Auditing your website's content is much like undergoing a physical exam. You may dread it at first, but it's a smart practice that uncovers focus areas to improve your overall health. It also helps you understand what's working and what's not in your approach. This is the same for SEO.

As a company that devotes valuable time and resources to every marketing channel, you know how essential it is to budget and plan for results. An SEO audit will help you accurately assess the return on your website’s content investment, and formulate an informed strategy looking ahead.

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit helps site owners break down the different components of SEO. Audits also pinpoint their weakest points, and eliminate any errors that could be damaging their rankings in the SERPs. As sites improve rankings through SEO, they will naturally receive more organic traffic and position themselves for tremendous growth.

A thorough SEO audit will look at a variety of factors including:

1. On-page SEO
2. Technical and Accessibility SEO
3. Linking

According to a study we conducted at BrightEdge, an estimated 51 percent of all your website traffic comes from organic search. Other factors such as direct traffic, paid search, and social media account for less than half your traffic combined. This means that a site with poor SEO could be missing out on enormous potential for growth and profit. An SEO audit is critical for understanding site performance in search engine rankings and how that position can be improved.

How do I complete an SEO audit?

There are a variety of different tools available to help sites successfully complete an SEO audit. You can use a combination of a few different platforms, such as Google’s Webmaster Tools, to check for a variety of different factors.

To establish your baseline, start from “ground zero” in an initial SEO audit, you need the right tools. Then, you need to define metrics and gather data around those metrics. Once you’ve delved into the data and interpreted what it means, you can set goals for your site’s content performance based on those insights.

BrightEdge offers clients a thorough SEO audit using ContentIQ that can provide them with the results in a single dashboard. This can help them identify clear tasks to complete and assign jobs within the platform for the site to be fully optimized.

The easy-to-read dashboard makes it simple to keep all errors and progress made in a single place so that the SEO audit can be regularly monitored throughout the process.

An SEO audit is a critical component to benchmarking, planning, and keeping a website optimized and prepared for the demands of high-ranks in SERPs to generate traffic. Websites should regularly perform an SEO audit and review their sites to ensure optimal site function. When performing an SEO audit, review the major components to ensure that the audit is thorough and maximally useful.

SEO audit for your main web pages

For your main website pages, you’ll want to collect all the data, but focus on the Web pages that are key to your business. On a spreadsheet, you may organize those key pages so they are positioned below one another; that way you can see the metrics for each page and how it fares against other important pages in that group.

The most important pages of your site typically represent the “core” of what you do. For instance, your home page, and key information-rich pages or landing pages likely would be priority for scrutiny in your audit.

That said, your most important pages might not necessarily be the best-performing pages. Findings such as this underscore the value of an SEO audit, informing both your strategy and resource-allocation decisions for the site. By simply knowing which Web pages need bolstering, you can then focus your SEO efforts on them for the coming months.

You may also choose to do a second-tier prioritization of your Web pages. Identify, based on what the data is telling you, which pages you can make small tweaks to that will move the needle drastically. At BrightEdge, these seemingly minor yet quantum content optimization opportunities are referred to as “striking distance”.

SEO audit for your blog pages

While pageviews, bounce rates and time on site are all important metrics to gauge the success of your blog content, in today’s current Web environment, you’ll need to measure social signals. These will indicate how (or if) people are engaging with your blog content.

By examining the number of Facebook shares, tweets, and Google+1s, for example, you can only determine what is resonating with your readers, but also what direction you should take your blog overall. For instance, if you discover your blog is receiving more engagement from how-to pieces versus interviews, you may choose to include more instructional posts.

An obvious “red flag” is if your blog content is not being shared at all. In that instance, you need to examine ways to improve upon that, such as creating a more solid community around your brand or ensuring that the blog is set up well technically for social sharing.

