An SEO audit is vital for finding opportunities to improve a site’s search performance and overall page rankings. It involves finding on-page, technical, content and link related issues that need to be fixed or improved.
While each SEO audit may vary from each other, there are basic issues that site owners should always look for.
What should an SEO audit cover?
An SEO audit is the process of assessing how well your site is optimised for search engines, such as Google and Bing. The process outlines and analises potential problems or errors that will most likely impact organic performance.
There are a few key parts that an SEO audit should cover, including:
Checking your site for on-page SEO issues
Analysing the strength of current on-site, off-site and core technical elements
Ensuring your site is being crawled correctly, indexed and rendered by Google
Verifying that your site has good UX design (user experience)
Elements of technical SEO in an audit
A technical SEO audit examines various technical aspects of a website, ensuring they are following the best search operation practices. Technical audits are simply just a type of SEO audit, but they focus on issues related to your website that happen behind the scenes.
Elements of a technical SEO audit include:
Identifying crawl errors with a crawl report
Checking a sites load time
Ensuring a site is mobile friendly
Optimising titles and metadata
Checking images for accurate descriptions and ALT-text
What does an SEO audit include?
SEO audits can vary slightly from one another, but each one should analyse the basic technical SEO elements like server errors and metadata. However, every SEO audit should include technical and on-page audits.
While each SEO audit process can differ since there is no universal approach, there are a handful of basic issues that you should be looking for.
We’ve outlined below the essential features of SEO audits that you should be including in your checklist.
Check for manual actions: Manual actions are when a human reviewer at Google has determined that your site doesn’t comply with their webmaster guidelines. The result of this is that some or all of your site won’t be shown in Google’s search results.
You are unlikely to have manual actions unless you’ve done something seriously wrong. However, it should still be the first thing you check because if you have one, you’ll be stuck before you even start.
Check organic traffic: Google updates its search algorithms all the time, meaning it’s important to check organic traffic drops coinciding with the updates.
Check for HTTPS-related issues: HTTPS is a secure protocol for transferring data to and from visitors. You should be checking each page on your site using HTTPS by visiting them and ensuring there is a lock icon on the address bar.
Check indexability issues: Google search results come from its index, which is a database of web pages. Your pages need to be indexed to stand any chance at ranking.
Check for mobile-friendliness: Mobile-friendliness has been a huge ranking factor everywhere since Google moved to mobile-first indexing in 2019.
Check page speed: Page speed has been a small ranking factor on desktop since 2010 and mobile since 2018.
Check for broken pages: Having broken pages on your site is never good, and if these pages have backlinks, they are effectively being wasted because they point to nothing.
Check for sitemap issues: A sitemap lists the pages that you want search engines to index. It shouldn’t list things like redirects, non-canonicals or dead pages, as those send mixed signals to Google.
Check for declining content: Rankings will rarely last forever since content can become outdated, meaning the search traffic will often start to drop off. You can solve this by updating and republishing old content.
Check for content gaps: Content gaps occur when you miss important subtopics in your content. Not including this content means you won’t rank for as many long-tail keywords and potentially won’t rank as high as you could for your main target keywords.
What to expect after an SEO audit
Before you dive into conducting an SEO audit , you will want to know what to expect. Once an SEO audit has been conducted on your site, you will receive an audit report which is a final document outlining all of the issues with your current website.
This report will be analysed in order to identify low-hanging opportunities to improve your site in one of the five key areas. These areas include technical SEO, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, competitor analysis and keyword research.
Using the data, SEO experts will interpret the raw data and suggest opportunities and strategies you can use to increase your overall traffic and visibility.
What is the difference between SEO analysis and an SEO audit?
SEO audits are long term processes in which you need to audit your entire site on-page, off-page, technical, user experience and other factors. It is the method of identifying your site’s fundamental issues which are affecting its performance and ranking.
SEO analysis however, observes all the factors above and determines how well you’re carrying out the site’s SEO strategy. It is almost impossible to make correct decisions in improving your site’s ranking in search engines without SEO analysis of your site.
Search engines are constantly evolving, and as a result of this, you should be actively ensuring that your website can keep up with these changes.
The best way to do this is by auditing your website, which helps to bridge the gap that affects your end-user experience and conversion rate.
What is a website audit?
A website audit often involves examining page performances prior to large-scale search engine optimisation (SEO) or site design.
Auditing your website can help to determine whether or not it’s best optimised to achieve your traffic goals, and can give you a sense of how you can improve it to reach these goals.
Audits are also often conducted after work on-site has been done. This helps to show progress, highlight under-appreciated areas and help to drive future online strategies.
Why are site audits important?
Site audits are important as they give a complete, detailed analysis into a website’s health, performance and speed.
Assessing these areas will give you full insight into the current effectiveness of your site. It will also show where you may be able to further optimise and/or improve your site, as well as identify issues that could be damaging to its health.
How different website audits are used
How a website audit is used for your own site will largely depend on your personal aims and objectives.
Here are the most common ways website audits are used:
Traffic analysis
With traffic analysis, we can look at where visitors are arriving from, where they came from, bounce back rates and other on-page engagement stats.
Based on the journey your visitors usually take, we can look at how your site’s design, content and functionality encourages conversion rates.
On-page optimisation
Your pages should be optimised with relevant and consistent keywords and your call-to-actions should be clear and compelling.
We will take a look at your content from a SEO perspective, looking for any potential unnecessary content or underdeveloped content to freshen up. Internal linking strategies may need to be formed to help users, and search engines, navigate your site efficiently.
Lead generation
We can audit your website to review the overall user experience and assess how well your website is optimised to generate leads. This involves taking a close look at lead generation mechanisms, such as call to actions and contact forms.
Here we will pinpoint obstacles your user faces when trying to engage with your site.
Social media
A social media audit involves looking at your organisation’s official social media accounts. This includes looking at the quality and quantity of your followers, who you’re following and the likes and shares of your most recent posts.
Taking a deeper look into your social media can help to define how your social presence impacts your website.
How do I know which audit I need for my website?
If you’re unsure which audit you need for your website, you should consider what goals you are looking to achieve by conducting an audit.
Consider:
What goals you are looking to achieve;
How many leads you are generating from your site currently and what you want to aim for;
Who your desired target audience is;
Current on-site and off-site issues, such as lack of call to actions, poor Core Web Vitals, struggling social platforms, underperforming content and so on.
