[Case Study] How We Do a Website Audit Live

Are you ready to take your website's health from mediocre to exceptional? Tune in as we take you behind the scenes of a live website audit. Whether you're a web novice or a seasoned pro, this episode will equip you with the knowledge to optimize your site, boost its performance, and climb the SEO ladder. Don't miss out on these practical insights that could transform your digital presence!

Timeline Summary:

• [00:00:40] Introduction to Cricket Matters 
• [00:02:29] Ahrefs Tool Introduction 
• [00:03:43] Website Health Score Reveal 
• [00:06:08] SSL Certificate Importance 
• [00:13:02] Final Health Score and Next Steps 

Key Takeaways:

1. Understanding Website Audits: The episode breaks down how to perform a website audit using Ahrefs, illustrating the importance of regular site checks to maintain and improve website health.
2. SEO Essentials: Learn about critical elements like SSL certificates, HTTPS vs. HTTP links, and the impact of these on your site's security and Google ranking.
3. Practical Demo: A real-time demonstration of fixing errors on a website, showcasing how quick interventions can drastically improve site health.
4. User Experience Focus: The discussion emphasizes that Google values user experience highly, which includes fast loading times, mobile responsiveness, and secure browsing with HTTPS.
5. Resources for Improvement: James and Josh provide resources and tips for listeners to conduct their own audits and highlight when it's wise to seek professional help.
6. Importance of Continuous Monitoring: The podcast stresses the need for ongoing website reviews to ensure the site remains optimized and performs well against competitors.

Websites and Links Mentioned:

• Ahrefs Website
• Free Website Audit

Quotes:

"Optimizing your site's health is like maintaining your personal health; both need regular checks and timely actions." — James Breese

"Even the smallest website error can impede your SEO progress; it's crucial to fix these quickly." — James Breese

"Your website’s backend is as important as the content on the front. Google cares about both!" — Josh Kennedy

"HTTPS is not just a prefix; it's a shield against potential threats to your website." — James Breese

"A good user experience starts with a well-structured, securely linked website." — Andrew Wallis

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Chapters

• 0:40 Introduction to Cricket Matters
• 2:29 Ahrefs Tool Introduction
• 3:43 Website Health Score Reveal
• 6:08 SSL Certificate Importance
• 13:02 Final Health Score and Next Steps

Transcript

[00:00:00] James Breese: Strength Matters Media. Video. Print. Podcasts. 

[00:00:05] Josh Kennedy: Welcome back to the podcast. This is episode 150. That's, uh, that's flown by, hasn't it boys? Blimey neck episode 150 time, time to party. Uh, but today's episode is another case study. It's how we do a website audit live. And this is a service we could provide for you guys.

[00:00:23] So listen out for the link at the end, James. This is all about Cricket Matters again. We've just crawled the website. Thank you for telling me what the official term is. Do you want to, are you going to share your screen and show us what's going on with Cricket Matters? 

[00:00:36] James Breese: Yeah, I'll share our screen, but yeah, I'll go into it again.

[00:00:40] I keep talking about Cricket Matters. The reason we keep talking about Cricket Matters is that that's our fitness business website, guys. You know, we're talking about health and fitness marketing and digital marketing and SEO and all this stuff here, but we're showing you and taking behind the scenes of what we're actually doing.

[00:00:55] to grow that side of the business and how you can too. So we're gonna make it as relatable as possible because [00:01:00] looking at strength management is a bit different. It's not the same as your business. It's not a gym. It's not a personal training services. Cricket matters is all about fitness and personal training and coaching.

[00:01:08] So that's the big difference here is some. 

[00:01:11] Josh Kennedy: Exactly. So we've always done training and coaching. We always will do training and coaching, but we've shifted it from strength matters over to cricket matters. So we still do training. So if you go to the strength matters website and go, these guys just do websites.

[00:01:22] No, we're still trainers. Coaches always will be. As you say, that's a cricket matters is the training side of the business now. 

