Search Engine Optimization

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.

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.

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.

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.

Screaming Frog Analysis

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 crawl ability errors, if so we indicate them in the spreadsheet and implement the appropriate fixes.

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.

Search Console Analysis

Search Console is an inside look at how Google perceives your website. This tool set, created by Google, allows webmasters and SEOs to make adjustments based on the data they see. Google Search Console will provide warnings if your site has any issues and is a great way to monitor the site from an SEO perspective.

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.

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.

We provide on page optimization services that are executed through immense research and competition. We focus on keyword sets that will drive qualified traffic. We do not focus on driving traffic that will not be valuable or be potential clients or customers. This means that we focus on your business and understand what you do on a granular level so that we can optimize your site in ways that no one else can. Your on page factors will not get you to #1 on Google alone, but along with a well executed content marketing campaign, your on page optimization and markup will be a differentiator from your competition.

Google and Bing follow the same top-down approach to evaluating the relevancy and focus area of a page on your website. We analyze the content and develop an implementation plan that is logical, keyword dense and most importantly properly executed so that your content and on page optimization doesn’t get in the way of selling and getting a user to understand your products or services.

All of the key elements that Google and Bing take into consideration need to be consistent. You need to let Google know that the page is about, if they cannot understand it from how your page is structured, or if you are trying to accomplish too much with one page, they will see your page as diluted and hurt your rankings.

Google and Bing ultimately want the user to have a great user experience, and the days of keyword stuffing and over-optimizing have come and gone. Your content needs to be engaging, informative and resourceful. We take your existing content and work closely with you to improve your content and increase engagement on the website. If your users are not engaged and leave your site, your bounce rate and other site measurements hurt your rankings.

How your site is architected from a hierarchy makes a huge difference on how Google and Bing prioritize your content. Our approach to this is to have more flat hierarchy and not try and have too many levels. The deeper the levels of your site, the less impact they have on Google and Bing. What does this mean? This means that we don’t create folders and sub folders on your website and categorize your content in that way. We keep it flat, where we can and make sure that more pages have a higher impact on your rankings.

How your site is linked internally makes a difference. Google and Bing will prioritize your content depending on how many entry points (links) there are to that page from your own website. If you only have 1 point of entry for page A, compared to 5 points of entry for page B, Google sees that you are emphasizing page B much more because you are linking to it more.

We review your content and services for your website and prioritize them bases on business objectives. Some services drive more revenue and profit than others, so we need to link internally to those pages more to tell Google and Bing that the content on that page is a higher priority.

Whether you are a small business or a large corporation, your marketing team needs to understand the core of SEO in order to properly optimize their content and capitalize on their outreach efforts. For consulting, our team participates in a discovery period with your business. We take the time to understand what current marketing efforts are taking place so that we can put together the most appropriate plan based on personal and skill-sets.

We get to know the business objectives, personnel and many other nuances about your business. This is imperative for putting together a plan for the marketing team. We never want to come into an environment without any knowledge of what is currently being done and start throwing around recommendations without proper analysis.

A more educated client, the healthier the relationship. As SEO consultants, it is our job to educate our clients on best practices and our methodology. We hold no trade secrets and never hold anything back from clients. We train our clients on fundamental SEO, content marketing and paid search management.

We put together a proceed plan based on the discovery phase. This plan is compiled based on an audit in the discovery, current efforts and new efforts that will not only drive traffic, but increase rankings. This plan allows our clients to have a guide and have assistance while implementing these efforts while not having to rely on our SEO team to implement all tasks and utilize their internal staff.

With the new skill-set that your marketing team has learned, they can begin to implement their new strategy in addition to their current efforts. We will manage the team and make sure that the business gets the most value out of the plan. We also dedicate time for assistance and tasks that the team may be too busy for, or not feel confident in just yet.