Company X SEO Review. April 2014

Transcription

1 Company X SEO Review April 2014

2 Introduction The following SEO marketing review provides a top-line overview of your current position online, as it relates to natural search rankings, and highlights areas in which pro-active online marketing could be adopted to develop your presence. The report is broken down into: Search positions current rankings for your most important phrases Visibility highlighting how much presence you currently have based on keywords ranking in the top 100 Website profiling a technical review of your website Page load speed and responsive check increasingly important to Google s rankings is the time a page takes to load and whether the site is mobile responsive Website content a review of the content on your site Competitor analysis comparing your SEO metrics to competitors Social media audit As social becomes more & more important for SEO, we ve assessed your social footprint, reach & sentiment Link audit a review of your site s link profile

3 Search positions Keyword Phrase 1 Phrase 2 Phrase 3 Phrase 4 Phrase 5 Phrase 6 Phrase 7 Phrase 8 Phrase 9 Phrase 10 Ave. Monthly Searches 01/11/ /12/ /01/ /02/ /04/2014 Summary: Over the last 3 months, some of the terms have shown slight fluctuations, but the overall trend is downward. Of your top ten keywords, your page 1 listings have dropped from 6 to just one.

4 Search positions The tables below show rankings for some other relevant terms Short tail high volume Long tail low volume Summary: For the shorter tail phrases (ie more commonly searched for), you re struggling across the board to rank for these high potential phrases. You do perform better for the longer tail phrases, however from a search volume point of view these offer limited potential for you.

5 Visibility This graph shows the number of phrases that you can be found for in Google s index (snapshot taken in April 2014): Summary: as can be noted from February onwards, when the new site was launched, your visibility has dropped considerably. At the backend of last year you were enjoying some excellent presence but the sudden drop is usually due to a change of website. Your presence has started to creep up but looking at the trend it s not increasing instead levelling out. This is a significant issue.

6 Visibility The graph below shows the volume of people being generated by organic traffic (blue line).! Summary: You have the natural fluctuations in May & January (to be expected in your sector). Whilst the January peak in 2014 was significantly better than 2013, Feb & March were lower than the same period last year which correlates with the drop in visibility in Feb.

7 Website profiling The technical health of your website plays a major factor in how search engines assess your suitability for key phrases. Currently we understand it accounts for anything up to 40% of what a search engine factors when assessing where your website should be positioned in search results. The snippets on the next few slides show some issues that need to be addressed (as of April 2014). The red cross symbol indicates major issues which are likely to be adversely affecting your rankings these need fixing ASAP. The yellow exclamation symbol indicates less urgent issues which, if fixed could help further improve rankings. The green tick symbol indicates that best practice is being followed and no remedial action is required.

8 Website profiling visibility issues

9 Website profiling meta tag issues

10 Website profiling content issues

11 Website profiling internal link issues

12 Website profiling image issues

13 Website profiling semantic issues

14 Website profiling security issues 3 security issues were identified which need fixing:!

15 Website profiling summary Summary: There are some pretty major issues across the board, however simple (but time consuming) to repair. We need to address these on-site issues as they re ultimately the easiest things to control, get right and to ensure Google gets the correct information from the site which ultimately defines how far up the rankings Google places your site. Of note are the duplicate & too short/long meta tags, missing image alt tags, broken links and security issues. The whole meta structure of the site needs reviewing to ensure that not only are the issues fixed, but that the phrases used match your target phrases to improve rankings for those phrases.

16 Load speed analysis - mobile Summary: Your current site load speed for mobile is ok, but not great, ideally you need to be upwards of 75+ plus. Unusually we see you have gone for a single template dedicated mobile site instead of a responsive one. This will not help from a search point of view Google is putting more emphasis on sites that adapt for mobile browsers. It is possible to make the site mobile responsive (to discuss).

17 Load speed analysis - desktop Summary: More concerning than the mobile speed test is your desktop site has a low score of 52/100 for speed. We ve carried out some further investigation and identified some issues, detailed on the next few slides.

18 Load speed analysis - issues We found these two issues which are affecting the load speed:!

19 Load speed analysis - issues Beyond looking at the speed of the site we have tested some technical aspects to highlight areas that could be improved:!

20 Responsive check As Google puts more emphasis on the usability of websites and as mobile internet usage is set to overtake desktop in 2014, having a mobile responsive website is more important than ever. Here is what your site looks like on a smart phone: Having a website that responds to the size of the screen it is being viewed on can help with SEO, but more importantly research suggests that consumers are increasingly ignoring companies whose sites don t work on mobile devices. Summary: as you can see, your site doesn t respond to the screen size, so it is shrunk to fit. This makes the text difficult to read and the links difficult to click. However, it is possible to fix this and convert your site to be mobile responsive.

21 Website content We have carried out an initial review of your on-site content to understand how much information the search engines have to understand more about you and to serve your site for search results. In carrying out the assessment we have looked at: Content strategy XML sitemap Google site check (to show how many pages have been indexed in Google) HTML site map Technical content assessment On-site keyword insights

22 Website content content strategy Search engines continue to place a significant emphasis on the quality, quantity, relevancy and freshness of content on the site. In many cases, websites are launched and no new content is added for months. A good content strategy will keep your site dynamic and encourage search engines to keep indexing regularly. To continue improving rankings, a blog could be introduced to the site where you could post all kinds of relevant and interesting content (approximately 300 words per article). Looking at some of your competitors sites which rank better than yours, their blogs are certainly helping with their SEO.