Using BrightEdge, you can get a picture of your engagement metrics in the “page report,” as shown in the following screenshot:

You’ll also want to consider backlinks as part of your blog metrics. These show a vote of confidence that your content is likable and sharable. Blogs with a lot of quality links show “credibility”.

Your own social media metrics can be informed by a relatively quick secondary SEO audit of your main competitors, their backlinks and social engagement metrics. This type of analysis can be used to come up with similar ideas in that niche.

Optimize on-page SEO for your audit

On-page SEO describes the steps you take to ensure that the content itself has been optimized for your audience. This means paying close attention to the page descriptions and tags that communicate with search engines and readers. Although fixing problems with on-page SEO tends to be straightforward, it is important to avoid neglecting details. Below are five on-page SEO factors you should consider for a better SEO audit:

• Title tags: Should be unique and include keywords relevant to the content on the page
• Meta descriptions: Include keywords and be engaging to encourage those reading the description on SERPs to click
• Images: Include alt tags that have keywords as well as image names that give accurate descriptions, such as [BrightEdge Logo] instead of just [Logo]
• Headings: Need to use keywords - particularly in H1 - while also breaking up text and making it more scannable
• Content: Should clearly describe the purpose of the site without keyword stuffing

Regardless of what tools you’ll employ, all data should be organized well and exported into a spreadsheet (such as Excel), with the columns designating the specific metrics tracked and the horizontal rows showing the individual page URLs to be audited.

Here’s an example of what the spreadsheet may look like, with columns showing key metrics like:

• Pageviews: Total number of pages viewed - repeated views of a single page are also counted
• Organic visits: Shows how many visits came from the organic channel
• Bounce rate: How many people came to the page and immediately left without interacting with it?
• Page speed: Gauges how fast or slow a page loads
• Conversions: Whatever your conversion goals are – form fills or product buys – how many are happening as a result of that page?
• Word count: The total number of words on a page
• Code-to-content ratio: How much actual text content exists versus code?

Every metric tells a story. The next step is figuring the “why” behind the metric data, and then putting together some next steps. For example:

• Would adding more content on the page help lower the bounce rate?
• If you have a low word count, does that result in "thin content" that could be deemed "low-quality" content?
• How about images and video - would that help improve conversions?
• What if you’re showing a slow page load time – would that be from the video or images on the page?

Technical SEO for your audit

Technical SEO is optimization that deals with indexing and writing code for crawling robots including Google bot. Technical aspects of the SEO audit will examine the more technical areas of your site. It will ensure that your page can be easily crawled by the spiders from Google. If a website is a challenge for Google to crawl, it will rank much lower. It can also impact how well users can move around your website.

A site that is difficult to maneuver will have higher bounce rates. According to KissMetrics, clear navigation is an excellent way to keep visitors on the site.

The technical part of the SEO audit will check for the following issues:

• The site navigation must be intuitive to ensure that users and spiders can easily move around
• The site should load quickly regardless of device
• The directory structure should be less than three folders deep
• All 302 response codes that are no longer temporary need to be updated to 301 redirects to be more search friendly and to pass the search equity onto the successor page
• All 404 error codes and broken links lead to orphan pages and need to be repaired
• URLs should be rewritten to be user friendly and excessive appends reduced
• Ensure pages have been indexed and that the site ranks well for the company name
• All duplicate content should be eliminated
• The site should be mobile-responsive or redirect at a 1-to-1 ratio to a mobile version of the website

What is linking for SEO?

When sites link to one another, it is the virtual equivalent of giving each other a handshake. Google assumes that when a reputable website links to another site, that site is also reputable. Conversely, if a poorly designed or penalized site has inbound links from other websites, the search engine has, in the past, viewed those websites as similarly low quality. It is important to make sure all websites you link to still exist and are worthy of the link to avoid hurting your own SEO efforts.

