Case Study: Off-Page SEO Audit of JuGo Graphic Design

Let's find out by looking at this case study about JuGo Graphic Design's off-page SEO audit.

Julien Gomez is a graphic designer with two websites, https://jugographicdesign.com/ in English targeting the international market, and https://jugographicdesign.fr/ in French for his local market.

While he wants to generate leads with both sites, he wants to generate leads on his website in French at first, and we will focus on that site for the sake of this article.

If you remember last week's newsletter, you are now familiar with my 10-step process to perform your off-page audit. I detail it in my off-page SEO audit course and use it to perform my off-page SEO audit agency service.

As a reminder, off-page SEO regards the activities made on other websites to improve your website's authority and ranking on SERPs. I can't insist enough on its importance, because search engine rankings give a strong coefficient on the quantity and the quality of backlinks.

I mainly used 6 tools to gather data for the website:

I like to leverage data from multiple sources to benefit from a better data set, more complete. But note that this takes more work and is not mandatory if you're doing it yourself.

The data gathered is copy-pasted into a template I created, which allows to have a holistic view on it and dedicated tabs for each audit step.

The Google spreadsheet looks like this:

JuGo is starting to use SEO as a lead generation method. As such, his off-page SEO data shows a website authority as follows:

JuGo's direct competitors for his French website are local graphic designers in his area competing for the same local market. They have their websites in French, offer similar services within a similar price range.

Julien defined 2 competitors of whom we analyzed the key off-page SEO authority metrics. We could clearly see that one of them is actively working on her SEO:

Ahrefs and Moz offer the possibility to list the backlinks and the referring domains. It allows a great understanding of the sources of traffic and authority.

We looked in details at JuGo's backlink profile and perceived 304 backlinks from only 6 referring domains:

One of the 6 referring domains listed a total of 291 links among JuGo's 304 backlinks!

Julien had registered his business profile on a local freelance website that automatically added his profile to pages from many other local cities without letting him know.

This being said, being referenced by only 6 domains doesn't help much with SEO. Registering to online directories is a good off-page SEO practice to gain backlinks, whether the directory is a business, local, or generalist one.

JuGo's 6 referring domains were composed of:

While the number of referring domains should be increased, their diversity should be too, to include:

Pro Tip: A good way to find websites to get backlinks is to analyze the backlinks of competitors investing in SEO (i.e. with a high website authority).

JuGo's link juice has been assessed by having 292 NoFollow links and 11 DoFollow links. As you have guessed, the 291 links mentioned in the previous sections are all NoFollow links.

Work has to be done now to increase the number of DoFollow links, which are the backlinks that are used from the source website to endorse the target website in the eyes of search engines.

Note that NoFollow links are not an issue per se. They can always bring traffic as visitors on these websites might always click on JuGo's link to reach JuGo's website.

Moreover, having little-to-none NoFollow link is unnatural and penalized by search engines, so there's no reason to fight NoFollow links.

Julien has not worked to improve SEO recently, and no evolution in the number of backlinks has been perceived. There is no new backlink, lost, or broken backlink.

An assessment can regularly been made to measure the new, lost, and even broken backlinks, to take action to improve rankings in SERPs.

JuGo Graphic Design's website is pretty recent, so there is no harmful or low-quality backlinks that negatively impacts his website's search engine performance or authority.

We looked at Moz's Spam Score:

If you paid attention, you have realized that he number of backlinks and referring domains is different here than in the previous sections. Indeed, where are the 304 backlinks? And where are the 291 backlinks coming from the same referring domain?

The data discrepancy comes from the use of 2 different tools, Ahrefs (previous sections) and Moz (Spam Score). For example, the referring domain found by Ahrefs containing 291 backlinks is not mentioned by Moz.

Never forget that there is no perfect tool containing the right data, accurate data, or all the necessary features for a thorough assessment. You will have to handle several tools and critically analyze the measures.

The backlinks tools aforementioned provide you with the anchor texts used by the source websites to link to JoGo's website.

For JuGo, they are (of course in French ;):

As you can see, one half of anchor texts is specific to JuGo's website or brand name (1 to 3), the other half is generic (4 to 6), and one anchor text is not relevant (6).

Note that you can’t really optimize the anchor text from websites you do not own. For JuGo, there nothing worth of our time to be done here. Other SEO activities will be more profitable to rank his website in SERPs.

However, if you have created some of these links on external websites, personal blogs, social media profiles or pages, etc. then you can at least optimize these ones. In such case, make sure your anchor text is:

We looked in Google Search Console at the 2 types of penalties JuGo could have gotten from Google:

JuGo has not received a manual penalty from Google and has not been hit by the algorithm during any update because there is no traffic decrease. To be fair, there's not much traffic either, but at least now we have measured his traffic and know from where we start to build his organic traffic.

In this case study, I have leveraged my 10 steps to audit the off-page SEO of a website, as developed in my article “10 Steps to Audit Your Website Authority”, and applied it to JuGo Graphic Design's solopreneur website.

While different businesses have different starting points and needs regarding SEO and off-page SEO, you can use these steps to get a strong understanding of your online presence and authority in your field.

If you want to learn to audit your off-page SEO, I created an Off-Page SEO Audit Course based on these 10 steps. Similarly to my other courses, it's a step-by-step guided course, DIY mode. I made its price accessible to all solopreneurs and small businesses.

Otherwise, if you just want to get the results of the audit fast and know how to move forward based on data, I can do your off-page SEO audit for you. Just let me know.

Good luck to JuGo Graphic Design and let's see how we can help him get traffic ;).