23 Website content XML sitemap Summary: we have noted you re using SEO Yoast s plug in and their organised XML sitemap structure which is excellent. However you re submitting slider, categories and resumes, these are not advised from an SEO perspective (they can be switched off within the plugin). Overall we noted over 400+ pages being submitted. Further extensions could be added for your different office locations (Leeds, Manchester, London).

24 Website content Google site check Summary: Google has indexed over 3k of results of content for your site, which is excellent. However when we have investigated these pages further there are a number of pages being submitted with the query string?, so the figure of 3k is perhaps inflated and could be causing you issues with duplicate content. The image on the right shows a results for a query string page:

25 Website content HTML sitemap The HTML site map (in the page footer) helps both the user journey (making pages easy to access) and from an SEO perspective. Summary: we noted the html sitemap featured on secondary pages have a html sitemap. Ideally this needs to be carried on the home page as well.

26 Website content technical content assessment Summary: as is true with a lot of websites these days the code to text ratio is poor, ideally you need to add more content on individual pages throughout (300 words+). The other elements are minor but if resolved could help.!

27 Website content on-site keyword insights Summary: understanding the keywords you re trying to target the most common keywords throughout the site shows that there is no specific targeting to the phrases highlighted, however they are relevant to the services you offer. In order to improve rankings for your most important terms, these phrases need to be used more throughout the site.

28 Competitor analysis website health check Based on our understanding we have aligned your website with some like for like competitors. The metrics shown are for your websites equity and link metrics. These figures help us understand how you perform and the requirement to help you rank better for terms: Summary: as can be seen your website has the smallest equity across the board. We understand Company Y is a larger website overall and will always dominate search results, however more like for like competitors like Company Z are clearly being more proactive in the search space.

29 Social media audit Playing a major role in search engine optimisation, social media is now a recognised metric for Google s assessment of a website. With such an importance we now integrate traditional search engine optimisation and social leveraging to not only develop presence but opinion. An overview of your shares and likes is shown below alongside the competitors already outlined: Summary: all of your competitors are more pro-active in the social space. Taking into account the nature of your services social can play a massive role in seeking new candidates and increasing the brand reach of your website, looking at these stats there is a real need to adopt a pro-active, planned social campaign. A key area to focus on will Google+, any area that has been neglected but is of key importance.

30 Social media audit Beyond the social shares/likes, we have looked at social from your website perspective: Summary: the site has limited social interaction tools, we understand from the point of a view a candidate might not want to share jobs, however there are other aspects of your site that could/should be shared e.g. content/brand elements.!

31 Link audit link profile A key factor in search engines assessment of your site, links continue to play a major role in your positioning for search results. Summary: your link profile is ok, this means it s not going to deliver your first page results, neither is it going to stop your from ranking it s just pretty average. Positives are you don t have any poor quality links, instead you do have a natural looking profile. The ratio between link volume and IP s is pretty poor, you need to increase your spread across multiple sites. Social media should be used to leverage this naturally.

32 Link audit trust & relevancy These two graphs show the overall quality of your links. Trust flow is how trust worthy the links are and Citation flow where the links are placed (which shows relevancy). Summary: Breaking these down the link trust is poor, however the relevancy is ok. As touched upon your link profile is not ideal, but isn t hindering your ability to rank.

33 Link audit back links Summary: You have a high dependency on text based links, which in essence is not bad, but Google likes to see a natural spread which is a mixture of all types of links. It s good to see most are live and can be followed.!

34 Link audit geographic link placement! Summary: The placement of the links is predominately in the UK and Europe, this will be helping your rankings in the UK.

35 Link audit anchor text Anchor text refers to the actual words in the back link these give search engines clues on what your site is about and therefore what to rank it for. The more relevant the anchor text, the more likely they will help your rankings, but there needs to be a balance of brand and generic phrases too. Summary: there is a strong bias to your brand in your anchor text (link placement), ideally to help balance the profile and provide more of a steer to Google you should include some service related phrases and generic terms (e.g. click here).

36 Summary Overall rankings have dropped year on year, but more worrying is the drop in search engine visibility since the new site launched. This would suggest that there was not a thorough SEO migration plan when the new site launched. To get the visibility back up and improve the rankings, all the items in this report with a red cross symbol will need to be fixed in the short term. In the medium term, an SEO strategy needs to be developed to incorporate some of the newer & increasingly important factors, including social media, mobile responsiveness, content strategy & link strategy. In the longer term, the strategy needs to deployed on a regular basis, as well as keeping up to date with the constantly shift SEO landscape and ensuring your SEO strategy continues to be up to date.

37 Next steps We will provide you with a quote to fix the most urgent issues. We will also discuss the possibility of IOL Marketing taking on your SEO work longer term to develop the strategy and deploy it, ensuring your site s rankings improve and continue to improve longer term. We will also discuss the options for making your site mobile responsive. Any questions, please don t hesitate to give us a call. Sam Crowther Managing Director IOL Marketing T: M: W: