Chase Reiner – SEO Audit Checklist (The Ultimate 2019 SEO Roadmap Template)

Depending on how long Phase 1 takes you to complete (it should only be a maximum of 10-15 hours), now you can move directly into optimizing individual URLs.

By fixing sitewide issues and then moving into optimizing the top trafficked URL’s on a website first, this is LITERALLY the quickest way I’ve found to show results to clients.

With that being said, here’s how you’re going to set up Phase 2.

1. Go back to the Screaming Frog crawl tab.

2. Scroll to the right until you see clicks (note you won’t see any data if the site you’re working on doesn’t have Search Console connected or doesn’t have any prior data/traffic)

3. Sort Clicks From Z to A

4. Create New Sheet and Name it Benchmark

5. Copy Screaming Frog Crawl Over To New Benchmark Tab

6. Move Clicks in Front Of URL’s

7. Right-click your top left column and add 6 new columns to the right labeled: Keyword, Clicks, CTR, Avg Position, Keyword Difficulty, and UR.

Discovering New Keywords And Tapping Into Phase 3

Before I continue showing you how to look up your prior data for URL’s and why it is important, I need to show you how to map out new keywords to your URL’s if the current data you have on Search Console doesn’t match.

The first thing I do is I think about what I want to be recognized as and where I want to make most of my money from.

This can be tough for some of you as you may want to be known as somebody who does SEO audits, SEO services, SEO training, and more.

I can guarantee you one thing: Within anything you want to become a monster in, you must first hyper-focus on topic and then expand out from there.

For me, I know that I make most of my money from training people in SEO.

So with that being said, I want my main brand to revolve around something in regards to SEO training.

Which brings us to the intro of Phase 3: Keyword Research and Clustering

Phase 3 Partial Introduction

Since I know I want to rank for topics around SEO training, I will begin by going to ahrefs and typing in that main phrase into keyword explorer.

Next, I will click on all keyword ideas and I will also notice how high the keyword difficulty is.

Note: I generally want to shoot for targeting phrases a range within what my pages are ranking for based on average keyword difficulty which I can view in Site Explorer by plugging my site in and then click on organic keywords.

I can see that most of the keywords I have ranking are within a KD range of 1 to 50. This indicates to me that with on page and content clustering work I could likely rank for this keyword in the next 3 – 6 months.

Next, if I head back to all keyword ideas in keyword explorer, I add an include filter to see everything with word “training” in the keyphrase and then I sort by parent topic.

One thing I notice is that there are easier, longer tail keywords that I can start off targeting and as I build more authority and presence for these longer tail keywords, I can begin optimizing more for the general phrases within Phase 2 (which we are about to jump back to).