Indexability + Site Health

Among the foundational elements of SEO is ensuring a site’s overall indexability and good health. With the help of tools like Screaming Frog, SEMRush, and Google Search Console, we can analyze URLs to ensure they’re both crawlable and accessible, enabling Google to seamlessly parse and index a site’s content.

Keyword Analysis

Employing keyword research enables you to pinpoint relevant words and phrases that searchers use to discover answers to the problems you’re working to solve. Considered SEO best practices by myself and other experts in the search marketing community (namely Rand Fishkin, former CEO of Moz), optimized pages should target one primary keyword phrase and a set of related secondary keywords that have shared user intent.

SERP + Competitive Analysis

Alongside keyword analysis, it’s just important investigate the SERPs of your prospective keyword targets. Not only does this provide insight into the overall search landscape and who your competition is, but this part of the SEO audit process helps to align your chosen keywords with what Google believes to be relevant to the searcher.

On-page SEO

With data and insights earned from keyword research, SERP and competitive analyses, you’ll then have the intelligence required to properly approach on-page SEO. Here we’ll want to craft a compelling title, Meta description, URL, and other elements that can appear in the search results snippet. Further, this information enables us to mindfully employ primary, secondary, and related keywords in the page’s copy.

Technical SEO

There are a number of technical SEO elements that can impact search engine rankings and snippet visibility – many of which are over-the-head of the common marketer. To begin, we’ll want to optimize URLs to load fast and render clearly on every device and browser. Additionally, web properties need to made secure (HTTPS) while leveraging canonicalization, open graph, and structured data markup. Where relevant, we’ll integrate schema markup and rich snippets to enhance visibility potential.

Content Strategy

While many have a plan of action for the latter fundamentals, few employ a thoughtful content strategy onoging. Although there are many ways to go about executing a content strategy, one of the most efficient and effective approaches is to have the most credible and amplify-able members of your team create content that serves the goals of your target searcher and helps solves their problem better than one else on page one.

Off-site SEO

There’s no questioning the value of links, mentions, and other off-site SEO variables that drive domain authority and search rankings. And yet, this too is one of the most perplexing aspects of SEO. As a core component to my SEO audit process, not only do I assess the health and strength of your site’s backlink profile, but I also help brands plan and execute individually-tailored strategies to amplify content and organically spread word-of-mouth across the web and social networks.

While these are some of the primary components to the SEO audit process, keep in mind that every project is unique and amidst different stages of the ranking process. For sites undergoing redesign or redevelopment, it can be an ideal time to assess the sitemap and navigation to better support the brand’s SEO objectives. Further, usability elements like content structure, layout, conversion funnels, and the overall user experience can offer to the greatest opportunities for improvement. How users interact and engage with your site can profoundly impact SEO, so it’s crucial to embrace SEO audits with holistic, adaptable perspective.