SEO Audits
Performing a technical SEO audit is a crucial exercise prior to an SEO campaign. This exercise determines what technical issues to be resolved and where to improve with on page and off page SEO.
SEO Audit Process & Implementation
A technical SEO Audit is crucial to your SEO success.
Integrated IT Solutions provides an SEO audit process that goes over all aspects of your website in order to be able to rank well for highly competitive phrases. Our goal is to ensure that your website is structurally sound, has no penalties and is setup for ongoing success.
SEO Audit Overview
70-80% of users ignore the paid ads, focusing on the organic results in search results
WHY ARE SEO AUDITS IMPORTANT?
Integrated IT Solutions has a proven SEO Audit that is crucial to increasing your site's rankings. Your site may not be ranking well for the appropriate phrases for many different reasons, but before you and start ongoing work and outreach, you need to define areas of fault and fix them immediately. Our audit process is below.
In any ongoing SEO campaign, we provide an SEO audit in the initial phase. The SEO audit is crucial to the success of any SEO campaign. Without performing an audit, we will not be able to make the necessary on-page changes, put in place the proper strategy and discover if your site has had any manual penalties or decreases in rankings due to major algorithm changes. The purpose of the SEO audit is to discover all problem areas of the website from a technical perspective. In addition to all of the on-page changes and recommendations, we perform competitive analysis to get a full understanding of your competitive landscape.
SEO Audit Phase 1: Site Crawlability
Ensure your site is being indexed, and indexed properly.
Crawl before you walk
As rudimentary as it sound, ensuring that your site is being properly indexed is vital to your rankings and is often be overlooked. In the early stage of the SEO audit, we run crawl tests to see if there are pages not being indexed or have any crawl issues. Below is a list of deliverables for this phase.
1. Robots.txt Analysis
The robots.txt file indicates to Google and other search engines what they are allowed to index. In many cases, companies do not want certain pages to be found online, so they direct Google through robots.txt file what to exclude or induce. In the audit, we pull your robots.txt file and determine where you have decided the search engines should or should not index your site.
2. Screaming Frog SEO Spider Crawl
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is software that crawls your website and distributes the SEO elements in a spreadsheet. In the initial phase we use this tool to verify crawl status and ensure that there are not crawlability errors, if so we indicate them in the spreadsheet and implement the appropriate fixes.
3. Moz Site Crawl
Similar to Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Moz provides a crawl test that provides similar results. We use two sources for the crawlability to confirm that we are using the correct data. Moz Site Crawl provides a spreadsheet with all the key SEO elements organize to assist in the on page changes.
4. XML Sitemap Analysis
The XML sitemap is a list of all the pages on your website. Your website needs to have an XML sitemap and you should have this sitemap in your Google Webmaster Tools settings. In the audit, we determine if your website has an XML sitemap and determine the frequency it is generated and submitted to Google and other search engines. Your sitemap needs to have a full index of your website and be properly sent to Google and other search engines weekly. If a sitemap is not present, we create one that automatically is sent weekly.
5. Google Webmaster Tools Analysis
Google Webmaster Tools is an inside look at how Google perceives your website. This toolset, created by Google, allows webmasters and SEOs to make adjustments based on the data they see. Google Webmaster Tools will provide warnings if your site has any issues and is a great way to monitor the site from an SEO perspective. Not all sites have a Google Webmaster Tools account setup, so we often start from the beginning. In the audit process, we make sure that all of the settings are properly setup. We also pull many reports to evaluate in future phases of the audit.
SEO Audit Phase 2: Keyword Research
It is crucial to choose the right keywords based on competition, search volume and relevance.
Keyword Study Overview
Keyword Research needs to be performed prior to any changes made on the website. Determining the keyword set requires a lot of information from the client. In the kickoff meeting, we provide a questionnaire that covers demographic, business priorities and other business rules that establish what keywords phrases we need to target and in priority.
1. Current & Competitor Keywords
We provide a list of current keyword phrases that are on the website as a baseline and to understand the business in more detail. This list is used only as a starting point and does not steer the direction of the research.
We use software, such as SpyFu, that allows us to see what keyword phrases your competition is going after organically and through marketing efforts in paid search campaigns. We pull many lists from these competitors and run search volume and competition level reports.
2. Manual Keyword Research
This process is important because we know that different people and minds will type in different phrases to get to the same subject matter. At Integrated IT Solutions, we use many different perspectives in our research and develop a list manually. We use the “What would my grandma call this product?” test and others like it to make sure we have all users perspectives included.
3. Compile & Organize
Once all of the lists have been created, we compile them and organize by subject matter. Reports are then run to determine monthly search volume and competition level. Once we have the data we scrub through the list and determine the phrases to go after based on the competition level and search volume. The reason why this is so important is because based on your current site metrics, such as Domain Authority and Page Level Authority, your site may not be able to rank for highly competitive phrases immediately, so we have to phase it out in what to target initially so you can see and ROI as early as possible. This does not mean that we ignore high competition phrases, it just means that we develop your plan based on the entire situation and focus efforts on real results.
