Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization starts with understanding your current situation or status. Only then can you determine where you want to be. Our SEO audit allows us to perform in-depth research on your existing site and provide specific recommendations to improve your rankings. After the audit, we'll propose a plan tailored to your needs that will show how we'll get you the final results. Here's how we'll approach the audit:

Getting the lay of the land

The first thing we do when auditing your website for SEO is configure our crawling tools and start collecting data associated with your site to learn where you currently rank. We'll review your Google Analytics and review your traffic patterns and consult Google Webmaster Tools free diagnostic tools. Having all of this data at our disposal, we're ready to begin the audit.

Auditing Accessibility

This part of the audit looks at how search engines are currently able to access your website. We want to make sure the basics are there and nothing keeps the engines from crawling the pages. We'll review the following:

  • Robots.txt
  • Meta tags
  • HTTP status codes
  • XML sitemaps
  • Site architecture
  • Javascript navigation
  • Indexability

Once we determine that search engines can access your pages, next we want to make sure they're actually indexing them (including them in results).

We do this quite simply by running search queries through Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, and learning how many pages on your website are being indexed. We'll run brand searches along with basic keywords (industry, product, location) and recording the results.

In the event you're being blocked, we'll dig to learn why and then propose a solution for fixing any errors to get your site back in the rankings.

On-page ranking factors

Now that we've determined that your site is being indexed and crawled, we'll review more about what factors on your site influence those rankings. We'll look at the following items:

URLs

Since a URL is the entry point to a page's content, it's a logical place to begin our on-page analysis. URLs are often responsible for the majority of duplicate content on a website because every URL represents a unique entry point into the site. If two distinct URLs point to the same page (without the use of redirection), search engines believe two distinct pages exist.

Content

Content is the most important thing Google and other search engines look for when determining how to rank your site. We'll analyze your content to determine whether your content is valuable to its audience and how targeted the keywords are, and make sure it's not spammy or difficult to read.

Information Architecture

Information architecture defines how information is laid out on the site. It is the blueprint for how your site presents information (and how you expect visitors to consume the information). During the audit, we'll ensure that each of your site's pages has a purpose. We'll also verify that each of your targeted keywords is being represented by a page on your site.

Keyword Cannibalism

Keyword cannibalism describes the situation where your site has multiple pages that target the same keyword. When multiple pages target a keyword, it creates confusion for the search engines, and more importantly, it creates confusion for visitors.

Duplicate Content

Your site has duplicate content if multiple pages contain the same (or nearly the same) content. Unfortunately, these pages can be both internal and external (i.e., hosted on a different domain).

HTML Markup

The markup in the source code of your pages is extremely important for how pages get crawled. We'll focus on the title tags and meta descriptions, while also paying attention to headings and images.

Outlinks

When one page links to another, that link is an endorsement of the receiving page's quality. Thus, an important part of the audit is making sure your site links to other high quality sites.

Off-page ranking factors

While what's on your website is important for SEO, what's off the website is just as important. Your site's quality is largely determined by the quality of the sites linking to it. Thus, it is extremely important to analyze the backlink profile of your site and identify opportunities for improvement. We'll review it from many angles, including:

  • How popular your website currently is compared to the competition?
  • Are you getting backlinks from popular website?
  • Are you gaining or losing popularity over time?
  • Is your website trustworthy?
  • How many domains link to you?
  • What is the Page Authority and Domain Authority?
  • How is your social engagement?
Competitive Analysis

After we've reviewed your site in detail, we'll also compare it against 3 competitors in all of the ways listed above, and compile the data down into actionable items.

SEO Link Building Strategy

Resource Links

Creating a resource for your unique purpose, targeting relevant sites, utilizing outreach techniques and trusted online tools to capture the highest authoritative backlink possible.

Skyscraper

Finding linkable assets, and creating something better or more up to date, then outreach to those who are already linking to similar content for a “fresh perspective”.

Natural Guest Blogging

1-2 per week.

Finding Competitors Common Backlinks

If they can link there, so can we.

Dead Link Recovery

Research, recover, or replace any links that have decayed or been deleted.

