The Secrets of a Good Technical SEO Audit (Olga Zarr and Jason Barnard)

Olga Zarr talks with Jason Barnard about the secrets of a good technical SEO audit.

Olga Zarr is a senior/technical SEO specialist, an SEO consultant and an SEO auditor who started her SEO journey in 2012. She is a true SEO geek who is very passionate about her job. Her main focus is on technical SEO and she loves to do advanced technical SEO audits which sometimes takes her 30-40 hours. She runs her own SEO consultancy, SEOSLY, and is the Director of SEO at Market JD, a Chicago-based company doing SEO for lawyers. She has experience working for big brands like Procter & Gamble, LG, banks, large online stores and more.

An SEO audit has no fixed time limit. The time it takes depends on the aim of the audit, the thoroughness the client wants and the automation choices the SEO expert makes. Olga is a huge believer in less automation, and more human intelligence, and although you may sometimes feel you are wasting valuable time, from an expert’s point of view, it is worth investing time in an audit and throughly covering every aspect.

Olga Zarr starts her SEO audits by manually reviewing the website and empathising with the user before diving into the more technical and geeky part. She analyses every aspect of the website, including its appearance and loading speed from a user’s perspective, then looks at it from Google’s perspective using Google Search Console. Simple. Smart. But those are just her starting points. Olga delves deep into Search Console, then crawls the site twice, then looks at the easier on-page wins… and finally produces a prioritised SEO audit that is workable for her client to implement, effective at pushing the site up Google’s rankings, and brings added value to her client’s clients. She is also very careful and conscientious about ensuring that her client is well informed at every step.

As always, the show ends with passing the baton… Olga delightfully hands over to next week’s wonderful guest, Yuval Ackerman.

What you’ll learn from Olga Zarr

00:00 Olga Zarr and Jason Barnard
00:44 Olga Zarr’s Knowledge Panel
00:55 Important Considerations When Claiming a Knowledge Panel
01:44 Tips About Olga Zarr’s Knowledge Panel
03:59 Announcing “Ask Jason Anything”: Ask About What You Want to Know About Brand SERPs
05:38 Where to Start with an SEO Audit
07:13 SEO Audit: What to look at in Google Search Console
08:22 How to Resolve “Crawled But not Indexed”
10:50 Convincing Clients and Keeping Them On Board
13:37 Olga Zarr’s Second Step for an SEO Audit
14:00 Website Crawling Tools Olga Zarr Recommends
16:32 The Importance of Keeping Clients Informed About the Progress of an SEO Audit
18:30 Olga Zarr’s Strategy for Guiding Clients Through an Audit Report
19:46 The Next Step to an SEO Audit: Technical Checks
20:22 Answering Google’s E-A-T Requirements from the Client’s Point of View
25:14 What are Olga Zarr’s SEO Audit Priorities
30:26 Passing the Baton: Olga Zarr to Yuval Ackerman