Hey guys, welcome to another video in the series of Shopify access you today in this video, we're going to work through the second part of our initial site audit. In the previous video, we work with sem rush and a refs to get an idea of where our market is. And now in this video, we're going to work through looking at your site from the perspective of perspective of Google, Google Webmaster Tools, and also use the other tool Screaming Frog. Now, this is just going to be an initial type screening of the site, we can use these tools later on through the course, a little more in depth, right now that we're just going to simply use them on the front end. And it will give us a little bit more information on the site itself. So we'll work through both tools and have a look at how some of one of our example sites matches up.

So simply the objective is to use Google Webmaster Tools in Screaming Frog to find potential problems with our site. I showed you how to set up Webmaster Tools and Screaming Frog, where to download it in one of the previous videos. So just to keep in mind with Webmaster Tools, you will need to have it set up and allow Google to crawl a site possibly for a few days or a little bit longer if you haven't set it up already. Because it needs to go out and aggregate all the data to be in Webmaster Tools before we can do anything with it. So we'll just head on over to Webmaster Tools. And take a look at one of our example sites.

Okay, so once you you're in Webmaster Tools, and you have selected your site, you'll come to this screen. Now. webmaster tools can tell you a lot but all we're going to be interested in today is a couple of elements of what Webmaster Tools will tell us. It's got information here on the search analytics, it can tell you and we'll just open some of these field here, it can tell you what links are coming to your site, which we're going to work in work within a video a little bit further on in the course, internal linking, and international targeting some crawl ability issues here, which we may go through later on security issues. So there's a lot in here that you can work with. So but the only, there's only two real issues we want to look at, in this initial audit.

First one is we're going to go to search traffic, and then click on manual actions. And this really, is only relevant to your site. If you have a penalty in Google. If you haven't heard of what penalties, Google can actually put on a site. There's a number of different penalties. But the two main penalties are a manual action, or a an action where Google will actually tell you that the site has some sort of error such as a spam A spam error or something like that, and it'll give you a little bit of information, it won't necessarily tell you how to remove that penalty.

But you'll it'll if you do have a penalty or manual penalty in here, it'll actually show up in this screen here. And a manual action is essentially where a human being at Google has actually reviewed the site and determined that it has some sort of issue that needs to be fixed a little bit outside the scope of this course to actually remove manual actions. And so all out something we do quite regularly with people that come to us with sites have been penalized. So if you come in here, and you see there's a manual action, let's and you've had trouble getting traffic or rankings, or you just decide to not just getting anywhere at all. If you've got a manual action in here, it's a pretty, pretty clear indication that that's the reason for it. So certainly, if you if you come into Webmaster Tools, and find you have a On election, you can contact us directly.

And we can take a look at your site and give you some recommendations on on how to deal with it. So that's the first thing you want to want to look at. With any site with a manual action, you're not going to gain any benefit at all from providing any extra SEO work. So it's one of the first things you need to actually look at with your site. This can also be quite common or not not not really common, but it does happen when someone's actually purchased a domain to put on their Shopify store, for example. And they didn't realize that that domain had been used by someone else in the past that can happen when you register domains.

And it can happen if you buy them an auction. And sometimes they come with a penalty. So just need to be aware of that. The majority of sites it's not going to have any effect on but something to consider. So if there's no manual manual action in here, you're all good to go from the foundation. Then the next section and the only other section we're going to look at today is HTML.

HTML improvements. A lot of people sort of overlook this because I don't think it's good. They're not it doesn't really tell you you have an error. But they overlook the fact that Google's actually determined that there's some sort of issue with the site. And it'll tell you here. So it'll give you information on meta descriptions, whether you've got duplicate meta descriptions, and the fact that Google's telling us that we have duplicate meta descriptions, that means that they don't want to see that.

And that's, that's certainly an overlooked factor that many people won't won't actually deal with on this site. So it's just worth coming in here and having a look and dealing with these simple issues first, before you go any further. If you've got paired with long meta descriptions, or short meta descriptions, we'll we'll go and if you don't know what meta descriptions are, and these title tags and all the rest will explain that when work on the on page optimization later on in the course. But he just come in and have a look and see what era's you've got, so if we just click on duplicate meta descriptions of this page here, it'll tell us the actual page, we can click on that page. And then it'll tell us that these two pages of our site, so here, have duplicate meta descriptions. And we can go and look at those if we want by clicking on them, I'm not gonna do that now.

And then the same for this other one here. Sometimes that can be a little bit confusing, and you click on them, and they're not actually duplicate. But it's how Google has crawled the site in a particular time. And it might have been changed in the past. And then if you've got obviously, other notifications here of titles, or non indexable content, which we'll go through later on as well. That's just something to keep note of.

So if you find issues in here, you just want to keep them keep a note of them, or at least understand that you can come back and when we work on the on page factors that you can have a note of them. So you know that These definitely need to be dealt with while you're working on your site. And the reason some of these issues can happen is certainly if you have not a lot of experience in optimizing or building a site. Let's say for example, you've got a heap of products from a supplier or a drop shipper. And you they provide you with a catalog or an online resource where you can get images and product descriptions and names of products, for example, and you essentially just copy and paste them into your site. And a lot of those will have duplicate descriptions and titles.