From here, you should be able to have some sort of idea about the type of audit needed for your website.
If you’re still unsure, or you’re struggling to determine which audit is right for your site, an experienced search-marketing team, like us here at Tao Digital Marketing, will be able to help you. Our website auditing services are fully tailored to your website and needs.
Alternatively, get in touch with us if you think you’d benefit from some consultancy from our expert team.
Different types of website audits
A website audit is a full analysis of factors that impacts a site’s visibility on search engines, but a full website audit is not always necessary.
Listed below are some of the most common types of audits:
SEO Audit
An SEO audit is the process of outlining and analysing potential problems or issues on a site that impacts organic performance. These problems must be addressed, otherwise they can prevent your site from ranking highly on search engines like Google and Bing.
SEO audits include analysing components such as keywords, link profiles, image optimisation and goal conversions.
Technical Audit
A technical audit is simply just a type of SEO audit, but it focuses on the issues related to your website that happen behind the scenes.
Technical audits focus on the best practices for site visibility and ensuring all of the site meets all of the search engines requirements for crawling and indexing.
Content Audit
A content audit is the process of systematically assessing all of the content on your site. The main objective is to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of your content strategy and adapt your current content plan to align with your marketing goals.
It also includes delivering strong insights into what messaging and tone of voice is converting and what isn’t.
We can offer advice as to what content needs to be updated, whether some pages are harmful and need to be removed, deleted or no-indexed.
Competitor Audit
A competitor audit is used to track your competitors, understand their approach and figure out what their brand is doing which yours isn’t.
The aim is to discover what techniques and methods are used for other companies within your industry and incorporate these into your own strategy in the right ways.
Audits like these highlight how many keywords competitors are ranking for, how much content they have in comparison to your site and where they place against you in terms of traffic.
Link Audit
A link audit is the process of analysing links pointing at your site to find potential problems or opportunities. You need to find the links, establish which ones are potentially harmful and which are good, and then develop the right strategy to deal with them.
Social Media Audit
A social media audit is the process of reviewing how well social media is working for your business. This audit is the process of reviewing certain metrics to analyse your current social media strategy.
These metrics can include information on demographics, engagement, locations, campaign performance and more. An audit like this can involve impressions, shares, likes, comments and other interactions.
Conversion Rate Audit
A conversion rate audit (CRO audit) is a full assessment of a customer’s journey on your site. The purpose of the audit is to identify the technical and usability-related problems that could be damaging your website’s conversion rate.
A typical CRO audit will focus on analysing the end-to-end customer experience, as well as digging deeper into a website’s analytics.
Why should your business invest in website auditing?
Investing in on-site audits can be highly beneficial to your ongoing business strategy. Knowing where you currently stand in the ever-expanding online market, and strategizing on how to best improve this, is where your business can stand out.
Have a chat with our team about website auditing and how insightful they can really be.
Our Guide to Google My Business
Having a Google My Business Profile is a great way to get in front of new customers and help towards local SEO.
In this guide, we’ll be answering some of the most frequently asked questions about Google My Business, with step-by-step instructions for some of the more in-depth questions. Keep reading to find out more.
What is Google My Business?
Google My Business is essentially a business profile that appears on the side of Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP) when someone searches for your businesses or your services in their area.
It’s essentially a brief overview of your business, including, but not limited to:
Business name
Address
Primary and secondary categories (your service offering – we’ll touch on this later)
Photos of the team/business/service offering
Location on Google Maps, sometimes an external shot of the business taken from Maps
Opening hours
Contact details
Website
Reviews
Q&A from users
Why is Google My Business important?
Google My Business is incredibly important – every business should have one as it helps potential new customers/clients find your business. For example, if you’re a coffee shop owner and a local types ‘coffee shops near me’ into Google, you will appear based on the location you have listed. These customers may never have come across you otherwise.
It also helps you to understand how your customers are finding/contacting you. Through looking at the analytics you can find out what keywords people search to find you, as well as getting insights on calls, reviews, bookings and more to understand how you connect with customers.
Does Google My Business help SEO?
Yes, it can help with SEO, particularly local SEO. Making sure your information is up to date and that you post regularly is highly likely to be a ranking factor that can help Google to understand your business offerings (Google would never give away its true ranking factors or we’d all be fighting for number one).
It’s important to make sure you optimise your listing as much as possible – we’ll touch on this later.
Is Google My Business free?
Yes, Google My Business, or Google Business Profile, is completely free! The ultimate aim of Google is to make it easy to use and help people to find the local businesses they are looking for. By listing your business, you’re helping people looking for your services and of course, Google – hence why it’s completely free.
Interestingly, as we write this in November 2022, Google has filed a lawsuit against a company who allegedly charged people for setting up GMB profiles. According to Search Engine Land, the company “threatened business owners that if they failed to pay (typically $99), their Business listings would be deactivated or marked as “permanently closed” and their positive reviews would be hidden – resulting in lost visibility and revenue.”
Do I have a Google My Business account already?
If you’re buying out a business or starting out as a Marketing Exec, you may be wondering whether the business already has an account. The simple way to tell is to Google the business – if the profile comes up, the business has one. This will be a case of claiming the listing, which we’ll touch on later.
If not, it’s time to set your profile up.
How to set up Google My Business
Here is our simple guide
Google My Business is incredibly easy to set up. The first step is to go onto Google, make sure you are logged into a Gmail account (or a Gmail-connected email address) and click the dots in the top right corner. From there, you’ll find an option to click ‘Business Profile’.
Then, you’ll see the page below. Click ‘manage now’.
You will then be taken to the next page. As you’ll be setting up a brand new account, click ‘Add your business to Google’.
You can then enter your business name and business category. The frustrating part of adding a business category is that there is no drop down menu, instead you start typing and then can only pick from a selection available.
For us, we typed in ‘Digital Marketing’ and this didn’t appear, however ‘Marketing Agency’ did as you can see below – it’s a case of guessing the terms Google may file your business under until you find an exact or close match to how you would describe your business.
To help with this, Vicki Mace, Digital Marketing Consultant from Insight Digital Copy, advises that you look at what your competitors have as their primary category. Do a search for a primary keyword, see what businesses appear and identify what category they belong to.
She suggests that you can further validate this by asking the following questions:
Would this category be the best fit for the services/products you offer?
Do people search for this service? In comparison to other categories, how popular is it?
Further on in the process you can add up to nine other business categories. Be mindful only to add categories related to your business – Google will suspend anyone adding irrelevant categories just to show up for more terms.
After you have entered your category, you will then be asked if you want to add a location. If you are mobile or based at your home address, you may want to avoid this for security purposes and only give it when you receive an enquiry. In this instance, you are classed as a ‘Service Area Business’ (SAB).
If you click no, you will be taken to a page that allows you to list multiple service areas, as below.
If you click yes, you will be taken to a page where you can enter the address of your business premises. You will then be asked if you offer deliveries/home or office visits, as well as how far you are willing to go. This helps to extend your location reach. You can always change these at a later date too.
You will then be prompted to add your contact details.
In order to stop fake listings and to ‘help maintain the integrity of all profiles’, Google then has to verify that you own the business by giving you a code. They will ask whether you want to receive the code via email, phone call or by post, just select whichever is your preference. You will be asked to verify using more than one method most of the time.
If you don’t want to verify immediately or can’t get the access code immediately (e.g. if you’re a Marketing Exec and need a Manager to send you the code), you can select ‘Verify Later’ – your profile won’t be visible until you verify, but you can still progress with the listing in the meantime.
After this, you have the option to add secondary categories and your opening hours. You will also be asked if you want to accept messages through Google – you will be notified of any messages via email.
You will be prompted to add a business description, which can be 750 characters (not words) max. You can skip this step, however we highly recommend you add this as it will help for SEO purposes. Be sure to include keywords, including those listed as your primary and secondary categories, but avoid keyword stuffing. It has to look natural.
This also needs to be unique content in order to be effective. Avoid copying and pasting from your website.
Finally, you’ll be asked to add some photos to the listing. If you provide a service, Amy Toman, a Google Product Expert, recommends showing staff providing that service (e.g. if you’re a plumbing company, don’t show boilers, show a member of staff fixing one). She also suggests that cover images should show either a storefront or humans. Use as many unique photos as possible – they’re more indicative of a business than stock images.
After this, once you’ve verified the business with the code, your listing will be live.
If you ever want to change details in the future, such as your categories or address, simply go onto your Business Profile, click the edit pen and you should have the option to change your details.
Verifying your Business Profile by Post
In order to avoid new fake listings, Google will send a postcard with a code on it to your address. This will also happen if you have an existing listing but change the address to a different one. Simply wait for the postcard to arrive, let your team know to keep an eye out for it and enter the code once it has arrived to validate the listing.
If you’re a Service Area Business, Elizabeth Rule, Local SEO Analyst Sterling Sky & GBP Gold Product Expert, suggests verifying your GBP listing to the address your business is officially registered at. After you verify the GBP listing, you can clear the address field so the address is not visible to the public on maps or search.
How to verify your Google My Business location without a postcard
As great as verifying by postcard is in terms of avoiding spam listings, there are a couple of issues with this – it can take five to seven days to arrive, and also if it gets lost in the post or the wrong person receives it, it can be difficult (if not impossible) to request a second one.
If, for whatever reason, you are unable to verify your location without a postcard, there are several alternatives:
Phone call/email based on the contact details you provided when setting up your account. Be wary of having an automated answering machine on your phone line as this will be an automated call that cannot ‘press three to be connected to a member of the team’. You will be given a five digit code that you will need to enter into your GMB profile.
Connecting your Google Search Console account to your Google My Business account, which can give you permission to immediately verify the listing – however this may not work for all industries.
In some industries, you may be able to verify via a video call with Google themselves, or submit a video walkthrough of the business meeting Google’s specifications (e.g. show the storefront or other employees working with you).
If none of the above steps are available or fail to work, you can submit a ticket to Google and request for them to manually verify your account. You may be asked to send photos of the business along with other evidence.
How to Claim a Google My Business profile
two factors must be in place first
There are many reasons you may want to claim an existing Business Profile listing, for example if you’re buying a business out, or perhaps taking over from a previous marketing manager.
In order for you to claim a listing, two factors must be in place first:
The existing listing must already be verified by its current owner
The current owner must add you as a manager first (if they do not know how to do this, you can send them Google’s official guidance here)
There is a difference between managing and owning (claiming) a business profile. Both have slightly different levels of permissions. Below is official guidance from Google on the difference:
After being added as a manager
Once you have been added as a manager, it can take up to seven days to be given manager capabilities within GMB.
In order to claim the profile, Google the name of the business and you should see a button saying ‘Claim/Own this Business?’, or type it in here and click ‘Request Access’ then fill in the form. The current owner will be then notified and can grant you permission to claim/own the profile.
If the current owner doesn’t respond within three days, Google may give you the option to claim the profile yourself. In this instance, open the original email confirmation from Google stating that you requested access. Then follow the on screen instructions to verify.
How to edit Google My Business
You can only edit the Business Profile listing if you are a manager or owner. To edit, navigate to the top right of the page again on Google, click on your profile picture and click ‘Business Profile’. You will then see the name of your business and a pencil button, click this to edit.
You will then be taken to a page where you can edit every element of your business, from your name through to categories, description and contact information.
Can I change my Google My Business name?
Yes, you can. Just navigate to the editing page as above, click the pencil icon next to your name and change it.
How to optimise Google Business Profile
There are many ways to optimise your business profile. The main factor to bear in mind is to make sure you fill in as many details as you can and keep it updated constantly.
Other factors to bear in mind:
Photos: Add photos on a regular basis, especially of the team whenever you get updated headshots or team members join/leave. Add photos of any new service or product offerings, too. This helps to show consistency to Google which can help you to appear above other profiles who haven’t updated for quite a while.
Create regular posts: Senior SEO Manager Abby Leigh Curtis recommends that you should post whenever you have events to promote, offers/deals you want to advertise, featured products, business updates (e.g. new hours or services), or even blogs. You should always include high-quality images to accompany your posts.
However, one of the only downsides of Google Posts is that you can only choose from a dropdown for the CTA button:
Use a local phone number: This can help to further verify that you’re a local business and is an easy way to encourage customers to call you.
Add videos: Video is becoming increasingly important to Google, especially as they added video as a separate section within the Google Search Console platform. We see this as a sign from Google to show the power and importance of video for the future of the search engine. Keep them under 30 seconds long to make sure that the file size isn’t too large.
Encourage reviews: Profiles with the most reviews tend to appear higher up when someone searches for your services. Ask your customers to give you reviews – this can really help you out (if they are positive, of course!).
Essentially, it’s all about keeping your profile up to date, giving as much information about your business as possible and keeping the positive reviews coming in.
How to Create a Post on Google Business Profile
In order to create a post on your Google Business Profile, simply make sure you’re logged in, Google the business name and scroll down a little. You should just see a large button allowing you to add a post.
Posts do have to be submitted manually, rather than scheduled – there is no way to schedule a post directly within Business Profile Manager, however there are various scheduling tools out there that can help with this.
How to rank higher on Google My Business
Ranking higher ties hand in hand with the optimisation tips we gave above. It’s all about keeping your information up to date, for example updating your hours during bank holidays or the festive period (Google often sends emails to prompt you to do this).
It’s also worth responding to your Google reviews and questions to show that you’re active, even if it’s just to say thank you.
Your website’s position in the SERP also determines how high up you will show in the listings, so general SEO for your website ties into this and is very important for more competitive search terms.
We like to use Brightlocal to help with building efforts. Brightlocal describe themselves as an ‘all-in-one local SEO, citations and reviews platform’. Within the software you can build citations (linking to your GBP) that can help with your rankings. Depending on the level of membership you have, it can also integrate with your social media profiles and Google Analytics.
My Google Business Profile got Suspended. What now?
Google may suspend Business Profiles that go against their guidelines. Breaching the guidelines includes, but is not limited to:
Promoting fraudulent or illegal activities
Low-quality content, e.g. misspelling or gibberish
Content containing swearing/offensive language
Focusing on special promotions, e.g. saying that everything is on sale or constantly saying that your products are 50% off
There are two types of suspensions: a soft suspension, where your listing is live but not verified (so you can’t manage and update it), and a hard suspension, where your listing doesn’t show up at all.
In October 2022 there was a major bug in the GBP system where hundreds of business owners had their Business Profiles suspended for no reason. Elizabeth Rule gives the following advice:
As we have seen recently with the suspension bug in GBP that there is not much, or anything, a business owner can do to prevent a suspension. There are things you can do to set yourself up for success to get the profile reinstated as quickly as possible if it does get suspended.
Here are some tips for Service Area Businesses to safeguard themselves in case they run into suspension issues:
Verify your service area GBP to an address you have business proof for. This proof can be utility bills in the business name, insurance certificates, business registration etc. You will need to have this proof if the profile is ever suspended or disabled. Even though your address is not visible, you need to provide proof to the address you verified the listing at to get reinstated.
Service Area Businesses should never use a virtual or shared space office to verify a listing. This is a clear violation of Google Guidelines as confirmed by Google in 2020.
Do not verify a GBP listing to an employee’s home. You may be able to get the listing live, but without valid business proof at the address you will never be able to get the listing reinstated if it gets suspended or disabled. Plus, if the employee ever leaves you have a listing verified to an address that you now have no connection to at all.
If you have multiple listings for the same business, make sure the service areas do not overlap. Even though the service area you add to the listing does not impact rankings, if you have two SAB listings with the same service area, Google considers this a violation of guidelines and one or both listings can be suspended.
Do not show your address if you are a pure Service Area Business. Even if the competition does or you think you can get away with it, if you ever need to contact support, they probably won’t help you if they notice you are an SAB with no signage that has the address showing.
Always make sure you have supporting documentation available in case of suspension; having it ready to submit with a reinstatement can cut down on the time your listing is offline.
Supporting documentation should provide a consistent story for the business (meaning the title and address, whether it shows or not). This could be insurance statements, a photo of the building with the logo of the business, your company registration number or similar. All should be from authoritative bodies, so usually not invoices.
Once you have submitted your evidence, it takes around three working days for Google to review and clear your request.
What are labels in Google My Business?
Labels in GBP are just for internal organisational purposes – outsiders can’t see them and they don’t help with rankings. They must be 50 characters or less.
The main reason you would use labels is if you have multiple different locations within GBP and want to quickly search for a profile. For example, if you’ve got coffee shops in Bolton, Manchester and Wigan all under the same name, you may want to just label them as these locations so that you can quickly search for them. It’s mainly for internal purposes.
How to add a Label into Google Business Profile
First, make sure you’re signed into Google, navigate to the Business Profile section and click ‘See Your Profile’. You’ll then be taken to the SERP with a summary of your profile. Click the three dots above the summary and select ‘Business Profile Settings’.
Then click ‘Advanced Settings’.
You can then add labels onto your profile.
How to delete a Google My Business listing
There are multiple reasons you may want to delete a Business Profile, for example if you are selling the business, rebranding, or perhaps the listing is an accidental duplicate. You can also leave the listing live but mark it as permanently closed.
It’s worth noting that the removal of a Business Profile is permanent. If you want to manage the profile again you’ll need to re-verify it again using the steps mentioned earlier on.
You don’t have to actually manage a business to remove it. Simply Google the name of your business/the business you want to remove, suggest an edit and click ‘Close or remove’, then follow the instructions on screen. This is where you would mark as permanently closed if the business is shutting down.
How to add Social Media to my Google My Business
There is no way to directly add your social media profiles to your Business Profile, however if they’re linked to on your website, Google may add them in this way.
If people are using the knowledge graph schema to add social profiles etc. on their websites this should pick up the social profiles much easier and show them in the “knowledge” panel for the brand/company. Rank Math’s helpful guide can assist you with this.
What are Attributes for Google My Business?
‘Attributes’ are various additional details that you can add to your profile in order to help potential customers further, for example detailing whether you offer outdoor dining or free WiFi. This can help you show up for more search terms, e.g. ‘Restaurants with free WiFi in Bolton’.
You can directly add these in, however many also come from your reviews, e.g. if your customers mention that you’re vegan friendly, this may appear as an attribute on your profile.
How to add Attributes to Google My Business
Navigate to Business Profile Manager and select Edit Profile, then Business Information. Select ‘More’ at the top.
Below is an example from one of our clients who owns a physical shop. You can see that they have detailed the sort of crowd that shops there, accessibility details, if the business is woman-owned, what sort of payments they accept etc.
Can you call the Google My Business team for support?
Google removed phone numbers from their support pages in 2019, so unfortunately there’s no way to call them directly now.
For support queries it’s best to go directly through their support page. From there you can select which profile you need help with, what the issue is and your contact options.
Whether you’re a small business trying to optimise your site for organic traffic, or you’re already a well-established business with a large website, it can be difficult knowing where to start with an SEO audit.
In this guide, we’ll explain the factors to consider before starting an SEO audit, allowing business owners, directors and more to understand how the process should work.
What is an SEO audit?
An SEO audit is the process of outlining and establishing any problems or errors which could impact organic traffic, potentially preventing your site from ranking highly on search engines like Google or Bing.
Why would you invest in an SEO audit?
Two of the main reasons why you should be investing in SEO audit services are because a well-optimised website will perform much better in organic search, and because search engines also change their algorithms on a regular basis.
If you don’t keep your SEO up to date, you could be missing out on a significant amount of search engine traffic, as well as any attention from potential customers.
What tools will you need before conducting an SEO audit?
In order to conduct an SEO audit, there are a few tools you’ll need. These include:
SEO software: These include software such as Ahrefs, Moz Pro, Screaming Frog and SEMrush, which will crawl your site to determine its general health. They will also look for inefficiencies that are dragging down your site’s organic performance.
Google Search Console: There are many ways to use this tool for SEO auditing, including finding issues and/or opportunities in respect to keywords, organic click-through rates, technical fixes and submitting any pages for indexing that you have newly optimised.
Google Analytics: The whole point of SEO is to improve traffic to your site, and so you will need analytics to measure the impact of your actions. This will also help you to prioritise pages which are dropping off.
7 factors to consider before starting an SEO audit
Before getting started on a SEO audit, it’s important that you understand the factors that need to be evaluated.
Research competitors
An SEO audit should only be conducted after your competitors have been thoroughly researched. You should be looking at how they attract organic traffic for different keywords.You can conduct competitor analysis by finding their keywords, estimating monthly search traffic, their domain authority, inbound links and estimating the value of search traffic.
Compare these numbers side by side with yours to find the gaps between yourself and the competition. This will help you find areas that require improvement on your own site.
Crawling and indexing
An SEO analysis is not complete without checking for any crawling and indexing issues. Crawling refers to how search engines skim and understand your content, and indexing is the storing and organisation of this information by search engines.Understanding how crawling and indexing works could help you to optimise your site for better results. You can use Google Search Console to check your site has been crawled and indexed.
Website accessibility
Every SEO checklist should include ensuring that a website isn’t disadvantaged by issues of accessibility. Website visitors may run into several issues when accessing specific pages, such as 404 errors or low loading speeds.You can use Google Search Console for basic insights into your website accessibility, but make sure that you take note of each error that arises.
Ease of use of your website falls under the category of accessibility, so make sure that the structure of your website is easy to navigate for visitors.
Keyword analysisAlthough you may have already looked at a few keywords whilst conducting a competitor analysis, keyword analysis should really be a key focus of your auditing process.
You should be using software such as Google adWords and Ahrefs to look at keywords and examine the capabilities, popularity and total visits for specific terms.
On-page SEO reviewOn-page SEO refers to everything on-site, such as content, headings and meta tags to target keywords. It can also include adding alt-attributes to images, creating internal links and designing a responsive design for desktop and mobile devices.
All of the above will send signals to search engines and users that your site serves a purpose, is functional and up to date. It is key to have these elements in line so you stand out in a crowded market.
Website link analysisUnderstanding how your website connects with other authority sites is essential, as it immensely affects your optimisation efforts.
An in depth link analysis should not only focus on your internal links, but your external ones too. Internal links direct visitors to different pages on your website, whereas external links, or backlinks, lead users from another site to your site.
Backlinks carry a lot of weight, so you should ensure that they are adding value.
Content evaluationContent evaluation is the process of examining a website’s content for factors which can either boost or deter organic traffic. You should be evaluating your content from the perspective of a search engine, and user.
Content evaluation will help you to detect duplicate content that has been used, such as in titles, introductions or keywords. This is vital for creating a useful strategy in your SEO audit.
What to consider during an SEO audit
Once you’ve actually started your SEO audit, there are a few things you should review and consider. These include:
Load time: Site speed is crucial in providing good user experience. If a website is too slow, it can negatively impact overall SEO performance.
Security: A HTTPS encryption on your site can play an important role in how Google ranks your site, as it will show your website is trustworthy and secure.
Site structure: Another crucial aspect of user experience is an easy-to-navigate site structure. Navigation is helpful for site visitors looking for information on your website, as well as providing a path for search engine crawlers to find new content for indexing.
Mobile readiness: If your website doesn’t have a mobile friendly design or version, it makes it difficult to access content and links in mobile view. It may also load slowly for mobile site visitors, causing your search rankings to take a hit.
If you are considering an SEO audit, or are actively working on one but could use some support, our team can help. Our SEO auditing services are fully tailored to your website and needs.
Alternatively, get in touch with us if you think you’d benefit from some consultancy from our expert Technical SEO team.
Technical SEO Audits: How do they Work?
A fully functional, user-friendly website is one of the most important elements of a healthy business; but, just having a website is simply not enough, it must rank well on search engine result pages too.
This is where a technical SEO audit can help. With rapid changes in the industry, it is vital your website is the best it can be.
What is a technical SEO audit?
A technical SEO audit is a process that examines various technical elements of a website to ensure they are following the best search operation practices.
A technical audit is an imperative part of site maintenance, and it will check if a site is optimised properly for search engines including Google, Bing and Yahoo.
This includes making sure there are no issues related to crawlability or indexation that could prevent search engines from allowing your site to appear on result pages.
Is a Technical SEO Audit different to an SEO Audit?
A technical SEO audit is simply just a type of SEO audit, except it focuses on the issue related to your website that happens behind the scenes. It is work done on the website besides from the content that is displayed.
Technical SEO is what enables search engines, like Google, to perform indexing and crawling of websites in search of new content.
When should you perform a technical SEO audit?
