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The first part of Our Methodology is The SaaSpirin Audit. The data we collect during this audit gives us an understanding of your website from a technical and content perspective.
We use five tools to pull data from your website: ScreamingFrog, Ahrefs, Semrush, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console.
Importing all this data allows us to find technical problems such as dead pages, non-indexable pages, and 302 redirects, as well as content problems like outdated pages, thin content, and pages with formatting issues.
Once we’ve identified technical and content roadblocks, we’ll address each with a specific action. This is the major difference between The SaaSpirin Audit and other SaaS SEO audits. Instead of just giving you a list of problems with your website, we show you exactly how to fix them.
We also prioritize the order in which we recommend tackling these problems so you can focus on the low-hanging fruit that’ll get you a quick SEO boost.
Below, we’ll walk you through our five-step SaaS SEO auditing process.
Note: If you’re looking for an SEO team to audit your SaaS website and provide you with a list of actions you can take to overcome technical and content roadblocks, you can reach out to us here.
The foundation of The SaaSpirin Audit is crawling your website and pulling website data into a spreadsheet where we can find technical and content roadblocks. These are the five tools we use to do this:
1. ScreamingFrog: We use ScreamingFrog to crawl your site and analyze its structure so we can find abnormalities like duplicate content, 404 errors, and incorrect meta tags.
2. Ahrefs: We use Ahrefs to pull a full backlink report. This gives us an idea of the quality of websites linking back to you.
3: Semrush: We use Semrush to pull your website’s organic data into a spreadsheet, helping us understand what keywords you’re ranking for and how much traffic you’re getting. We use Semrush instead of Ahrefs to pull organic data because Semrush has a larger domain database, allowing us to run a more in-depth organic audit.
4. Google Analytics: During our kickoff call, we’ll usually ask for access to your Google Analytics. With this access, we use Supermetrics to pull Google Analytics data, such as bounce rates, page views, and average session durations.
5: Google Search Console: The last tool we use to pull site data is Google Search Console. In addition to Google Analytics, we like to get access to your Google Search Console so we can import site impressions, clicks, CTR, and average position.
With all this data inside our spreadsheet, we have a 360-degree view of your website and can use it to build a checklist of technical and content recommendations.
Now that we have all of our data in one place, we’ll clean up the URLs that we don’t want to analyze. This makes the analysis process more manageable.
During this cleaning phase, we’re deleting JavaScript files, WordPress files, and any other backend links. We’re basically filtering out anything that isn’t part of the front end of your website.
This process is long and can take several hours because we’ll manually check thousands of URLs to see if it’s worth keeping. However, it’s a necessary part of the process because we don’t want WordPress and JavaScript files creeping into our final analysis.
We now have a cleaner file with a more manageable number of URLs to analyze, so it’s time to assign page categories to each URL.
A page category is essentially a tag that better organizes the types of pages on your website.
So when we do our analysis, we’re comparing apples to apples. We aren’t looking at a blog post and comparing its data to a contact or about page.
These are the eight most common page categories that we assign:
Once we’ve assigned these categories, we can filter our spreadsheet by page category and conduct a more concise analysis. For example, if we want to analyze the performance of blog posts, we can filter by blog post and avoid comparing blog posts to other page types.
After we’ve set up the audit and categorized your website, it’s time to assign technical and content actions to each URL.
We do this because, after speaking to hundreds of SaaS founders, we know you don’t want just another spreadsheet that tells you something you could’ve gotten from Ahrefs or Google Analytics. You want an actionable SEO audit containing steps to overcome your website roadblocks.
This is why we assign actions to every page on your website.
We do this using an SOP that we’ve built here at SaaSpirin. This SOP contains over 30 if statements that help us make decisions on what to do with certain web pages. Some of these if statements include:
In the example below, we ran an SEO audit for one of our clients, Belighted, and found that there were hundreds of image URLs without alt text. So we filtered all these URLs into a sheet and suggested adding alt text.
In another example, we found that Belighted had 21 pages that linked to 404 pages. So we rounded them up and suggested an alternative link to each broken link:
The same goes for content actions. We use a content SOP to find content problems and assign actions. These are some of the if statements inside our content SOP:
When doing an audit for Belighted, we found that there were three pages that didn’t have any meta descriptions, so we recommended an SEO-optimized meta description for each page:
We also found pages with formatting problems like multiple H1s, so we sorted these links into a sheet of their own, and suggested alternative headings:
With all your website’s technical and content actions neatly laid out in a spreadsheet, we’ll compile everything into a presentation deck. This presentation deck gives you context on why we recommend these changes, so we aren’t just making blanket recommendations.
We’ll also sort these recommendations from highest to lowest priority so you know which order to tackle them in.
But we like to go a step further and hop on a Zoom call with you, where we’ll share our screen, talk you through our findings, and why we recommend you take these actions.
The goal here is to over-communicate the thought process behind why we assigned these actions and present you with data to back up our decision.
If you’re looking for an SEO team to audit your website for technical and content problems and show you exactly how you can solve these problems, consider booking a call with us.
Once we’ve completed The SaaSpirin Audit, the next step in Our Methodology is keyword gap analysis.
During this step, we’ll pull all the keywords that your competitors are ranking for into a spreadsheet and filter out the keywords that you already rank for.
We’ll then sort these keywords based on highest buying intent. We target high-buying intent keywords first for one simple reason: they convert better. Readers typing in high-buying intent keywords like “best accounting software” are ready to buy. They don’t need nurturing.
It’s just up to us to create a piece of content that’s the best on the internet for each keyword.
If you want to learn more about this process, head over to our keyword gap analysis service page.