Best Practices for Auditing Your SEO Program SEO

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1 Your Program

2 2 How do you know if your campaign is getting the results you need and expect? By auditing your program on a regular basis, you will stay on track with your goals and gain the highest return on your digital marketing investment. Launching a campaign is half the battle and managing it is the tough part. This How-To Guide will help you to diagnose your website s performance, measure key metrics appropriately, and master your competition in the online market. You will learn to recognize if usability issues are affecting your lead generation or sales goals, if Google is indexing your site regularly, and if your keywords are driving qualified traffic to your highest priority pages. 1. Indexing and Caching: Indexing refers to the web pages that Google has added to their database. To accurately find out how which and how many of your site s pages are being indexed use a site: search. To do this, type site: into the Google Search bar. Google will then show you every webpage within your company s domain that is being recognized by Google. Are most of your web pages not getting noticed? Are there too many? It doesn t hurt to check up on your competitors too. Site: search their domains, and see how many web pages those competitive sites currently have indexed. Another type of Google search function that is useful is the cache: search. This will bring forth the cache view of your home page which is Google s snapshot of this page that is currently stored in its index. Type in cache: and you ll be taken to your homepage, however, at the top you can see the date and time Google s Spider last crawled your page. From here, you can review the text only version of your page. This is the version Google spiders actually see, without all the pictures and flash animations. At this stage, it s important to determine if all your content is being read properly and that all your links can be properly followed.

3 3 To check the frequency of the Google Spiders, you can utilize your Webmaster Tools. Under Diagnostics, you will find your Crawl Stats. Crawl Stats tell you the number of Pages crawled per day, the Kilobytes downloaded per day, and the Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds).

4 4 2. Keyword Optimization: It is important to be able to gauge the potential of the keywords you have chosen. You must identify the traffic on each keyword that you want to rank for to help you best optimize each word. In the table above, we have listed keyword variations for a travel website. By analyzing the monthly searches and monthly traffic on each key term, we can conclude that optimization efforts should be focused on cheap airline tickets because of the site s already high rank and a high amount of traffic on the keyword. Unless this is a core term to the business, then Cheap airline prices, however, could be removed from the keyword list. This is because it attracts a low search volume and the site s ranking on this term is farthest from Page 1 of the search results, relative to the other terms.

5 5 3. Navigation and Content Although keywords are important, you must optimize other elements of your site to rank well on the search engines and encourage visitors to return and engage in your calls-to-action. Because search spiders crawl your site by following links, you must ensure that content that can easily be navigated to. Users (and search spiders) should be able to easily flow from your homepage to other pages like an About Us, Products, Services, and Contact Us page, which helps form a cohesive theme across each of the pages. The keywords you want to rank for should be used naturally throughout your website. Focus on optimizing about 3 to 5 keywords on each page. It is important to determine which web pages are best suited for which keywords. This will help drive visitors to the proper site pages upon performing a particular keyword search.

6 6 4. Inbound links If you re wondering why your competitors are ranking higher than you when you are aiming for the same keywords and have very similar on-page content, it s probably because they have more inbound links. Inbound links are hyperlinks from other websites that point back to yours. To Google, inbound links indicate votes of credibility and relevance to other thematic content throughout the web. Successful cannot be achieved without the support of outside sources linking to your content. A great way to create more inbound links is to utilize media that will expose your company s online presence and build your brand. Publish press releases, compose compelling blog posts, create client case studies, and distribute informative whitepapers, colorful infographics, or engaging ebooks that can be easily shared among users. Joint marketing activities are also helpful ways to increase your inbound link value. Each piece of content should be of the highest quality, credibly written, and viewed from the lens of: is this piece of collateral worthy of being shared with friends and colleagues? Touch points in social media will influence others to learn about your brand and follow your messaging. Becoming a trusted and reliable source within the online community has much to do with the traction you are able to gain amongst your target audience. Managing your Twitter and Facebook accounts help both with sharing and creating more inbound links. Replying to tweets and getting Likes will keep users engaged and your brand in their minds. In addition, search engines are factoring social media presence into ranking algorithms. More than ever, it is becoming apparent to marketers that engagement in social media optimization is contributing to impact.

7 7 5. On-Page Optimization Page titles are an important ranking factor that you must not overlook. All sites can benefit greatly by including important keywords at the forefront of each web page s page title. For example, if the page title of your home page is Home Page (like in the example below) then you are signaling to Google that your most important keyword is home page. This is debilitating to your site s strength, because your homepage is like the front door of your business. If this page doesn t give Google any idea of what your business does, then you have already set up your site for a big loss. An example of a good page title is Webmarketing123 s, which reads: Digital Marketing Agency Company California:, PPC, SMM. For us, the most important keyword we want to be found relevant by search engines for is digital marketing agency, which is why we have listed it first. Notice that we also include the main services that we offer:, PPC, SMM as well as our local location: California. As you can see, in a page title you can express who you are, what you do, and where you are located, for geographical targeting purposes. Regularly auditing your program is vital to ensure you are getting the most out of your search marketing investment. By attributing the right tactics and strategy to your program, you will get results that measurably indicate where you are making success and where you may need to redirect your efforts.

8 8 Additional Resources To learn more about how Webmarketing123 can optimize your online presence, reach out to engage with one of our experts for a complimentary digital website analysis. Our team will help you pinpoint your challenges and map out steps for improving your digital visibility on the search engines. The analysis is structured as a one-on-one discovery session to walk through your digital marketing framework, an opportunity analysis, and a competitive keyword report. Whether you need to boost conversions, optimize your marketing budget, or engage prospects online, Webmarketing123 can help you discover proven solutions that are right for your business and your performance goals. CONNECT WITH US Webmarketing123.com Twitter.com/webmarketing123 Facebook.com/webmarketing123 Linkedin.com/webmarketing123