Ideally, you should have a technical SEO audit when a new site is made, or when you are thinking of investing in more online marketing. Once a site is live and an initial audit has been completed and actioned, you should look to have a mini audit completed every 4 to 6 months, depending on the size of the website.
If you aren’t regularly checking your website’s health, you could put yourself at risk of losing traffic to your competitors. Google also keeps updating its algorithms every year, so it’s important you stay informed about the current trends.
By performing a few technical SEO audits a year, you can figure out what is and isn’t working for your site, as well as identifying areas which need improvement.
What is on-site SEO?
On-site SEO is the practice of optimising elements on your website in order to rank higher and earn more relevant search traffic.
It can include:
Optimising your titles and metadata
Formatting your text properly (use of heading tags, H1/H2/H3, correctly)
Checking your content for uniqueness, grammar and formatting
Updating content regularly
Identifying broken links and internal linking opportunities
Checking your images for accurate descriptions and ALT-text
How do you know if your website requires a technical SEO audit?
There are a few different key signs that your site needs a technical SEO audit:
Your search rankings have fallen: If your Google visits have dried up and you can’t figure out why, it’s best to find out sooner rather than later. Just moving from the first page to the second on Google, can result in a loss of thousands of visits per week. It’s likely that this will result in a loss in leads, which can affect your sales.
You’ve launched a new website and want to check it is built correctly: If you’ve just had your site redesigned, but you aren’t sure how well it has been built, now is a good time for a technical SEO audit. Using an experienced team will mean issues can be discovered early on and the problems can be solved.
You aren’t 100% sure you’ve caught everything: Many marketers are good at finding keywords, tweaking content and ordering citations, but it can be difficult to see other issues with the naked eye. In that case, it’s best to have a technical SEO audit to look for well hidden problems.
What can you expect from an SEO audit?
Once you’ve outlined the reasons why you may need a technical SEO audit, there are a few different problems which you may discover during an audit.
Internal or external links that don’t have a valid destination
Links to pages that can’t be crawled
Page resources that incorrectly redirect away from your site
Different forms of duplicate content
Special characters that cant be read or indexed properly
Hidden files or access issues
Missing titles, metas and heading tags
Incorrect formatting in text or images
This is by no means an exhaustive list, and there may be other issues that arise.
However, when you look at the issues above, you may begin to understand how they can cause damage to visibility, marketing and inbound lead generation.
What do you need before an SEO audit is completed?
There isn’t much that you’d need to provide before having an SEO audit. In order for a technical audit to run smoothly, you would likely need to provide:
Website admin access
Google Search Console access
Any analytics access that you already have
Any previous, relevant site data
A brief overview of your site, its purpose and functionality
An explanation as to what you want to achieve from a technical audit
How is a technical SEO audit conducted?
Follow the steps below to find out how to conduct a technical SEO audit:
Start by crawling your website. Every technical SEO should start by crawling your website. This will help you find errors such as broken links, poor images, page title issues and missing text.
Review sitemaps. The sitemap of your website is extremely important as it can inform the search engines about your website structure. It is essential to have a sitemap for getting your SEO strategy correct.
Check the browsable versions of your website. You should be ensuring that the browsable versions of your site are actually browsable. If you have different versions of your website, this can result in mixed signals being sent to the search engine. The crawlers will be confused about which site is the correct one. The technical SEO audit should make sure that only one version of your website is browsable.
Check internal links. Logical hierarchy in your website can massively help your search rankings, which is why you should be checking internal and external links. Web pages can also be moved or deleted, causing broken links, so it’s worth checking this too.
Test the site’s speed. Your site’s speed is an extremely important parameter when it comes to technical SEO. People don’t like waiting for pages to load, and the longer it takes, the more likely that the visitors might bounce.
Do a backlink audit. Backlinks are vital for the success of your website, so it’s no surprise that they are part of a technical SEO audit. They show search engines how valuable your content is for the user.
Re-crawl your website.
Once the issues in the technical SEO audit have been outlined, you can re-crawl your website. This will ensure the changes you’ve made are being taken into account straight away.
What tools are used in a technical SEO audit?
Online SEO tools are used in a technical audit to allow a site to be crawled, data to be collected and categorised, missing areas to be flagged and statistics to be created.
A technical SEO audit on a site can be performed using a range of online SEO tools, such as:
Google Search Console
Screaming Frog
Ahrefs
Moz
SEMrush
Key elements of technical SEO auditing
Tracking the issues you find will help you outline some of the key elements to focus on.
Some of these elements may include:
Making sure your content is visible
Ensuring your analytics is set up
Checking for canonicalisation
Checking for mobile friendliness
Scanning your site for 404s
Checking your sitemap is visible
Checking for suspicious backlinks
Security issues
Checking for schema markup
Why is technical SEO important?
Technical SEO is important because it essentially ensures that your website is user friendly, easy to use and free of any technical issues that prevent it from being ranked by search engines.
You should be implementing technical SEO into your strategy in order to attract organic traffic and turn that traffic into customers.
Technical SEO can be difficult to understand and implement. That’s why the team at Tao Digital are here – we can perform a technical SEO audit for you, and run through the findings in an easy-to-understand format.
From there, we can work on implementing key changes to your website to ensure that it is performing at its best.
Email marketing is great for anyone looking to expand their reach to customers and prospects alike.
It has become progressively more difficult over the years as spam filters get wise to marketing emails, but done right it can be a highly effective marketing tool.
In this guide we will discuss some of the basics to help you start moving your email marketing in the right direction and turn it into a profitable channel for your business.
Email Marketing: How and When
When you send your emails, the timing is so important. Get this wrong and you could see no interaction at all or mass unsubscribe from your hard-earned lists.
Bear in mind though, most email platforms like Active Campaign will bill you by the number of email addresses you have in your platform.
Sometimes it might be better to let some go who are never going to interact. They’re costing you money, lowering your open rates and potentially hiking up your spam rates too.
Best day or time of the week for email marketing
If you run a bar or restaurant, you’ll likely see better returns from your email on a Thursday or Friday as people get in the mood for the weekend.
A B2B company would normally find a Tuesday works great, but it’s well worth testing this as you never know. The different industry quirks can mean better open rates on other days.
Within eCommerce, the best day will always be pay day, which is normally the last Friday of the month in the UK.
