All SEO campaigns must have a thorough SEO site audit prior to starting.  Without this site audit, we would be flying blind and wasting your money.  Below is our typical process for starting an SEO campaign for our customers:

1.) Back Link Audit

We perform a backlink audit of your website, and your top three direct competitors.  We do this for several reasons:

• We need to know if you have any penalties related to backlinks
• We will be able to tell if you have done any link building in the past and whether or not that was a white hat or black hat campaign.
• We will get a good understanding if we need to run a disavow campaign prior to starting to remove any bad backlinks.
• Will give us some general ideas of where your competitors are getting there most valuable links from.

2.) Site Speed

This is arguably the most critical factor for on-page SEO.  We need to know if your site loads quickly, and if it doesn’t then why.  Prior to starting any backlink or on-page SEO campaigns, we will do whatever we can to speed up your website.  The reason being is if we generate traffic to your website and the user simply bounces because it’s too slow then we are wasting your time and money.  We will scan every page of your website and try to get it under two seconds.  We can typically achieve this unless there are large videos or hi-res images that must be shown.

3.) Useability

We try to behave like a user on your website and understand the typical conversion process.  If this process is more than 2 clicks than we try to shorten it.  We also make sure the user can find all the supporting information they need to be informed enough to go through with the conversion.  During this part of the audit, we will also hook your site up to google webmaster tools and remediate all the under the hood items that they flag in their dashboard.

4.) Code, Tags, Sitemaps and Issue Remdiation

We will scan your site for several different things.  A high-level overview of this:

• Make sure most pages have a relevant Title tag that is human readable and keyword dense.
• Make sure the meta description is written and relevant to the goal of the page.
• Have corresponding H1, H2, H3 etc… tags to line up with the title tag.
• Clean up code errors.
• Image Alt Tags and Title tags.
• Generate an XML sitemap and make sure it gets updated monthly.
• Generate robots.txt file to properly include/exclude crawlable pages on the site.
• Can site with screaming frog to identify any 404, 500 or other header errors throughout the site.
• Make sure all pages are do follow from a crawl standpoint.
• Make sure HTTPS is enabled for every page and there are no insecure content errors related to this.
• Identify/fix all internal and external broken links, images and pages.
• Clean up URL’s, make sure they are relevant, short and has the correct characters.
• Check for spammy keyword density across all pages.

Here is a typical report:

5.) Competition Report

We load all of your competition into a matrix to understand how you stack up.  This looks something like this:

6.) Keyword Research and Rank Tracking

Using tools, experience and analysis we find keywords that have enough search volume to justify targeting them but as little competition as possible.  We then load these into our ranking report and track them nightly.