide on how to rebuild the website from scratch to avoid future mistakes. The largest audit ever delivered was about 80 pages.
Delivering SEO Audit in Several Parts vs Single Delivery Approach
While the idea of delivering an SEO audit in several parts might seem appealing, it’s not a practice that is often employed. The reason for this is simple: until the audit is fully completed, it’s impossible to determine the highest priorities of work.
For instance, upon initial inspection, it might be evident that there are severe page speed issues. And it’s important to note that page speed isn’t just about core web vitals (CWV). However, if these speed issues are addressed first without a comprehensive understanding of the site’s overall health, it could lead to complications.
For example, if there are architectural weaknesses or severe code problems that haven’t been identified yet, working on the speed first could result in changes that will later need to be undone to fix these other issues.
Therefore, the preferred approach is to complete the audit in its entirety first. Once the comprehensive document is handed off, it can then be broken down and prioritized. This ensures that all necessary tasks are identified at the highest level before any implementation begins.
What Should Be Included?
The content of an SEO audit can vary greatly, depending on whether it’s a strategic or a tactical audit. Most audits conducted by Alan Bleiweiss are strategic, offering a high-level view of a website’s presence in the organic ecosystem. The focus is on identifying the most significant weaknesses and recommending the most impactful resolutions.
Often, clients will hire for an initial strategic audit, implement the recommended changes—which could take six months or more—and then return for a deeper, more detailed audit once they start seeing improvements.
However, it’s important not to overwhelm clients with too much information at once. The aim is to provide what’s most important in the present moment, knowing that there will always be more work to be done in the future. After all, the world of SEO is ever-evolving, and there’s always room for improvement.
Content Audit
Topics
The focus on topics rather than just keywords is a result of the evolution in how search engines understand human language.
Back in 2011, during the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, Stephan Spencer from Bing mentioned a collaboration between Bing and Google to improve their understanding of human language. This led to the development of Google’s Panda update, which marked a shift from a pure keyword focus to a topical one.
Fast forward to today, and topical understanding forms the foundation of all SEO. A keyword might be a single word or a short phrase, but a topic can encompass hundreds or even thousands of keyword phrases. The goal is to assess how well a website communicates its most important topics and the highest value phrases within those topics.
This also extends to subtopics. Just as in e-commerce, where you have categories, subcategories, and sub-subcategories, the same principle applies to informational content. Not all keyword phrases hold equal importance, so they need to be prioritized and organized by subtopic.
The audit examines how effectively a website conveys and distributes this knowledge. It checks for potential dilution from covering too many different topics in one area or whether the content is too superficial, not delving deep enough into the subject matter. This is what is meant by a focus on topics in an SEO audit.
What’s the Right Amount of Content?
Understanding the right amount of content for SEO comes with experience. After 28 years in the industry, you develop a sense for what’s enough and what’s not. It’s crucial to remember that the purpose of SEO is to optimize. The amount of content needed will always be whatever is necessary to answer all the important questions that your target audience may have.
To determine the right amount of content, you need to understand the subject matter of the business. For a particular topic set, there might be 10, 20, 50, or even a hundred different questions that people ask when considering that product or service. This is the key to understanding how much content to have.
The process involves evaluating what the important questions are, identifying questions that you might not have considered important, and recognizing which questions are similar enough to be consolidated into one page for more depth. All of these factors contribute to determining the right amount of content for effective SEO.
Entities
When it comes to entity optimization techniques or recommendations in an SEO audit, according to Alan, it’s important to understand that entities are essentially topics. The term “entity” is just another word for a type of topic. For example, a business can be considered an entity, and the topic of that business could be search engine optimization consulting.
The focus is on the human language approach that consumers use, rather than getting caught up in the overly technical terminology often used in the industry. While the concept of entities in SEO is understood, the emphasis is on topics because they offer more clarity and align better with purpose and needs.
So, when optimizing, it’s about understanding and optimizing for the topics that these entities represent.
The Role of Conversions in SEO Audits
Conversions are the ultimate goal of SEO. Driving traffic to a website is important, but if that traffic doesn’t lead to conversions—whether that’s making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or any other desired action—it’s essentially fruitless.
When speaking to high-level executives, such as a Chief Financial Officer at a Fortune 500 corporation or a Chief Operating Officer at Walt Disney (Alan’s clients), they’re not primarily concerned with the technical jargon or granular details of SEO. What they care about is conversions. They want to know how much revenue is being generated as a result of the SEO efforts.
Google’s aim is to provide the best answers to searchers, and the best answers for those who are willing to spend money are those that lead to conversions. Therefore, SEO audits need to consider conversions. They need to focus on driving more qualified visits to the website to potentially increase conversions by accurately targeting the ideal market.