[00:01:30] James Breese: Exactly. So here you go. So let's look at the page. So this is the new Cricket Matters webpage, right? Very simple. We've launched it. Tells exactly where we are. We're strength and conditioning for cricketers.

[00:01:40] That's, that is number one, what we're trying to aim for, what we're trying to go. So, you know, this is what we all do. This is what it's all about. But the old website that was there was just doing a simple job. It was just sitting there doing nothing really other than just looking pretty ish. I think that's the best way to put it.

[00:01:59] [00:02:00] Right. So there's loads of issues with it. So what we're going to share with you today is like how I will do a mini site audit about what's going on, what to fix very quickly and how you can do it too. For free. Okay. Now you can't do everything on this because you have to pay a lot of money for the software that we use to help all our clients and that's why people pay us to do it because it saves them all that money, but you can do this basically yourself to start off with, to get a rough idea, how you interpret that information then is down to you.

[00:02:29] But we'll show you a few of the key things that we're looking at. So the first thing we're going to go to is Ahrefs, right? A H R E F S, A H R E F S dot com. It's a play on words and a coding term for websites. Go to this website. You sign up for this, you can sign up for the free, not the free trial, but the free course here now, but if you want to pay for that big end services, you're talking 300 a month plus.

[00:02:54] Right. So you don't only pay that money, but you can sign in for a free account. When you sign in for a free account here, you connect your [00:03:00] Google accounts to it. Google analytics and Google search console. Really important. If you haven't done that, make sure you do it first to keep hammering home this point.

[00:03:09] Once you do that. It allows you to pull in the data into their system, so they can start doing mini crawls here for you. Okay? And mini crawls, when they search and go through your website for you, looking at, looking at it inside out. Have I made that simple enough? Josh, does it, do you even understand that?

[00:03:25] Oh, yep. I think I've got that. Absolutely. Fantastic. So if you're watching, please watch along on YouTube to see this behind the scenes, and don't watch in a car if you're listening in the car right now. So let's go to this first and foremost. So this was. The crawl of the cricketmatters. com website on the 4th of April.

[00:03:43] And you see the health score was 47. You must have been, you must have been fuming when you saw that. Well, well you'll see, I'll show you in a second actually, like I'll show you before, before I do the big reveal of the scores coming through today, which was happening live before actually. When we launched, because we just launched the site here today.

[00:03:58] So 47 was there, and I knew it [00:04:00] was at 47 for a long time, but I just didn't have time to fix it or do it, because it wasn't a priority for me. But, 47 is not good. We need this at 100%. And you have no excuse to have it not at 100%. Okay? So, what it tells you, after it calls your website, is like, what's going on?

[00:04:18] And you scroll down the page, and it tells you, like, there's no links. Okay? There's poor HTTPS, which means there's no secure server links coming here. I was linking to a bad, bad link here. And there's duplicate pages going on. These are all main reasons why it's not working properly. Okay? So we can click on this now, and we can say, right, orphan pages no incoming internal links.

[00:04:41] Goes into it, and we go, okay, cool. The issue is along here. There's links. To a page that are not working properly. That's essentially what it's telling us here now. Now, probably the biggest one is this. HTTPS, which I see all the time, has internal links to HTTP. That is a linking [00:05:00] structure, which we spoke about on the previous website, where HTTPS is the secure server which you need to have on your website.

[00:05:07] It needs to be a secure domain, not HTTP. Right? Because that makes people from hacking your website test stealing information a lot harder when you have that you need a certificate, basically an SSL certificate to make sure it's working properly. So if you look at this page, here we go. So on the cookie policy page, it's got bad links.

[00:05:29] It's got internal, external links not working properly. HTTP here tells us where it is, tells us on what pages, cookies, terms, privacy. We know which page we need to go into to fix it, essentially, so we can go and do it. This is the beauty of this software. It tells us where to find the problems and where to go and fix it.

