SEO Website Review
Here at Online Business Creators, we like to make SEO-friendly websites, but sometimes our clients already have a fairly effective website. When this is the case, the first things we do is conduct an SEO audit along with an initial Keyword Rankings report. Then, we break down our audit into four main components:
- On-Site
- Off-Site
- Technical
- Social
On-Site
The on-site component refers to the site-wide SEO practices, and on-page refers to page specific SEO. We look at the website as a whole – Does the URL have relevant keywords? Are the permalinks structured properly? Is the website using sub-domains? Then, we look the all the major site-wide details to see if any changes are necessary. We identify duplicate content; keyword cannibalism; and html markup including, but not limited to, title tags, meta descriptions, alt text, body tags, geo tags, meta data, and image file names. We look at the internal linking structure and site architecture, and then ask the following questions: Are the links all working properly? Do they have the correct anchor text? Are any of the links no-followed? Should they be?
Off-Site
While not every aspect of the off-site audit is technically off-site, much of the audit revolves around off-page components. First, we examine the back-link profile – What other websites are linking to the site? Are the inbound links helping or hurting? Who is linking to the competition? What websites should and could be linking to the site? Is there a current linking strategy? What is it? Are there any business partners? After asking the above, we check the inbound link profile to make sure the site is not the victim of black hat link building. Up to about a year ago, having links from particular linking companies and directories would have been a good thing, but now search engines are cracking down and websites must take a proactive approach to sever bad links or potentially face penalties.
Technical Sitemap.xml Spider
Some aspects are of SEO are highly technical, and a website owner must take specific actions or else a website won’t appear at the top in search result rankings. We audit all of the technical components to make sure that a website is optimized for search. We also look to see if a site has examples of keyword stuffing, hidden or invisible text, and double check to assess whether any cloaking methods are employed. Some websites we work with have hired SEO companies in the past, and these companies have used shady practices to help boost rankings temporarily. While these tactics may have worked up to even last year, search engines are constantly evolving, and today these tactics may be hurting a website rather than helping it. We identify these technical problems and work to fix them.
We crawl a website in the same way that a search engine does to identify any problems. We fix these problems and then setup Webmaster tools and Google Analytics to monitor the site. We also submit a Sitemap.xml and set up regular scheduled submissions so search engines will know to crawl the site frequently.
Social
Once a website is set up it must connect and interact with people. The best way to foster website interaction is through Social Media. We audit your social media – Are you using Facebook? How? Can a visitor “Like,” “Follow,” and “Share” every page? Every post? Can you monitor the traffic coming in from each social media channel? When are you sharing posts? When are you tweeting? What are you sharing? How many followers do you have? Does it matter? What percent of followers become customers or clients? Who is running your social campaigns? Do you have a social campaign? Is it a local business? Is the website optimized for local search?
Action Plan
Once the audit is complete, we present our audit findings with suggested action steps. This report gives the online business owner a grade for each of the four components, and outlines a strategy for each component’s optimization.
