SEO Process

Before we get into the nuts and bolts of the site audit and the Search Optimisation itself, it's very important to get some background on the business and the market. The client would normally brief us on the market and the business. We would establish who the main “off line” competitors are and get to grips with some of the dynamics of the business and the market.

But there are markets where there are very specific terms used: used by the businesses in the industry and, after a while, used by people who have researched the industry in order to get some product details on the way to perhaps making a purchase.

We use these discussions to get a 'first pass' on the keyword-research and to benchmark the sites against these industry specific terms.

We would also to see if there is a "local search element" i.e. is the business being searched for using geographic search terms and if so to what extent. There are plenty of strategies simply for the local search phase of the process.

Finally we would look to any emerging trends, innovations and new products. It’s important that if there are new trends and developments you want to ensure that that terminology is embedded into your site.

In looking at a site with the site analysis or site audit hat on there are a number of areas that you would want to concentrate on. Below are listed some of the areas that should be analyised.

Crawling and indexing: How many pages have been indexed and how many pages are there on the site. Is there a gap (there can be small gaps at times)?  Is there a big difference between the indexed and actual pages and why? Using an online crawler (or offline) like seo-browser will show you how your page appears to a search engine – which will be very different to how it’s rendered in a browser. See blog article of a real life example of this difference.

Search engine Ranking: What is the current status of your site in the various search engines? Where does it rank (if at all). It’s a fairly straightforward exercise and just has to be run off against some of the chosen keywords for benchmarking purposes.

URL Structure: The URL's on your site are important not only for the spider visitors, but also for humans. A URL that can be "read" is infinitely better than one that’s generated by a content management system without any instructions to alter that URL. Keywords in your URL may give you a bit of a boost in the search results.

Site Structure: Similar to your URL structure you should try and make your site navigation as simple as possible. By site navigation we mean how easy is it to get from, say, the home page to your checkout page. During that excursion, is it easy to tell where exactly you are and is it easy to navigate forward and backward.  This planning really should be done when the site is being designed as it’s easier to execute at that point than after. It’s still very possible to restructure a site after it’s been in the wild but it means using redirects etc which can be problematic.

Code: Although small code problems are not exactly a deal breaker but if a search engine comes across bad or poorly formed code it may abandon the page altogether. Its best to run your code through a code validator just to make sure that it's all above board.

Page Speed: This is a big issue currently and according to Google's representative on earth, Matt Cutts, page speed will be one of 200+ factors used in calculating page rank. The best approach to this is to either check your speed online. I like Pingdom Tools as it keeps a record of a sites performance so you can see how your efforts are being rewarded. There is plenty/a fair amount you can do to improve your pages speed. Look at the code and especially your images as they are the low hanging fruit. You can ensure that large files loaded at the early part of the page load are actually needed at that point (like css or js files) and that if they are needed should some of them be compressed (like a GZIP compression of some of the css files if your server allows it)

 Page Title and Descriptions: Page titles and descriptions in a lot of search results inform human visitors what the page they could potentially click on is actually about - and are worth a big effort. There is more information on this particular topic here

Keyword Analysis We've looked at it here is some detail. Essentially it’s a root and branch analysis of the site looking at it from a keyword point of view 

Sitemaps: There should be two types of sitemap a sitemap for the human element and another for the spiders. The latter is a xml file which you can build on line for free. Put the xml file in the root directory of the site and then make sure that in Google Webmaster Tools you submit that file to Google. Just be careful that the URL’s you use in that file are exactly the same as you use on site otherwise there may be an issue with duplicate content.

404's: You can use many applications like xenulink to make sure that all the links on your site lead somewhere.  You will also get a steer in GWT if some of your URL's lead to a dead end. A lot of CRM systems have inbuilt 404 pages where, if a page does not exist, it throws up a simple 404 notification. This normally stops all spiders in their tracks as there is no way forward. It's best to make a 404 page yourself, one that gives the uses some options if they reach a dead link. Many custom 404 pages have site search options etc, its something not only for the spiders to keep plugging away, but for the end users as well.

Robots.txt: This is a small file that points and guides spiders as to what they can index and what they should keep away from.

It’s getting down to the nitty-gritty where we start looking at the competition and their web offerings. In this we will be making direct comparison with the client site to the better performing sites. At times these comparisons are not for the easily offended.  But you have to understand that by beginning this SEO process you've identified that you need to improve your own site.

The very first item on the agenda is to identify the competition. This can be through the initial analysis in part one combined with looking at the search engine rank report. We want to see which sites are ahead and, most importantly, make a judgement call as to why they are ranking ahead.

Rankings

Not only will we focus on the sites that rank ahead of you in the ‘organic’ listings, but we would also look at any of the relevant sites that are using PPC (Pay per Click) advertising on the search results.  These sites may be ranking below your site, but the mere fact that they are engaging in PPC does show some intent.

Keywords

In assessing the competition we would take into consideration what Keywords they are targeting in page titles, on page, in the description etc.  This part in itself can reveal your competitions hand very quickly (and yours as well it should be remembered).  Are they targeting specific industry standard keywords or is a site aiming for a particular niche? You soon get a good picture of what phrases your competitors treat as a priority.  We’d look at the Search Volumes for those keywords to see if there is a market there. Search volumes are no indicator of profitability.

Sometimes it’s futile to go after one or two ‘trophy keywords’ where it would be easier and sometimes more profitable to optimise for “long tail” expressions. If they are aiming for keywords that you are not, there’s obviously a question to be answered. Are the keywords profitable and how well are the other sites ranking for these words?