[00:05:46] If you know what you're doing a little bit. Okay. So again, incu insecure internal links. That's what we're te it's telling us here because HTTP instead of H-T-T-P-S, which is a common error we've found on a lot of [00:06:00] websites, just quickly 

[00:06:00] Josh Kennedy: for, um, people like me who know nothing about websites, how do you change A-H-T-T-P to H-T-T-P-S 

[00:06:08] James Breese: is that simple question that comes to the, that comes to your domain provider, right?

[00:06:12] Where you're hosting your website. Okay. Okay, so that's quite a geeky little way of talking about it, 

[00:06:20] Josh Kennedy: but it's, but it's something that people want to know. It's like, cause if they do a crawl on their website and they see that, it's like, well, how do I change that then? 

[00:06:28] James Breese: You know what I mean? Absolutely. So the way, first of all, is where your domain is hosted.

[00:06:32] Okay. Where your domain is hosted. That's the first thing. So we have, we have our own internal servers. It's for Strength Matters and Cricket Matters. Therefore, we have our own domain certificate issued. Whereas people who go to other domain hosting providers, they should be doing it for you. Okay? So that's why you should be hosting on a HTTPS type site.

[00:06:52] But then the issue then comes, they may have that domain that's like secure and safe. However, their linking is poor. They link [00:07:00] to HTTP on their website, and that's a user error, not a hosting error. Okay? So most domain hosters will have this secure domain now. Okay. But it's an internal error from a user error from linking badly when they design the website, which is easily done.

[00:07:15] Okay. It's easy. It's just one letter, essentially. That's the issue. So it's easy. This is why this, this thing is so good to help you find issues. Okay. So go back to the overview. Tells us here it's crawled 251 pages, score 47, URLs with errors, URLs without errors. And it tells you where to go and fix it.

[00:07:34] Missing text, open, these are all things you have to fix too. Right. So that was on the, on the 11th of April. So let's go to today's. Shall we? Should we add a drum roll in? Let's go to today's. Today's. Da da da da da da. Live view. What do we have? It's gone up to 97%. Right, 97 percent in terms of health score, still not a hundred, [00:08:00] but it gives us a bit more information about where we need to go.

[00:08:03] So right now, right, if I look at this, so we have a 404 page. A 404 page is, tells us that there's a page with no information on it. There's no link to it. There's no, it's not, it's not working basically. So I click on 404 page. Not found. Okay. Timetable. Well, where's that coming from? Ah, membership. So I need to turn that page.

[00:08:24] That page here is probably a broken links. If I click on that link straight away. So, yeah, there we go. It's kind of linked to something else completely different. Let's have a look at the website. That's linked to Bruce's website. What's going on? It linked to Bruce's website. So that's an issue because I used pilot attempt to go and do it.

[00:08:41] So if you look at that, So we now know if I click in copy link, let's click in here.

[00:08:50] So there we go. That's an issue I've got to fix. It's on the Cricut matters website. So when you launch a website, guys, that's a great example of not, of making sure you check [00:09:00] everything. So I haven't turned off one of the pages as part of the design process. You're seeing this live. This is the proper edit I'm seeing here live guys.

[00:09:06] So I'm not messing this around. So I know I've got to go back into my website and fix this. Because it's not working, right? It's not working. There's errors here now. So I've got to go back into that thing and fix those errors. So, if I go back into the pages, links to broken page. Yep, so again, it's all linked to that one page.

[00:09:25] Personal training and group training, which is linked to part of the Bruce's page I use as part of the default process for building this website. So when you build a website, you take frameworks and other things you've built which you've done good and you keep layering, layering up on top of it. So that for me is where I've got to go fix.

[00:09:42] But then it's got all these new things, we do exchanges, all here now. But the point is we've jumped. Right. We've jumped from compare from, you know, before 47 percent to 97%. And it can go to a hundred percent by fixing these errors very, very quickly. Right. And that [00:10:00] is pretty exceptional in some, in some cases, in most cases, because we've fixed everything.

[00:10:05] We've got all the redirects in place. We've got all the pages fixed. It's optimized. It's built, but it's just one page. It's getting broken traffic at the moment. And that's how we look at it. And this is what you guys can do with your website. Cause it'll make a massive difference. You may not see it straight away.