Mentions into Backlinks

When other people mention the brand they often do so without offering a backlink. Scrubbing the web for mentions and then outreach with properly constructed email template.

Infographics/Video Creation

People are more apt to watch rather than read. Creation of Visual Content can clearly communicate information in a more enjoyable manner. Then outreach to bloggers, sites, etc… that love to share visual content for high quality backlinks. Simply embed code attached and ask those who like it to share.

Lists

People love lists, “10 ways to narrow your home search.” And again, outreach to those who would share.

Material Giveaway

Links can be generated by offering material giveaways that outpace competitors, ebooks, guides, how-to manuals.

Social and Blog Commenting

Finding relevant articles, social posts, infographics etc… and post with embedded link - hundreds of articles and posts per week are qualified and trusted through eyes of Search Engines to jump on.

Analytics

Google Analytics provides some great pre-configured reports to work with out of the box, but the ability to customize and build your own reports from scratch is what allows us to gain truly valuable insights from the tool.

Here is a breakdown of reports for measuring site performance and acquisition patterns options that will can utilize to get the easiest, and best reporting from our SEO efforts:

Browser Report

One of the most common money leaks on websites is incompatibility with certain browsers. We will create a custom report showing conversions per browser and segmenting the report by device (mobile, desktop, tablet) so as not to skew your numbers.

Visitor Acquisition Efficiency Analysis Report

This is to organize key metrics that reveal the efficiency and performance of each stream of traffic to a website. You’ll see total sessions, unique users, new users, goal conversion rate and goal value per session, all organized by source and medium.

Customer Behavior Report

The report reveals how behavior varies between new and returning users in terms of overall traffic, conversion patterns and event completion.

Mobile Performance Report

This report is ideal for understanding how well the site is optimized for mobile and where we need to make improvements.

Site Diagnostics: Page Timing Report

This instantly reveals problematic pages that need attention. Discovery of which pages are taking extra-long to load as well as which have an uncomfortably-high bounce rate.

Here we can switch the data table to view the comparison in order to compare load time to bounce rate; allowing us to view bounce rate for each page against the site average.

Hours & Days Report

The Hours & Days Report shows which day of the week and at what time of the day the website receives the most traffic. If a large time span is set––say a couple of months––the data can be used to guide experiments with blog post times.

Referring Sites Report

This report is great for identifying the referring sites that provide the most value. It tells us not only which referring sites are generating the most traffic but also how they’re contributing to goal conversions.

Content Efficiency Report

This report focuses on key metrics that will help identify which pages are performing the best and which need a little optimization. It’s especially useful for sites that produce a lot of content; it can help us answer important questions like:

Which content is most engaging?

Which subject matter experts should we hire more of? What type of content (videos, demos, pictures, reviews etc.) do visitors value more? Which content delivers business or non-profit value?

Traffic Acquisition from Social Media Report

This report shows us not only which social media channels are driving the most traffic to your site but also whether or not that traffic is translating into tangible results for your business. Metrics like Goal Conversion Rate and Goal Value will tell us which social media sites we should pay more attention to.

SEO: Referring Pages Report

This is a great way to gauge the effectiveness of link building efforts and track the top referring links to your website. The “Referral Path” column will tell us exactly which page links are coming from (not just which website). Bounce Rate and Avg. Session Duration will indicate which links are high-quality, and Per Session Value will tell us which links are generating real business results.

SEO Insights for Google Organic (not provided) Report

The Google Organic Insights Custom Report provides insights for your “(not provided)” keywords. Showing the landing page URLs along with their page titles gives you a sense of the general keyword themes that people are searching for on Google before arriving at your site.

Keyword Analysis Report

This report lists the most popular keywords alongside visitor metrics, conversion rates, goal completions and page load time for each one. There’s also a tab measuring engagement for each keyword, and a tab showing revenue metrics.

Using these Custom Reports will save time and most likely reveal insights about the data that wasn’t’ expected. With the results we can then adjust our SEO accordingly so no stones go unturned to make sure your business is successful.

Ranking reports are also provided monthly using a third party tool SEMRUSH. They are unbiased and not affiliated with Google or Jason Hunter Design.