How often to send emails
This always depends on the industry you are in and what the subscribers on your list are happy with.
It is so important to test these factors to make sure you aren’t losing subscribers due to not being active enough. On the flip side, being too active can annoy people with too much communication and lead to unsubscribers too.
That being said, we always recommend starting off with either monthly or fortnightly emails before starting to increase the velocity of your sends. This is purely down to making sure your subscribers don’t suddenly feel overwhelmed with the number of emails you send and head for the hills, in this instance hit the unsubscribe button or even worse, “mark as spam”.
Through trial and error you’ll be sure to find the sweet spot for the frequency of emails. You can even set up automations to create weekly/bi weekly emails. We do this within ClickUp – you can read about it here.
Best image size for email marketing
The answer to this is an SEO’s favourite saying – “It Depends”.
According to Campaign Monitor, they use an email header image of 960px wide. This is due to the vast number of email clients there are in the world to open emails along with the fact most email clients are now fully responsive. Their email builder supports images of up to 20MB in size.
Active Campaign recommends you keep your image between 400 and 650 pixels wide. This completely depends on the layout you choose, however – some may be square images, some much wider. The maximum file size they recommend is 5mb.
Again, with Klaviyo, the image specifications depend on the design you choose. Like Active Campaign, the maximum file size they recommend is 5mb, however they recommend using less than 1mb where possible to avoid slow loading time.
Mailchimp recommends an even smaller guide of 1mb for all images.
What is a Good CTR for Email Marketing?
Again, this depends on your industry. Overall, a click through rate of around 2-5% is considered to be good. Mailchimp has a great table of average open rate and click through rate by industry, you can check it out here.
Click through rate can be improved in various ways, for example:
Making buttons or call to actions (CTAs) obvious
Improving your design, making it easy to show what you want readers to do or where you want to draw their attention to
Use powerful phrases in your CTAs, for example ‘save, start, now, join, win, exclusive’.
Best Practices for Email Marketing
In order to be successful, it’s essential to follow best practices. Here are some tips:
Ensure your list is opt-in: This is one of the most important rules of email marketing. If you don’t have permission from your subscribers, you could be facing spam complaints, unsubscribes, and even legal battles. Always make sure people have the option to subscribe to your list and that they are aware of what they’re signing up for.
Send relevant content: Don’t send your subscribers information that isn’t relevant to them. If they opt-in to your email list, they want to hear from you. Send them information that will interest them and help them in their everyday lives.
Personalise your copy: Personalise your copy with the subscriber’s name or other personal details. This makes them feel like you’re talking directly to them, increasing the chances that they’ll read your emails and take action.
Keep your messages short: Most people are busy and don’t have time to read long emails. Keep your email messages short, concise and to the point so they can be easily read and understood.
Use a clear subject line: Your subscribers should be able to quickly understand what the email is about by reading the subject line. Make sure it accurately reflects the email’s content so that subscribers don’t get confused or decide not to open it.
Test different types of copy: Not all copy works for everyone. Try different types of email copy to see what works best for your subscribers. This could include videos, images, articles, or even infographics.
Use A/B testing: A/B testing is a great way to see which email copy and subject lines are most effective with your audience. Test different versions of each to see which gets the best results.
Optimise your emails for mobile devices: More than half of all emails are now opened on mobile devices, so ensure your emails are optimised for these devices. Use a responsive design or ensure your text is easily read on a small screen.
Track your results: It’s important to track the results of your email marketing campaigns so you can see what’s working and what isn’t. Use analytics tools to track things like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.
Use a reputable email service provider: Using a reputable email service provider will help ensure that your emails reach their destination and that they look great no matter what device they’re viewed on.
Use images sparingly: Too many images can slow down the loading time of your email and may cause spam filters to block the email.
Ensure your links work properly: Broken links can be frustrating for customers and may cause them to unsubscribe from your list.
Test your email before sending it: It’s always a good idea to test your email on different browsers and devices before sending it out to ensure that it looks correct and functions appropriately.
Use a responsive design template: A responsive design template will automatically adjust the size of your email to fit the device it’s being viewed on, ensuring a good user experience regardless of the device someone uses.
Segment your list: Segmenting your list allows you to send targeted content to specific groups of customers, increasing the likelihood that they will open and read your emails.
Subject Line Tips
Subject lines are arguably one of the most important factors in email marketing. While it may only seem like a small part of your message, they are the very first impression you have on your recipients. This is why it is so important to craft a subject line which is compelling enough to get people to click through.
Here are some tips for successful subject lines:
Learn by example. Seeing clever word plays or emojis is one of the best ways to get you thinking about how you could alter your subject line to be more compelling. Sign up to the newsletters of competitors in your industry and see what tactics they are using.
Keep it short and sweet. Email subject lines can be cut off if they’re too long, especially on mobile devices. Try to make your subject line 50 characters or less to ensure people scanning your email read the entire message.
Avoid ‘no-reply’ send names. Thanks to the amount of spam people get these days, many people will ignore or delete email with an address like ‘noreply@company.com’. It makes the email less personable and prevents people from adding the email to their address book.
Don’t make false promises. Your subject line is used to make promises to your reader about what your message will be. Make sure you are making a good commitment, and try not to get your email opened by false promises. This may bother your audience and they’ll lose trust in your subject lines.
Don’t shy away from humour. Most people love a good pun, and it’s a great way to spice up your recipients emails. Don’t go overboard, but think of small ways you can incorporate humour into your subject lines.
UK Email Marketing Law
When you send emails for marketing purposes, you must be compliant with UK email marketing laws outlined in the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR).
These rules outline specific things you must include in your marketing emails, such as disclosing your identity and providing a valid email address to all recipients.
The PECR also covers:
Use of cookies or similar tracking technologies
Any form of electronic communication made for marketing, including text messages and emails
To make sure the communication service providers are secure, including customer privacy-directory listings, location-based data and other identifiers.
Under the General Data Protection Rule (GDPR), recipients can prevent companies from accessing their personal data, which is any information related to an identifiable person.
The seven principles of the GDPR include: fairness; lawfulness and transparency; purpose limitation;data minimisation; accuracy; integrity and confidentiality; and storage limitation.
Under the GDPR, an individual’s consent is considered as a critical aspect. The consent can either be expressed or implied freely by the individual.
