JENN

Search Marketing Audit
What is a search marketing Audit?
A Search Marketing Audit looks at many aspects of your website's search marketing campaigns. From natural search engine optimization techniques to your pay per click adwords, overture, and adcenter campaigns.

Search Engine Optimization Audit
An SEO Audit looks at your website and your competition of which suggestions are made in order to make sure your website is search engine compliant, or is optimal for search results based on internal SEO, external SEO, and websites that rank for your target terms.
The SEO Audit consists of nine major aspects of natural search engine optimization:

Keyword Analysis
By looking at your competition, and researching your target audience a main list of key terms is developed based on natural search trends. If you have pay per click campaigns running now, an evaluation of your pay per click reports are completed in order to maximize the terms that are resulting in the most conversions. The goal is to obtain rankings for the terms that are driving the most traffic, obtaining the most conversions as well as those that have the highest cost per acquisition (those ads that people click through the most before finally converting into a sale or lead).

Meta Tags
While meta tags are not a major part in natural search rankings they do play a factor in your search results. The title is what shows up in the search results, and if the key term that I search is in the description then the description will usually show up in the results as well. The reason for why your meta tags are important is that while you may be ranking in the top5 or 10 positions there are still up to 10 results on the same page that rank for the same term. Studies are now showing that users are more likely to spend some time and read through the results before making their selection. If your results aren't what the user is looking for then the user won't click through. Careful evaluation of your current meta tags is made in your SEO audit and suggestions are made in order to help your site maximize it's rankings and potential with traffic.

Page Content
It is common knowledge that content on your website is very important when it comes to search engine optimization. It's not just about adding as much copy onto your pages as possible but making sure your key terms are in your copy at the correct densities. An SEO Audit looks at your page copy and suggests changes in order to increase your overall rankings for your main domain, and individually looks at your pages in order to increase rankings for your more targeted terms. This not only improves your overall rankings, but will drive traffic to your landing pages through natural seo which increases your conversion rate by offering your user a more streamlined process based on what they are looking for. For example: if your website sells apparel to consumers the key terms that you would want your main domain to rank or would be your business name, clothing, men's clothing, women's clothing, garments, outfits, and so on. Your more targeted terms would be shirts, t-shirts, sleeveless shirts, short sleeve shirts and so on. Your more targeted terms would go in the pages that exhibit your t-shirts and such. Therefore giving your user what they are looking for more efficiently and increasing sales.

Internal Linking (URL Structure)
Your website's architecture is not only important when it comes to your users and how you want them to click through the information they are looking for, but the URLs themselves and how the bots index them are also very important. If the search engines can't see a page then they won't be able to index it. if the page isn't in the search index, then you won't be able to see any rankings. A quick way to check to see if a page is indexed is to either type in link:www.yoursite.com into the search form on Google, Yahoo or MSN. These results aren't always completely accurate and sometimes bring back so many results that it's difficult to pinpoint them down to one page. If you are curious if one of your pages is getting indexed and considered for rankings then copy a line of text off of your page that is 6 or more words long. Past the line of text in the search form and submit. If your page shows up in the search results then the page is getting indexed. An SEO Audit will evaluate how many pages of your site are indexed as well as the efficiency at which the search engines are crawling the site. If there are any issues with the indexing of your pages then a list of suggestions are presented that will help increase your indexing, and therefore improving your rankings for those pages.

Duplicate or Similar Content
Your SEO Audit also looks at any duplicate content issues that might be present in your current copy. Search engines frown on blocks of content that are the same or similar on multiple pages of the website. While evaluating the content of your site and the linking structure if any duplicate content issues are picked up a series of suggestions will be made in order to minimize the duplicate content, and increase the rankings of your website. Jennifer Mathews Somogyi has focused heavily on similar content issues by creating pages with similar content and performing case studies to help determine how content is read and what is actually considered duplicate content thus proving the importance of duplicate content issues and how they can effect your sites overall performance.

External Linking
Google was built on the algorithm of external links. A link from another website pointing to your website is counted as a “vote” therefore increasing your websites rankings. Yahoo and MSN have both adopted the algorithm in order to bring back the most relevant results that Google's users have come to trust. Over time the linking algorithm has taken on many adjustments in order to compete with those search engine optimizers that try to trick the search engines in order to increase rankings. With external linking still holding a key factor in your website's rankings, a careful evaluation of the links themselves and the websites that link to your site is carefully evaluated. The SEO Audit looks at the words that are in the link itself, what page or pages the links re pointing to, and the website from which the links are coming from. The goal is to increase the relevance of the incoming links as much as possible. If your website advertises your services as a house cleaner and you have over 20 links all of which are coming from various directories then those 20 links won't be counted as valid links. But if you have 10 links all coming from websites that talk about housecleaning, or even recommend your services as a housecleaner than those links will all be counted as valid links. The goal is to increase the valid links from credible websites. The SEO Audit will suggest a plan to help increase the links from valid websites that you can execute yourself, or help you hire someone that can help you with your linking campaign.

External SEO
Natural SEO doesn't stop with your website or with external links, your SEO Audit also looks at any efforts made in order to help drive traffic and increase visibility of your website through the Dmoz or open directory, Yahoo directory, Wiki pages, and even Blogs, as well as Articles and Press Releases. Whether you are working on all of the external SEO in-house or have a current SEO consulting firm working on your natural SEO the Audit will look through to not only see if these techniques have been used, but also if they are effective in their execution.

Competition Analysis
Once your website has been carefully evaluated in terms of natural SEO, a competition report is then ran in order to compare your website to those that rank for your key terms. The report takes a small list of your main targeted terms and searches them on the three major search engines. Then the top1-3 websites that rank for their terms are evaluated for meta tags, word count within the body copy, and keyword densities within the pages content. The goal is to see how your competition is showing up for the terms that you want your website to show up for therefore increasing your changes of out ranking them.

Solution
Finally the solution! Based on the careful evaluation of all components of your website for natural SEO a list of suggestions is then presented to you for you to execute yourself, have your current search marketing company work on, or Jennifer will work with you to get the work needed done either by completing the work herself, or helping you find a trusted SEO company to execute your new plan.

Contact Jennifer today
for more information on how to get an SEO Audit completed for your website either by phone at 800-515-6810 or by email at jenn@justjenn.org.