SEO Technical Audit & On-Site Updates

 

On-Site Optimization for SEO builds the right foundation for your website and business for the long-term. We start by auditing and strategically optimizing your website’s pages, content, site architecture, and more to align with search queries. We then focus on earning high-quality, authoritative, and trustworthy backlinks to your website to help you rank higher, since this is the most heavily-weighted ranking factor in Google’s algorithm.

 

Our Comprehensive, Proprietary Process

  1. Keyword Collection
    • We typically collect anywhere from 1,000 to 6,000 keywords, depending on your niche
    • We collect keywords from 8-12 different sources including:
      • your competitors
      • 3rd party data tools
      • your own data in Search Console/Google Analytics
      • checking against our own ideas
      • mashing up word combinations
      • suggestions and recommendations from Google
  2. Keyword Analysis
    • We use our own formula to discover the most commonly recurring terms and phrases within your keyword list
  3. Hotwords Analysis
    • Our secret sauce to identify the right terms and synonyms for your business
    • This stage helps us to identify high-intent keywords and hear your feedback about what topics are most important to you
    • We also choose negative keywords in this stage
  4. Keyword Grouping (Clustering)
    • The full list of keywords discovered are broken down into their own separate groups.
    • Our most intensive and time-consuming stage
    • Through this process we are able to effectively optimize one page to dozens of keywords
  5. Keyword Mapping
    • We decide on which pages should correlate with which kewords
    • We identify new pages that should be created for keyword groups that aren’t mapped yet

Our Workflow

  1. Identify who we are targeting, why, what we are offering them, and what action we want them to take.
  2. Collect keyword data from multiple sources:
    1. Import previous keyword research.
    2. Import keywords from Google Analytics/Webmaster Tools.
    3. “Get Ideas” from Google Keyword Planner from landing page.
    4. Check and import the keywords that your site is already ranking for
    5. Check and import keywords that 3-6 competitors are already ranking for.
    6. “Get Ideas” from competitors’ landing pages in Google Keyword Planner.
    7. Check competitors’ meta keywords.
    8. Manually brainstorm a list of ideas and use Google Keyword Planner to “Get Ideas”.
    9. Get keyword suggestions from Ahrefs, SEMrush, and more.
    10. “Get Ideas” from a list of services available from the website.
    11. Manually create a “mashup” of keyword combinations/permutations.
  3. Combine all data into one master list and remove duplicates.
  4. Clean and filter for brand name and irrelevant queries.
  5. Decide on and remove negative keywords.
  6. Import corresponding keyword volume data.
  7. Run a word frequency calculation and consider the most important keywords accounting for synonyms, word variations, and word phrases.
  8. Analyze word occurrence in every keyword.
  9. Score keyword relevance, user intent, and qualification.
  10. Measure the trade-offs of high conversions on low search volumes vs low conversions on high search volumes.
  11. Analyze and organize the keywords and break them up into groups based on similarity, synonyms, intent.
  12. Perform keyword mapping to relevant webpages.

Site Audit

We audit for over 30 technical factors

  1. robots.txt file
  2. sitemap accessibility
  3. crawl errors
  4. 404 errors
  5. broken links
  6. spammy backlinks to disavow
  7. pages indexed by Google
  8. 301/302 redirects
  9. page load speed
  10. meta descriptions present, length, etc.
  11. title tags length present, length, etc.
  12. backlink profile
  13. referring domains
  14. other versions of the domain properly redirecting
  15. mobile-friendly
  16. manual actions (penalties) in Google Webmaster Tools

Audit the following 31 factors:

  1. Google algorithm update penalties
  2. anchor text variation
  3. duplicate content issues
  4. country targeting properly set up
  5. image alt text available
  6. URL structures
  7. rel-canonical link tag properly implemented
  8. meta keywords not present
  9. HTML markup
  10. keyword cannibalization
  11. privacy policy page
  12. ratio of follow to nofollow backlinks
  13. physical address listed and “real company” aspects
  14. ranking for the site’s own brand name
  15. social media pages available

On-Page Optimization

  • Yoast plugin is properly installed
  • Word frequency count for proper keyword grouping
  • Proper frequency and placement of primary keyword and long-tail keywords per page
  • Suggestions for keywords to naturally include (and number of times) in:
    • page titles
    • header titles
    • body text/content
    • URL slugs
    • meta descriptions
  • Internal backlinking

Content Creation Planning

  • Assess and analyze content for most important pages
    • current status of pre-existing content
    • high-quality, well-written, comprehensive, long-form, helpful
  • Site structure and siloing to categorical pages
  • Short-term blog content vs evergreen content
  • Suggestions for specific content to be created or expanded upon

Strategy

  • What are your biggest opportunities to acquire the highest converting traffic?
  • What are your biggest opportunities to acquire the greatest volume of traffic?
  • Are there any backlinking SEO opportunities that are a natural part of your business?
  • Which keyword groups and topics are the highest priority to focus on?
  • What external backlinking campaign is the most suitable for you?
  • What stategy will give you the highest ROI?
  • What strategy will be the most effective for you to reach your goals?
  • Who will help amplify our message and why?
  • What is our process for turning visitors from search into paying customers?

Additional Analysis

  • Analysis of competitors
    • find competitor backlinks and content and assess why they are ranking higher
    • discover opportunities to earn similar backlinks and create better content than them
  • Google Analytics
    • set up conversion rate tracking if it’s not already set up to
    • track conversion rates and the most important pages

What’s Included?

How Long Does it Take?

Because it is so thorough, it typically takes around 3 weeks to complete the on-site SEO process.

What Is Included?

This phase is primarily comprised of what you see on this page, which focuses on: keyword research, on-page optimization, content planning, a technical site audit, and strategy. We limit on-page optimization to an initial 5 pages. If you would like to optimize more than 5 pages, it is recommended that you make a custom request.

What Happens After It’s Completed?

This phase ends with a final comprehensive report with actionable items that are prioritized for easy execution.  When you receive the report, we walk you through it every step of the way with a screenshare.  We don’t stop there.  Taking the time to answer all of your questions, we help to educate you on any complex or technical issues and explain in a conversational way what we’ve found and the best course of action.

You are provided with a clear roadmap of what needs to be done in order to fully optimize your website to rank higher for actual keywords that people are searching for.  You get a high-level picture, as well as all of the nitty gritty details.  You receive multiple files that detail everything you need to know.