Not only on the on your own site, but other people would have done the same thing. And then you have duplicate issues throughout the internet with other sites as well. So you have duplicate content with other sites, but also duplicate content within your own site. And duplicate content is certainly not something you want on any of your sites, you want unique content, where at all possible all the way through. So that's it for Webmaster Tools for now, obviously, as I mentioned, very simple for the this part of the audit, and we probably will need to come back and review this later on as we work further through the course. So we'll go and have a look at Screaming Frog now and I'll explain how we want to use Screaming Frog to determine any problems with the site as well.

Okay, so I am in the previous video of explaining where to grab this bit of software and download it and install on your machine. And as mentioned, it's free up to 500 URLs. If you've got a very large store, you'll need to look at purchasing the license but this is a bit of an option whether you want this and use this software and certainly handy Screaming Frog does has many, many, many features and can certainly go really deep in it's an Analysis of a certain site, and we're going to use it later on for a little bit further information as we work through the course. But straight out of the box, we're just gonna let Screaming Frog crawl outside, and it'll pull back some of the information we need. And we'll just work through it. So simply watch, just keep all the standard default configuration.

So you literally download the software, install it on your site and open it up, put your domain in this top box up here, and click Start. And we just let it run through and start crawling. And you'll see it starts crawling down the bottom here, and then it'll start pulling in URLs. So I'll just let it crawl. I'll stop it for a second and we'll come back when it's done. Okay, so Screaming Frog has crawled our domain.

And you can see it pulls back all the pages. And you can use these tabs up at the top to work through the different elements of the site and then also on the right hand side here. It can, you can scroll through and give you a little bit more More information. So if we scroll on down, we can see page titles, it'll tell us how many, how many are missing, whether there's duplicate titles, over characters below characters, etc, etc. So all in one here that gives you all the information you need. Again, this will make a lot more sense and be more user friendly once we work through the the on page elements of the site, but we just work through them.

So obviously here, it's a URL of each page, or each collection page. Also, blog pages, and it'll pull back tags as well. And tags is something we're going to talk about in another video because tags can cause problems with not only ecommerce sites, but any site. It's a feature of Shopify by default, but we'll explain why tags can cause an issue later on. So straightaway, we can look at the page titles. And the main thing we want to look here is to make sure we don't have any page titles missing.

And then also, using on the right hand side here, we can see whether we've got any duplicate. So it shows us here that we do have some duplicate pages, and sorry, duplicate titles in our site. So these are things we'd want to go and adjust and make sure that they're not duplicate. And it's something again, we'll go through when we're doing the on page stuff. But here we can get all the information we need. And we know where to start.

Start working. Because it makes sense, obviously, to a lot of work involved with optimizing a site on page. So you want to work, start working on the site, where the issues are, and and work towards the end point rather than just deciding how you want the site built and hoping that you end up ends up in the right way. Or you've already got problems and you don't really know where to start. So it gives you a good starting point. Just suppose what I'm trying to say.

Okay, then we can also click on through the medicine descriptions. So Exactly. assignment tells us what the meta descriptions are here from what page whether we've got any missing. We've got a few missing pages here, which certainly we want to make sure we deal with later on. Then, so meta keyword is one thing that it's a bit of a key words can still be added to Shopify and also to a lot of other sort of platforms or website building platforms such as WordPress, and it's a little bit defunct or redundant. Now, Google says that they don't take into account keywords and some that are related to as a meta element of your site.

But we generally never work with keywords so it's something I'd recommend you don't need to worry about. Okay, then we go and look at h1 tags, which, again, are we're looking for any h1 tags that are missing. You can see we've got many duplicates here. h1 tags become a little bit tricky. With a ecommerce store and Shopify, but again, we'll work talk about the reasons why that is when we go through the homepage. And then we can also look at h2 tags as well.

So you can see the site's got few issues with h2 tags with duplicate h2 tags here. And just just finish with sake, not such a big issue with Shopify stores because they're self hosted, or sorry, they're hosted by Shopify. So generally, if you build a page, and the page status will be 200, which means the page is callable and working. Sometimes, unless possibly a web developer or someone else's fiddled around with certain pages or the code, you may find some errors and different status codes here, within the Shopify store itself. And you'll also see any pages that have had a URL redirect, which we'll go through on page as well, later on. Obviously, things like the scroll up back up here, things like the cat, it's blocked by the robots.

Txt file. And all that means is Google's not able to call the cat, probably obvious security reasons. So most ecommerce stores have the status blocked by the robots. txt file. So essentially, just with this, this bit of training, I just wanted to give you an idea of how Screaming Frog can pull back data all in one hit from our site, we get a lot of information straightaway. And we can use that information later on as we go through and optimize certain pages and sections of our site.

Hope that all made sense. If you haven't downloaded Screaming Frog yet, make sure you go and do that free version up to 500 URLs. And it's a really handy tool that you get to like Use all the time when you're starting to optimize and build out your store properly. Thanks a lot. see in the next video