Moreover, the website itself needs to be optimized to ensure there are no friction or barriers to conversion access in relation to the SEO efforts. Conversions are about the bottom line, the end results, and they absolutely matter in SEO audits.
Internal Links
Assessing internal links, especially for large websites, can indeed be a challenge. For context, a large website is considered to have a minimum of 250,000 pages. Auditing websites of this scale, which can go up to 400 million pages in Alan’s case, means it’s impossible to look at every page, test every page, or crawl and properly examine the data for every aspect of SEO at that scale.
So, how is it done? The first step is to use Google Search Console to export their report on internal links, which lists the 1000 most linked pages on a website. This report can reveal whether the internal linking is mostly pointing to the most important pages.
In addition to this, a website is crawled and other data is examined. However, the best way to understand internal links is to identify the key sections of a website and examine the navigation in that section through a sampling of pages.
A common weakness seen in internal linking is the lack of proper internal navigation within individual sections of a website. For instance, in an e-commerce site, a category of products should have subcategory links and filter options for easy navigation. Similarly, for an information website, users should not be forced to click ‘next’ or ‘previous’ repeatedly to discover all the pages in a section. Instead, additional navigation specific to that section should be provided.
In addition to this, links within the content are also examined, as they are equally important. This overall approach helps effectively evaluate internal linking in SEO audits.
Anchor Text
Anchor text diversity in internal links is an important aspect to consider in an SEO audit. It’s natural for a website owner, who may not be well-versed in SEO, to consistently use the same text when referring to a particular page or section on their website. This pattern is considered natural for internal links, but artificial when seen in inbound links from various other websites.
In the natural course of things, not all websites linking back to a page would use the same anchor text. Therefore, seeing the same anchor text repeatedly in inbound links is considered unnatural. However, this doesn’t mean that over-optimization of anchor text isn’t a concern. It’s important to be aware of this and consider it during the audit.
When it comes to the theory that using the same anchor text more than three times in context (not in navigation or footer) causes Google to treat it as a navigational link rather than a context link, the answer is that it depends. This usually happens when the internal links aren’t placed in unique enough content.
Google doesn’t just look at the anchor text for relevance or topical refinement, but also at the surrounding text for that relevance connection. The overall uniqueness of the paragraph where the link is placed is more important than the actual one or two words used for the hotlink itself. This is taken into consideration when evaluating anchor text in SEO audits.
The Impact of Page Speed and UX in SEO
Page speed has a significant impact on SEO, more than many in the SEO community are currently willing to acknowledge. There’s a common misconception that Core Web Citals are the only aspect of speed that matters. However, Google has a separate algorithm dedicated to page experience, which includes not just speed factors, but also other usability factors.
For instance, if a page has good Core Web Citals but the Largest Contentful Paint takes 15 seconds, and the rendering sequence is designed such that a user can’t interact with the page until that content is delivered, then the user can’t interact with the site for 15 seconds. This delay can negatively impact SEO, and if it happens frequently, it can lead to significant consequences.
Even if a page ranks highly, some visitors may leave before they even have the chance to decide to become a client or customer. If the focus is solely on SEO and Core Web Vitals, it overlooks what’s truly important: usability, regardless of how a visitor arrived at the site. Google’s efforts are continually geared towards more accurately emulating usability.
Page speed matters more than many in the industry are willing to accept. Improving page speed alone has helped websites recover from lost rankings. While it doesn’t mean that page speed is the most important aspect for every website, or that improving page speed will always lead to increased traffic, it’s so crucial that it would be irresponsible to ignore or take shortcuts with it.
Google’s Changes and the Importance of Usability
Google is constantly evolving and changing how it communicates what’s important to site owners and the search industry. The removal of any given aspect of SEO from Google’s documentation doesn’t necessarily mean that aspect is no longer important. It could simply mean that Google is trying to find better ways to deliver search results in a world that now involves many algorithms, and their documentation needs to catch up with the changes they make internally.
The key takeaway from this is that even if Google no longer specifically mentions a particular aspect of SEO, if it’s still important for usability, then it remains crucial. Disregarding it just because it’s no longer in Google’s documentation would be irresponsible business practice.
We always eventually get more information about what Google was thinking when they make changes. So while it’s important to pay attention to changes in Google’s documentation, it shouldn’t dictate the work we do. The focus should always be on improving usability and delivering the best possible experience to users.
Checking Mobile Friendliness After Google’s Tool Removal
With Google removing its mobile friendliness tool from Search Console and the API, it’s important to find alternative ways to check if a page is mobile-friendly. Here are some recommended methods:
- W3C Testing Tools: The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) is the organization that has developed the HTML language over the years. Their testing tools can help you test the code on your webpages. This can reveal if any particular functionality is causing problems for web accessibility, which can also indicate potential issues for mobile.
