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Our SEO Audit Process

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

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.

SEO Audit Phase 1: Site Crawlability

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

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.

SEO Audit Phase 3: Penalty Evaluation

Since April of 2012, Google has taken a strong stance against over-optimization through content and through link building. It is crucial that we know all previous SEO related work done on your website to ensure that we put in place a plan to recover. We use many different tools that analyze downturn in rankings and traffic during periods that algorithm changes occurred. We can determine what caused your penalty by this evaluation and set forth a plan to recover.