The first key step to learning what opportunities are out there for your business with an improvement in SEO rankings is to have a digital marketing agency perform an SEO audit. As SEO is a complex subject, there are a few key areas that will be included when Norba Design creates a full SEO audit for your business website. We will go into detail with each area below and what it means to your business.
The main key areas that we will focus on are the following:
- On-Page SEO
- Keyword Analysis
- Backlink Analysis
- Blog Analysis (if necessary)
Part 1 – On-Page SEO
This component of the audit consists of everything that is included on your actual business website that you can control. Some examples of this that are highlighted are the page speed (with a detailed report of how to optimize page speed for a better user experience and improved SEO rankings), title tags, keyword density, heading tags content, and whether you have an SSL certificate or not (for a secure connection).
We will provide an overview of where different components of your on-page SEO is satisfactory, average, or needs improvement and include actionable steps to fix that as soon as possible. The on-page SEO is similar to the foundation of the project as it’s key to get this taken care of and go along with all of the best practices to make sure you make it as easy as possible for Google to crawl and rank your business site.
Some examples of the most common issues that we’ve seen:
- No SSL certificate (says “Not Secure” at the top of the browser)
- Page speed is slower than 3-4 seconds to load the homepage
- Title tags don’t include keywords they’re looking to rank for
If you’d like to learn more about this, we include more details around how you can test your website speed with the following previous article – https://www.norbadesign.com/blog/2019-seo-basics-what-is-seo/
Part 2 – Keyword Analysis
One of the first questions that our clients ask from us is “what search terms/keywords are we even ranking for and what does that mean for our business?” If you don’t have premium SEO tools, you are left in the dark around what your website is ranking for and what it means.
Norba Design leverages premium SEO tools such as SEMRush that provides a detailed breakdown of exactly what keywords your business site is ranking for, how competitive each keyword is, how often that keyword is searched for in Google on a monthly basis, and other key performance metrics.
Our deliverable that you will be provided with is a detailed Excel spreadsheet with the exact keywords that your business site is ranking for with additional data to help show what it means for your business overall. Most importantly, we will provide you with our recommendations for what keywords you should focus on. This is in conjunction with the on-page SEO recommendations so that you can optimize different website pages for certain keywords to optimize your site.
This is one of the more important parts of the SEO audit, as the main goal of any SEO campaign is to increase targeted keyword rankings for your business site.
Part 3 – Backlink Analysis
First of all, what is a backlink? Simply put, when another website includes a link to your business site, that is considered a backlink. An example of this is if you write an article for the NYTimes and they include your bio and a link back to your website, Google identifies that as a trusted news source linking to your site, which naturally helps from an SEO perspective.
Using our advanced SEO tools, we provide a detailed Excel file for this component to show you exactly what websites are providing your business site with a backlink, what their ranking is from Google’s perspective (on a scale of 1-100, with 100 being the best).
This gives great insight to the business owner as it shows them if this is an area that they can improve upon. From an SEO standpoint, getting consistent and high-quality backlinks is THE most important way to improve your website’s SEO rankings. As included in the other parts, we will also provide a recommendation for how you can improve your link building, whether that’s something you’d like to do yourself or outsource to an SEO firm.
Part 4 – Blog Analysis (if necessary)
After working with countless businesses in the SEO space, we’ve seen some common mistakes and themes with blog posts – business owners feel like they’re playing a guessing game. They aimlessly post and wait to see what will happen. What they typically don’t realize is that there’s a tested and proven best practice list to follow for posting in their blog.
If a client needs assistance with this, we will analyze their last few blog posts to see what can be improved upon and then provide them with a best practice checklist. Typically, the biggest mistakes that we notice have to deal with content length, keyword placement in strategic positions, missing images in the posts, and not linking to external links and/or their previous blog posts.
We work with your business to empower your team to have all of the information that you need to take your business site’s SEO to the next level. However, if you are too busy, we are always happy to recommend one of our SEO packages if we have the capacity, as we only work with a select number of clients each year.
Ready to get started with your SEO audit? Reach out now to [email protected] and get the SEO results that you deserve.