• Links should use relevant anchor text and be applicable to the content itself
• Outbound links should open in new windows
• Links should only point to reputable sites
• Any links that are broken should be removed or replaced

To wrap up, regularly checking your site for errors and performing an SEO audit is a must to keep a healthy online presence. Dismissing errors and issues within your technical SEO could result in losing out on organic traffic. This will end in growing less-rapidly than your competitors and generating leads and revenue at a much slower pace. Keep your SEO in check with an SEO audit.

The much-anticipated and highly-hyped Google mobile algorithm update officially rolled out as of a month ago. Much of the build up around the infamous 4/21 mobile update was that Google explicitly warned webmasters of this change – unlike the other several hundreds of updates they make throughout the year.

Seasoned industry veterans and newbies alike have seen big changes with Secure Search, Panda, Pigeon and Penguin. We here at BrightEdge recently released our own readout on the impact of the mobile algorithm update.

Considering all of the digital ink already used up around anticipating and analyzing the impact, I want to focus on how all BrightEdge customers and agencies are winners because they had the BrightEdge Mobile Solution available to proactively understand mobile search opportunities through client communication.

Whether you were on the losing end of the change or, like many, are waiting with cautious optimism to emerge essentially unscathed – you stand to gain something from the proactive approach we employed with our partners leading up to the update.

Those of us who spend our days thinking about SEO are typically abreast of the latest and greatest tactics being promoted by industry pundits. Oftentimes clients are relying on you as their search partner to filter out all of the noise and bring to light the most important takeaways with your relationship often hinging on the ability to take these blog-driven discussions and turn them into actionable insights. But, rest assured that when Google explicitly announces a major algo update your clients are bound to hear about it whether or not you’ve actively had client communication. You certainly don’t want to be on the receiving end of “Why didn’t you warn us about this?!” question from your client.

The mobile algo update was actually the perfect storm with regards to getting out in front and being proactive in distilling the most important information through client communication. BrightEdge customers had a unique opportunity to reiterate the established best practices Google provided, accurately monitor for rankings and analytics performance, and push recommendations to improve the mobile-friendliness of their clients’ sites. As stated previously, this scenario was a bit unique in that Google announced the change in advance – though even without fair warning the process employed can be an important lesson, or at least helpful reminder, on using the right data to drive your strategy and enhance reporting.

Leading up to the mobile algorithm update, we had the opportunity to collaborate with our long-standing partners at Fathom, a Cleveland-based full-service digital marketing agency whose core focus is on helping businesses grow through customer acquisition & retention strategy, execution and consulting. Fathom is vertically structured with expertise in healthcare, technology, education, retail/consumer brands and manufacturing industry segments. The goal of this collaboration was to develop a detailed and scalable process for leveraging the power of the BrightEdge platform to help them navigate the mobile algorithm change while leading with data and a proactive approach to client communication.

While the steps below might seem intuitive given the head start Google provided, this practical framework can be used in multiple situations. You can use it to better integrate data to help inform your content marketing strategy, address technical issues you’ve long since presented remedies for but have yet to implement and kick start your local optimization strategy.

5 Key Steps for Effective Agency Planning & Client Communication

1. Zero in on your initiative

In this case it was simple – “How might our clients be impacted by Google’s algo update?” However, at the risk of stating the obvious, it’s important to define what you’re trying to do clearly ahead of time to ensure the following steps are able to drive your agenda without steering off course. Secure clear buy-in and agreement with the client.

2. Devise a plan of attack

Even with eight weeks advance notice, making a site fully mobile-friendly isn’t always something that can be done quickly. Keeping this in mind, our focus shifted a little bit away from short-term updates to the mobile-friendliness of the client’s sites and instead focused in on how we proactively develop a report that helps us to quickly and easily identify whether a site had been negatively impacted by the algo update. We also enabled the Mobile Site Audit capabilities as part of this analysis to quickly identify potentially problematic pages and/or page templates that could be troublesome.