- Simulated Mobile Environment Tools: There are tools available that allow you to view your webpages in a simulated mobile environment. While these tools have their limitations, they can provide a visual check on whether a page is functional for mobile.
- Wave Testing Tool: This is a browser plugin that tests for web accessibility. While it’s not 100% complete or accurate, it can reveal potential problems for web accessibility, some of which may be related to mobile.
- Google Page Speed Insights or Google Lighthouse: These tools provide reports that include information about mobile functionality.
It’s important to remember that relying solely on Google Search Console for all your needs was never sufficient. Using multiple tools can provide a more comprehensive understanding of your website’s mobile friendliness.
Prioritizing SEO Tasks
Determining the priority of SEO tasks depends on various factors. If an audit reveals multiple major problems on a website, such as page speed, internal navigation, and topical dilution, it’s important to consider the resources available for addressing these issues.
Technical issues should always be the first priority for a few reasons:
- One-time fixes: Technical issues are usually one-time fixes at the code level. Once they’re resolved, they typically don’t recur.
- Template-based solutions: Most websites are template-based, meaning you might only have a few templates for your entire website. Fixing the code on these templates can resolve issues across multiple pages.
- Benefit to all site visitors: Addressing technical issues improves the experience for all site visitors, not just those coming from search engines.
After resolving technical issues, more time-consuming tasks like topical fixes can be tackled. These might involve reviewing a large number of blog posts to determine which ones should be moved into evergreen page status outside the blog.
The number of people working on the project also influences the prioritization. If there are enough resources, some team members can focus on technical issues while others work on topic-related needs. All these factors play a role in determining the priority of SEO tasks.
Measuring SEO Results and Follow-ups
Measuring the results of SEO changes involves several steps:
- Pre-Live Review: Ideally, clients should make changes on a staging or development server and then have those changes reviewed before going live. This ensures the work has been done correctly, which is the most important initial result.
- Monitor Site Traffic: After confirming the work has been done correctly, the next step is to monitor site traffic. This can provide insights into how the changes are affecting user behavior and engagement.
- Monitor Rankings: It’s important to monitor rankings, but not on a daily basis or for a vast number of individual keywords. Instead, look at the general trend of ranking fluctuations in Google Search Console.
- Use Google Search Console Reports: These reports can provide valuable insights into traffic over different time periods. Comparing date ranges for specific keyword phrase groups can help identify trends and patterns.
- Don’t Focus on Individual Keyword Rankings: It’s not beneficial to get caught up in the rankings for a single keyword phrase. Sometimes, focusing on a specific goal can lead to improvements in related areas. For example, a client might not achieve the top position for their most important keyword, but they might see a significant increase in traffic and conversions from related long-tail keywords.
The key is to understand why you’re looking at certain results and what information you can glean from them to better understand what’s happening with your SEO efforts.
Backlinks
Backlink auditing is an integral part of an SEO audit. It’s crucial to approach backlinks strategically and ethically. Negative SEO, which often involves the creation of artificial links, is a real threat that can harm websites. Therefore, monitoring backlinks is essential to identify any potential negative SEO attacks.
Despite the risks, some people still buy and sell backlinks, believing they’re a quick way to improve rankings. This practice is not only unethical but also potentially harmful. Google has become increasingly sophisticated in detecting and penalizing artificial link creation.
If Google detects artificial link creation, it can significantly drop a site’s rankings. This drop can occur without any warning or manual action notice from Google. Once a site’s rankings start to fall, they can continue to decline with every major update.
Disavowing harmful or spammy links is a critical step in recovering from a penalty. However, it’s not a magic solution that will automatically restore a site’s rankings. Google’s system is sophisticated, and simply disavowing links won’t necessarily regain Google’s trust.
If a site has been penalized due to artificial link creation, it’s necessary to prove the site’s authority and expertise in a new way. This process involves creating high-quality, valuable content and earning legitimate backlinks.
In conclusion, while backlinks are an essential part of an SEO audit, it’s crucial to approach them ethically and strategically. Buying and selling backlinks is a risky game that can lead to severe penalties from Google. Instead, focus on creating valuable content and earning legitimate backlinks to build your site’s authority and trust.
Gaining Authority Without Relying on Links
Achieving authority in the digital landscape doesn’t always hinge on the quantity of backlinks. In fact, many websites have reached the pinnacle of their industry rankings with minimal links. The key lies in the quality of those links and the value of the content provided.
A common misconception is that authority is solely built through a vast network of backlinks. However, the source of these links matters significantly. Proper public relations, devoid of SEO manipulations, can provide the visibility and community recognition needed for offsite validation of your authoritative presence. A single, well-placed link can be more valuable than a thousand low-quality ones.
