The first step in any SEO project is auditing the existing site. We need to understand how the search engines view your site, if there are any technical issue preventing them from crawling and indexing the content properly and it’s important to learn how existing visitors find your content. For sites with no web analytics package, this is a critical time to implement tracking to start this learning process.
What is the purpose of this website?
It’s a question that many businesses struggle to answer. This is the first step in auditing a site and must be answered to provide a baseline direction for the SEO process. Most sites today are selling a product or service. Some company websites can be strictly informational, but there’s always a desired result like a phone contact.
Traffic History
Web analytics history is a great starting point for a site audit. An SEO consultant can learn what search behaviors current customers use to find your site and leverage this information in the site targeting task during optimization. Analytics provides a wealth of information on existing inbound marketing channels. The key to your analytics implementation is tracking the Action that you identify in answering the “What is the purpose of my site” question. Google offers a free analytics service which eliminates the financial hurdle of tracking visitors to your site.
Link Profile
Analyzing a sites link profile is vital in learning just how authoritative a site is and how much link building needs to be performed. A link from another website to your content is seen as a vote-of-confidence for your website. The more links you have from credible sites, the higher online authority your site gains. It’s the combination link quality, link quantity and content relevance that makes up the majority of a search engine’s ranking algorithm. Google has over 200 ranking factors, but these two are paramount.
Technical
Just as analytics provides a window into your current and historic site traffic, Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools provide highly valuable information on the health of your site. There are many technical issues that prevent search engine spiders from crawling and indexing a website. Using webmaster tools and a host of other tools our SEO consultants can diagnose these potential issues and make recommendations for site changes that can result in dramatic improvements to search engine rankings.
Site audits are a laborious process but we provide a comprehensive report and project plan to help you understand where your site is today and what the potential is in the future. Contact us with your site details and we’ll get started on your audit report.