Indexed Pages

How many pages has each site indexed in the search engines? If we find that the competition has substantially more pages it would beg the question as to why that is the case. We’d have to look and see where your site is falling down in that respect. It’s not a case of ‘who has more pages’ – but you’d have to be curious if the volumes were substantially different. (We will discuss volume vs quality content at a later point).

On Page Strategy

Their on-page “calls to actions” how visually effective are they. The site navigation: is it complex/easy/apparent?

Links

We look at their back links from a variety of angles. The total number of links, the rank of the pages linking to their sites, the anchor text, the overall quality of the sites linking to their sites. Are they getting into "link farms" or reciprocal links. Can your site utilise the websites they are using so we halve the share of voice on those pages?     

Social Media 

It’s here as well we can see the competitions use of social media. Do they tweet? Facebook, Bloggs, forums, involvement trade associations, conferences either attending or speaking. What about press releases and coverage in the media. All these will fall into the social media strategy. We'll get back to social media in another section. 

Constant review

This should not be a one off process. This should be conducted roughly every quarter so you can chart not only your own progress, but also the strategy of your competition.

Keyword Research is the next stage of the process. Having compiled a list of industry terms in our first pass and then seen, through the competitor analysis, which terms your closest competitors are aiming for, we are now beginning to build up a lexicon of words specific to a particular industry.

But while you will find certain keyword expressions being mentioned again and again, there is a trade off between the time, cost and effort it would take to rank on that specific phrase and the volume of business it would bring your way.

Obviously in certain markets there are trophy terms accepted by the industry as a whole to be key drivers. But the first thing to get to grips with is what words and phrases do potential customers use to look for a product or service. For an individual beginning to search for a product is always a learning process.

Initially searchers will begin using broad product search -"Mobile Phone" for example. But as they define their product preferences and begin to eliminate or adopt certain products, their search terms become way more focused. Further they begin to learn terms and rapidly narrow their search from product category, then to brands and then to specific products.

If you think that visitors are going to spell your company name or the product correctly, think again. Out of the 1006 keywords used only 37 managed to used “St. Patrick's” in the correct form with a period at the “St” and no sloppy apostrophes attached to the name – and certainly no abbreviations of the same.

Taking on board that people will search in different ways, you still have to have a list of primary phrases that you feel will act as strong drives. But these front line phrases will only deliver a certain amount of traffic and here we introduce the concept of the ‘long tail’.

Take again that week in March, the top 100 keyword phrases brought in just shy of 10% of the total visitors. The top 500 dragged in nearly 20% of the total traffic. As there were many thousands of keyword phrases used during the week, over 70% of the visits were spread across tens of thousand plus key phrases. The points to illustrate here:

• there are a few phrases that have good search volumes in any industry but they can be very difficult to rank for due to the sheer volume of competition
• whatever way you look at it, the majority of your traffic will come from other quarters - from the long tail.
• in order to capitalise on this you have to have a site with relevant content and enough content to cover many of the long tailed searches.

Keyword research is incredibly important and you have to spend a bit of time on it. Opting for a keyword(s) that are not a good fit for a page or that are low volume can be a disaster for a site.

On Page Optimisation is where all the information gathered in earlier parts of the process guide us as to how we should construct the actual pages. Each page should, ideally, act as a “landing page” so try and forget the notion that the "home page" is the one to be optimised.

It will be optimised but other pages should get the same treatment – but for different keywords. On one site I am familiar with the home page is the ‘most popular’ landing page in absolute terms. But of all the page visits only 3% land directly in the home page.

Some optimisation techniques will be dependent on what type of site you have. Having said that, all optimisation should include the following.

Title Tag: For keywords and geographic and other relevant information such as company name. On that, many companies optimise (unwittingly) for their company name in the title. All well and good if it’s a recognised brand and that name will be searched.  If it’s not, place more emphasis on the products/services that a person will be searching for.

If you want to see why using keywords in internal linking for images is important, do a Google image search for 'click here'. You'll see a good few 'click here' buttons, which is fine. But you'll also see a huge number of images that have been indexed under 'click here' and not under something that they actually are Click Here! It's such a waste of SEO property.   

One of the early parts of the SEO process, and of a site audit, is to establish where the site under scrutiny lies is the search rankings. Initially we would use the keywords we arrived at in the initial assessment of the site. Whilst these keywords are in no way the definitive list, they will serve as a benchmark for future work and this part also helps establish the deliverables for the project.

Depending on the sites ‘target’ market, the search can be conducted on any number of search engines at any one time. Once we do the initial search rank report this then allows us to see where exactly a site lies and what sites are ranking above it. More importantly, we can then track the site over time to see what improvements the optimisation is having on the sites rank. The report will also allow us to keep a track on how the competition is fairing on these keywords. We can see if there are any sudden jumps in a sites rank and investigate further.

The premise here is very simple: if you are not getting the traffic, then someone else is. The further back from the top spot the less traffic you are going to get. And the difference in traffic volumes for each birth from one to ten in the search results is staggering.  Advertising network Chitika looked at a sample of traffic coming into their network driven there by Google.

They analysed the data according to where the sites were according to the results placement. Top position took roughly 34% of all traffic and the difference between that and the second placed site was a whopping 100% as second place took only 16% of the traffic. From there on back, it’s a race to the bottom with the site ranked ten taking only 2.5% of the total traffic.

So, not only is page one the ‘Holy Gail', page one would seem to be nirvana! Interestingly, the move from page one to page two was equally devastating. The site ranked ten, as mentioned, took 2.5% of the totla page traffic. Turning the page halved the volume to just over 1%. In gross terms the sites on page one managed to devour 94.5% of all the traffic for the particular keywords.

You can see this behaviour if you apply some filtering to your analytics to see where the keywords that delivered traffic to your site, physically ranked at the time they were clicked.