However, acquiring such high-quality links can be challenging. So, how can you establish authority without heavily relying on them? The answer lies in creating an exceptional web presence. This involves answering all the important questions your audience might have and doing so better than your competitors.
Your content should be well-organized for intuitive human access, which includes section-level navigation and a URL hierarchy that mirrors your navigation dropdown process. If your content is long, consider adding a table of contents at the top for ease of reading.
Moreover, the content should be crafted by true experts in your industry and provide proper citations for the information presented. This approach can help you demonstrate authority and expertise without the need for artificial backlinks.
Remember, the ultimate goal is to deliver the most valuable content. Some Alan’s clients have maintained top rankings for years with minimal inbound link efforts, simply by providing high-quality, expert content. In the end, it’s not about who has more backlinks, but who delivers the most value to their audience.
Alan’s Opinion about AI
Artificial Intelligence and models like GPT-4 have made significant strides in content generation, but they are not a threat to seasoned professionals in the SEO industry. This is primarily because AI, in its current state, has significant limitations.
Firstly, AI relies heavily on data, which is often outdated. Secondly, AI lacks the ability to emulate human emotion and the intricate workings of the human mind. While AI can generate content on dry, factual topics, it falls short when it comes to emotionally charged or nuanced subjects.
Consider a scenario where a company is trying to sell life-saving medical products. If they rely solely on AI to communicate with potential customers, they might miss the mark. The emotional needs and concerns of the customers can be better addressed by a human who understands the nuances of communication and empathy.
Professionals in the SEO industry often collaborate with content creators who have a deep understanding of communication. These could be individuals with degrees in English or Communication, or native speakers of the language the content is being created in. They understand how to evoke an emotional response from the audience and can tailor the content to the specific needs of the business.
When you combine this human touch with knowledge about the business and SEO best practices, the resulting content will outperform AI-generated content in most scenarios. Despite the advancements in AI, the human element in content creation and SEO remains irreplaceable.
Less Known Tools for Audit
When conducting an audit, there are some lesser-known tools that are incredibly useful and important. The W3C HTML testing tools, specifically the new HTML checker, is a top recommendation. This tool allows you to submit a page and receive a list of errors and warnings. It identifies whether the issues are related to style sheets, scripts, or pure HTML. This tool is often overlooked, but its value is immense.
Another underutilized tool is webpagetest.org. Despite some usability issues with the current version, it remains a valuable resource separate from Google Lighthouse or Google Page Speed Insights. Webpagetest.org allows you to emulate testing, which is particularly useful for assessing mobile usability. By using the system’s advanced settings, you can emulate a mobile device and test your page from that perspective, providing insight into your page speeds.
What sets webpagetest.org apart is its ability to break down a page’s individual assets and provide detailed information on how long it took to request each script, image, or code block. It also shows how long it took to process and execute the script and complete the download.
Moreover, webpagetest.org shows you the render sequence. Many site owners put too many assets in the code before rendering can begin, which slows down the rendering sequence. For instance, they might pull JavaScript files that aren’t necessary for a person to use the page, placing these scripts before rendering is completed. By showing you the rendering sequence, webpagetest.org enables you to identify and fix issues that could be slowing down your page.
Costs Involved
Conducting an audit involves a significant investment of time and resources. For someone new to the process, it might take up to 40 hours to complete an audit properly. For an experienced professional, it might take only 10 hours. The cost charged to the client needs to reflect the time spent, but also the level of expertise. An experienced professional can accomplish more in an hour than a newcomer, and this should be reflected in the pricing.
There are also costs associated with the tools used in the audit. For example, if you’re not just relying on Google Search Console and want to use Screaming Frog to crawl the website, there’s a cost associated with that. If the website is large, you might need to use cloud-based crawling to avoid overwhelming your laptop, which also incurs a cost.
Other tools, like Ahrefs for an inbound link gap analysis, also have associated costs. In fact, there might be 50 or 60 different tools that could be used in an audit, although for any given audit, you might only use 5 to 15 of them. The tools needed can vary depending on the specific site being audited.
Additionally, there might be costs associated with hiring other professionals to conduct specific tests that you don’t have the expertise to do yourself. All of these factors contribute to the overall cost of performing an audit.
Log Files
Checking log files can be important, but it’s not always necessary. Alan hasn’t needed to delve into log files for a couple of years. The need to examine log files typically arises when there’s a severe technical issue that can’t be identified with other tools, or when there’s a suspicion that the site has been hacked or hijacked.
For most websites, however, it’s not necessary to examine log files. The tools available today are generally sufficient for identifying and addressing most issues. That said, there are certain circumstances where examining log files is necessary, but these situations are relatively rare.