Curtis Rummel, Online Marketing Specialist from Fathom’s Retail and Consumer Brands team noted:

“The proactive discussions around the upcoming mobile algorithm update, supported by BrightEdge’s reports, gave us the opportunity to work with each client to strategize on a plan for their short and long-term mobile success. We were able to analyze then prioritize which areas of their site should be focused on first while the remainder of the site would eventually be rolled out.”

3. Build your data framework

Leveraging already-existing BrightEdge mobile capabilities to bring together the most important and relevant data points into a standardized report allowed us to make use of it as template across the agency client base. While BrightEdge has been touting the importance of understanding your mobile performance for several years, it took Google’s mobile-friendly announcement to rally many customers to take action and start tracking Smartphone performance against Desktop rankings. Collectively, we used this as a catalyst to drive a paradigm shift in the way the agency considers mobile visibility moving forward.

4. Execute your strategy

Once the proper data inputs were available, we set out to develop a best-in-class StoryBuilder dashboard for a single client that served as the template for the remaining client roster. After a handful of iterations the template was prepped for final approval and replication. While each client account offered some unique differences in KPIs – we were able to streamline the majority of the inputs to be applicable across every account.

Curtis Rummel added:

“StoryBuilder allowed us to create beautiful mobile analytics dashboards that we provided each client before, during, and after the mobile algorithm update went live. The weekly mobile analytics reports allowed us to have numerous data-driven discussions about each client’s mobile site design prior to the algorithm update going live – which allowed for much quicker execution.”

5. Client communication

At this point, it was then time to provide a client-facing POV on the upcoming algorithm change coupled – perhaps most importantly – with an already developed dashboard report. Being able to proactively bring this to the client went a long way toward easing potential concerns from clients while also painting the agency in an extremely positive light amongst its client base. Feedback from clients was overwhelmingly positive and using BrightEdge and a refined approach showed the agency being proactivity.

A brief reflection on the work outlined above conjures up a reference to the old adage that “sometimes it’s as much about the journey as it is the destination.” Whether your clients gained or lost in the mobile algorithm change, hopefully you can figure out ways to mimic the methodology employed by Fathom in the sample case outlined here.

Failing to take action on any of the steps described could have potentially left the agency scrambling after the update to develop the necessary execution or reporting framework. By getting out in front of the mobile algorithm update and proactively communicating the plan and BrightEdge mobile reports to clients the agency served its client well even before the algo change even rolled out.

BrightEdge Content Optimizer 3.0 recognized as breakthrough capability for content performance marketing success

The BrightEdge Content Optimizer 3.0 has been selected as a finalist today for the 2015 American Business Awards!

The American Business Awards, also known as the Stevie® Awards, are considered the nation’s preeminent business awards program. This year, more than 3,300 nominations from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were submitted. BrightEdge was recognized as a New Product or Service of the Year in the Software Content Management Solution category.

In light of Content Optimizer 3.0’s recent Innovation Award win at Adobe Summit 2015, our recognition as an American Business Awards finalist reinforces the importance of this breakthrough technology for digital content analysis and successful content performance marketing strategies. To win on the content battleground, marketers need a comprehensive understanding of not only their own content’s performance, but also their competitors’.

BrightEdge’s Content Optimizer 3.0 is the most powerful solution on the market, providing marketers with a holistic analysis of both. Backed by sophisticated web-wide data technology, Content Optimizer 3.0 breaks down competing content in detail, showing brands what their competitors are doing right, what they could do better, and how they can apply that knowledge to their own strategy. In addition to in-depth competitive insights, Content Optimizer 3.0 allows marketers to better understand consumer demand around specific topics and keywords, view the momentum of their content optimization progress, and tailor content to fit their organization's specific needs and goals.

The BrightEdge team looks forward to the announcement of the Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie® Award winners later this fall. This is a tribute to all of the feedback received from BrightEdge customer community who helped us improve the technology to support marketers’ success. Additional details about The American Business Awards and the list of finalists in all categories are available at www.StevieAwards.com. More information about the Content Optimizer 3.0 can be found on the BrightEdge website.