[00:10:20] It's like, it's like starting a diet. Right? You can eat well for two, three days and you won't see the scales move or anything or any change of clothing. But if you keep going in six months time, you could have lost 20, 30 pounds. It's the same with this, you fix this year, keep an eye on it, keep it ticking over.

[00:10:38] And then suddenly you're six months, 12 months later, you are ranking higher than all your competitors because they're healthier websites. Does that make sense to both of you guys? It does. 

[00:10:47] Andrew Wallis: No, it's good to see in action, 

[00:10:49] Josh Kennedy: Andrew. 

[00:10:50] Andrew Wallis: It does. And I've got two points I'd like to add. Firstly, Josh, I was impressed you were able to interpret that data to say, Oh, that's Bruce's [00:11:00] website.

[00:11:00] So, uh, you're holding back on us. You know, more than what you're letting on. And secondly, I'm just surprised how quickly when you address the changes, how it can go from that 47 to 97 that just shows. To me. Wow, that's that's significant. Um, and I guess is testament to, to folks really reviewing how their, their sites performing and making the, the, the relevant edits to it.

[00:11:31] But that brings up another question. I guess is, do I get stuck? Um, what do I do? Can I just ignore it or, or who do I reach out to, to, to get some support? 

[00:11:45] James Breese: Yeah, great question. You literally, if you get stuck, just reach out to us guys, we will do a website audit for you. But this is where technical expertise comes in.

[00:11:52] Like most trainers, coaches, health officials, practice owners, guess what? They're experts in their field of helping people get out of pain, get fitter, [00:12:00] get stronger, lose weight. You know, that's the areas of expertise in. They're not experts in this and there is a level of expertise required to help fix some of this stuff and do it quickly because something you can spend a couple of weeks, months learning this stuff.

[00:12:12] It's taken me 20 years plus to learn most of this stuff, right? So I know where to go and where to look for sure, right? Because I've learned it by doing the Strength Matters stuff over the years and having a Master's in Computer Science. So they've got to like ask help, we can point them in the right direction, right?

[00:12:29] But they know they can take this information themselves as well and start applying it to their own thing by just launching into it. Now, if you look on the right hand side here too. Right. Uh, not the right side of the earth, down here. Look at this. We launched it in the 11th of January. There you go, Josh.

[00:12:42] That's when we launched it, the 11th of January. So I launched it knowing it's only got 47%, basically. That's what I wanted down here. So we go down here, 11th of January. So we then scroll all the way back up to where it is, the 11th of April. Uh, here, and then today, 97%. That is all as a [00:13:00] result of changing the whole website.

[00:13:02] There 

[00:13:03] Josh Kennedy: we go. Fantastic. Um, No, it's great. Anything, anything else you want to add before we wrap up, James? 

[00:13:11] James Breese: Uh, I think that's it for now. I think I'm trying to look at, if I go inside audits, that's all for now. Cricketmanors. com. Stop going through things live. You just get into your tech, you'll just go off into your own little world while we see.

[00:13:24] I am, I sound like a good thing to hear now. No, I think that's, if I stop sharing my screen, let me stop that screen share. There we go. No, I think, look, your health of your website is similar to your own personal health that you can have. People who are really slim and fit, but unhealthy on the inside, and you can have people who are overweight and healthy, you know, overweight, but healthy on the inside, depending on who you look at, but in terms of websites.

[00:13:47] What you see is not always what you get. And Google is more interested in not just the content you have, but the backend inner workings of how it's structured to make sure it's optimal for people's benefit. It's all about user [00:14:00] experience and user experience is all about good linking, no broken links, no toxic links, and having a good website that's crawled properly and pages that work as well.

[00:14:09] So 

[00:14:09] Josh Kennedy: there we go. Thank you very much guys. That is it for today. Hope you found that useful. And if your brain is a little fried and you do want to get yourself a free website audit, you can with us by going to strengthmatters. com forward slash audit.