The 10 Step SEO Audit 10 Steps to SEO Success

Francis Skipper Executive Vice President

617-259-1605

francis@451marketing.com

linkedin.com/in/francisskipper

@fskip

www.451Marketing.com

National Public Relations, Social Media, and Search Marketing Agency Founded in 2004

Headquartered in Boston and representing Los Angeles, New York, San Diego, and Las Vegas

Recognized as a 2011, 2012, 2013 an award recognizing the fastest growing private companies headquartered in Massachusetts

About 451 Marketing

About 451 Marketing

What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of improving a website to make it more relevant to searchers and search engines.

AKA: • Natural search • Organic search

What SEO is NOT…

• Paid Search (but it’s also not free)

• Fast

• Guaranteed

• Fire & forget

Paid Results

Organic Results

Search Engine Results Page (SERP)

Search Query

search is how customers learn about your products

4,717,000,000 Per Day

Worldwide, 1,722,071,000,000 searches conducted on Google last year.

(Yes, that’s trillion)

(MarketShareHitsLink.com)

of users never scroll past the first page of search results

of searches from mobile by end of 2013

(SMX West 2013)

10 Steps to SEO Success

Visual Audit

Usability Audit

Content Audit

Technical Audit

Prepare

Before you get started, it’s important to prepare your browser to audit your site

• Know How To:

• Clear you Cache • Disable JavaScript • View Page Source

Prepare

Sign up/verify Google Analytics. Let GA run for two weeks before doing any SEO to determine a baseline

Visual

First Impressions

1. Visual Assessment - General

• First impression - will your website will be seen as reputable source?

• If visual appearance drives people away, no amount of SEO will help • Google looks at bounce rate from organic clicks for rankings

1. Visual Assessment - Flash

Is the bulk of your site in flash? If so, your site isn’t friendly to search engines. Also, may deter users.

• View site in Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari.

• Remember to do this on Mac and PC

• View site on mobile phone (iPhone and android )

1. Visual Assessment - Browser

Usability

Removing Roadblocks

2. Site Navigation/Information Architecture

• As few clicks as possible for user to get to content • The easier it is for users to get around your site,

the easier it is for search engines • Google loves a clear path from home page to product

2. Category/Subcategory Pages • Make sure there is

enough content on these pages to be useful as a search result alone

• Analyze the amount of extraneous links on the page

• Take notes on how to improve the anchor text used for the subcategories/content pages

3. Responsive Design?

4. Loading Speed

http://loads.in/

4. Loading Speed

http://tools.pingdom.com

Content

Relevant Content and Context

5. Keywords What are the top keywords for your site?

5. Keywords Does the copy on your site reflect the keywords you want to rank for?

Optimized Titles and Headings These are the strongest on-page indicators to the crawlers of what your content is about.

Title Tag

Heading (H1 Tag)

6. HTML Tags

View Source

Right click web page and select view source Primary objectives should be accomplished from the homepage

6. HTML Tags

Title Tag

Title tag is main text that describes an online document. It is the single most important on-page SEO element (behind overall content) and appears in three key places

I. Browser II. SERP III. External Websites

(esp. social media sites)

6. HTML Tags

Title Tag

Optimal Format Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name or Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keyword

Best Practices Less than 70 characters, as this is the limit Google displays in search results

6. HTML Tags

Meta Description

Meta Descriptions, provide concise explanations of the contents of web pages. They are used by search engines on search result pages to display preview snippets for a given page

6. HTML Tags

Meta Description and Tags

The meta description should employ the keywords and create compelling description that a searcher will want to click Direct relevance to the page and uniqueness between each page’s meta description is key Best to keep meta descriptions between 150-160 characters

6. HTML Tags

H1 Tag

At a minimum, make sure that your primary keyword or phrase for the page is enclosed in an H1 tag

6. HTML Tags

Meta Keywords

The meta tags are the main keywords for the page

6. HTML Tags

Search Friendly URLs http://www.451marketing.com/services/search-marketing/

7. URLs

Optimized URL

Short, descriptive urls are optimal.

It is very important the url for your webpage contains your keyword phrase and is no longer than 100 characters.

7. URLs

Search UN-Friendly URLs

7. URLs

SEO Friendly URL - Solutions • Wordpress: Turn on “pretty permalinks”

• Drupal: Install URL alias plugin

• Magento: Install SEO Links

• LAMP/WAMP: use .htaccess and mod rewrite*

• IIS 7.0: URL Rewrite extension*

*Get your developer to do it

7. URLs

Address and phone number on every page as text

Company Name Street Address City, State Zip 555-555-5555

8. Contextual Content

Up-to-date copyright

8. Contextual Content

Technical

Is Your Site Technically Sound?

9. Indexing

Use the “site:” command on Google, Bing, & Yahoo. If site is not indexed, need to find what is preventing search engines from crawling.

Are you indexing?

Robots.txt What is Robots.txt? The robots exclusion protocol (REP), or robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to instruct robots (typically search engine robots) on how to crawl & index pages on their website.

http://www.451marketing.com/robots.txt

9. Indexing

Robots.txt

Best way to insure blocking by spiders? <meta name="robots" content="noindex">

Block all spiders and bots: User-agent: * Disallow: /

Block a specific spider from a folder: User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /uploads/

9. Indexing

Public and XML Site Maps

9. Indexing

10. Troubleshoot

10. Troubleshoot

Visual Audit

Usability Audit

Content Audit

Technical Audit

1. Visual assessment and browser compatibility

2. Site navigation 3. Responsive design 4. Loading speed 5. Keywords 6. HTML tags 7. URLs 8. Local content 9. Indexing 10. Webmaster tools and server

logs

Takeaways:

Questions?

The 10 Step SEO Audit The 10 Step SEO Audit