If you haven’t heard of or used the SEOTools Excel Plugin by Niels Bosma then it’s definitely something worth investigating. It is a powerful plugin containing a number of useful functions to help you collate SEO data. Bringing this data into Excel opens up a vast amount of data handling and analysis possibilities.
Using this plugin we have created a free to download SEO audit template for you to use, edit and improve as you wish
- To begin with, please download and install the SEOTools Excel Plugin.
- Download and open the Keyword Eye SEO Audit Template
To start, please go the ‘config’ tab of the spreadsheet and enter the following details:
- SEOmoz Access ID and Secret Key. These are free to generate and are available here.
- Alchemy API Access Key. Again, this key is free to generate and is available here. Please do not share these details with 3rd parties.
Specific functionality within the spreadsheet requires these API details. Once entered, you are able to begin using the audit template for your own websites.
- Click on the ‘Setup’ tab
- Running this audit within Excel can increase CPU usage significantly so please define which elements of the SEO audit you wish to run prior to entering specific website and keyword information. This can be done by using the drop down menus in the load section of the ‘Setup’ tab. These can be turned on at any time.
- Enter the XML sitemap URL of the website you wish to run the SEO audit. The audit spreadsheet will then capture the individual URLs from this file. If you don’t have an XML sitemap yet, they are free and easy to generate here. Once generated simply upload it to the root directory of your website.
- Enter up to 5 keywords. These are the keywords which you are optimising for.
- Click on the individual tabs of the spreadsheet to view the results of the audit once it has finished loading. These tabs consist of meta, heading, content, domain, page load speed and broken link reports.
Let’s go through the reports generated within the audit.
- Meta – This report captures and analyses the title and meta description tags used on pages within your website. The length and keyword usage within these tags are checked. If length is over a specified limit the background colour changes to red. If you wish to edit the predefined title and meta description length please do so in the ‘config’ tab.
- Headers – This report captures and analyses heading 1 and heading 2 used on pages within your website. Keyword usage is checked.
- Content – Clean, navigation free content is gathered from your pages. Keyword usage and density is analysed.
- Domain – This report records top level domain statistics such as pages indexed, Google PageRank, SEOmoz Domain Authority and social metrics from Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
- Page Load Speed – This report captures the page load speed of your homepage in seconds. If the page load speed is over 2 seconds the background changes to red.
- Broken Links – This report captures the URL status of your web pages to check if there are any 404 not found errors. If any errors are found then the background colour will change to red.
This is our first release of the SEO Audit so if you have any feedback or addition requests please let us know.