Here are some tips to make sure your emails align with the UK laws:
Identify your emails as an advert. This can be as simple as having a clear subject line indicating the purpose of your email, such as phrases like “discounts this week”.
Make sure you have permission from your recipients.
Include your business details such as a postal address.
Give importance to the unsubscribe requests. The opt-out process should be made as uncomplicated as possible and done within 10 business days.
Pros and Cons of Email Marketing
As with all methods of marketing, there are positives and negatives to both.
Pros:
Lead generation: Emails are an incredibly powerful form of lead generation and can lead to sales.
Segmentation: You can segment, tag or create lists for the exact kind of audiences you want depending on their interests. This is especially useful for eCommerce businesses who may offer products for a variety of different audiences, e.g. a footwear business that sells mens, womens and kids shoes. By segmenting them, you can avoid sending irrelevant emails to your main list and avoid unsubscribers.
Advertising directly to your audience: Other forms of advertising, such as social media, may not get directly in front of those who like or follow you due to the different algorithms on each platform, however with emails you are directly in their inbox.
Opting in: These people have opted in and WANT to hear from you. This is much different to other forms of advertising, such as paid socials, where you may not always be relevant to the audience.
Access to valuable analytics: There are so many analytics you can access that can give in-depth insights into your audience, such as the best times to send emails, which subject lines are working best, where your subscribers come from, how many times links are clicked in the emails and by who, how many sales have been made, etc.
Can be easy to build a list with competitions: There are a few incredibly easy ways to build your email marketing list. One way that has worked really well for our clients is via holding competitions where entrants enter their emails to enter. Through just a few social media posts for our client, Hirst Footwear, we generated over 700 email subscribers – you can read the case study here.
Cons:
Can be costly for small businesses: Startups and SMEs may find that some email marketing platforms are out of their budget until they have the financial backing and resources to see a return on investment.
Can take time to understand platforms and segmentation: If you’re a newbie to email marketing, it can take some time to get your head around using different platforms. If you get stuck and your email provider’s guides aren’t much help, some email providers can take up to a week to respond to an issue.
Can get caught in spam: If you suddenly receive a lot of spam complaints, some email providers can automatically filter you into your subscriber’s spam folders, rendering your efforts ineffective.
Design issues: Some email marketing platforms have an easier design interface than others. There can be limitations on some platforms, e.g. not being able to change the colour of buttons or images not aligning without having to edit code.
Can take a while to find a balance between sales and messaging: It’s important to find that ‘Goldilocks Spot’ of your messaging – not too many pushy sales emails and not too many blogs/advice. Striking the balance will depend on your industry and how your subscribers respond, which can be determined by your CTR.
Summary
The more hands on you get with your email marketing, the more efficient you’ll become. Although it may feel overwhelming at first, following the steps above will help your campaigns achieve success.
The more you learn what resonates with your audience, the more you can scale your marketing goals and deliver meaningful messages that will drive results.
What is an SEO Audit?
If you’re looking to improve your website from a technical perspective, but are intimidated by the thought of uncovering all of your site’s issues, don’t be!
With the right professional help, you’ll soon be rising past your competitors and attracting more traffic.
In this guide, we’ll explain the in’s and out’s of an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) audit, allowing business owners, directors, marketing managers and more to understand the steps necessary to optimising a website.
An SEO Audit is the process of outlining and analysing potential problems or errors that will most impact organic performance, potentially preventing your site from ranking highly on search engines such as Google and Bing.
There are a few key parts which make up an SEO audit, including:
Checking your site for for on-page SEO problems
Analysing the strength of current on-site, off-site and core technical elements
Ensuring your site is being correctly crawled, indexed and rendered by Google
Verifying that your site has good user experience (UX)
Why would you need an SEO Audit?
One of the most important reasons to utilise SEO audit services is the fact that search engines change their algorithms on a regular basis.
It is vital that you keep your SEO strategy up to date, otherwise, you could be missing out on a significant amount of search engine traffic, as well as attention from potential customers.
Below are several reasons why an SEO audit would be necessary for your business online:
Webmaster guidelines: Popular webmaster tools from search engines are continually changing, so you need to make sure you’re compliant.
Algorithm changes: As we’ve mentioned, search engines are constantly changing their algorithms to provide better search results. You need to be aware of these changes so you can update your site content accordingly.
Outdated content: You may have content on your site that is outdated. It’s important to provide fresh content to search engines to give them a reason to come back.
Damaging elements: There may be some technical elements to your site that are actively harming your organic rankings. Core issues, such as broken links, duplicate content, unoptimised pages and poor site speed, can have significant negative impact.
What is an SEO audit tool?
SEO audit tools are used to make the work of Search Engine Optimisation much easier – auditors do not need to spend valuable time doing manual checks on every web page, as the tools help you to identify the problems on your website and categorise them for further, crucial analysis.
Many SEO audit tools can examine your sites health, recognising technical issues and critical errors such as broken links and redirects, which can harm your sites rankings.
Most Technical SEO agencies will utilise SEO auditing tools to allow them to spend more time analysing, proposing and fixing core site issues, which is what will bring businesses the most value.
What does an SEO Audit include?
While SEO audits may vary slightly, each one should analyse basic technical SEO elements such as sitemaps, server errors and metadata.
Some audits may also include indexation, optimisation and accessibility. Every SEO audit should include technical and on-page audits.
An SEO audit varies depending on website size, quality and issues found; the core elements of data gathering and analysis typically takes around 6 weeks.
During this time, a Technical SEO expert will be analysing and uncovering technical issues and opportunities on your website.
During an audit, there may be a few low-hanging opportunities to be discovered and acted on. This gives you the opportunity to recover visibility whilst the remainder of the audit is being carried out.
After the audit has been completed, you will receive a full comprehensive report of your site’s health, which is fully customised to you and your specific situation. Further actions can then be decided upon, depending on how severe the issues are found to be.
How are SEO Audit results analysed?
Analysing your SEO results can take some time, and there are many factors involved.
A technical SEO expert will run through an audit once complete, categorising key issues in terms of priority, current harm to the site, difficulty of repair and time required.
It would then be down to the business to decide how to proceed, but if you are considering analysing and working through an SEO audit yourself, following a checklist can help you to run through your SEO audit and ensure that you are working towards optimising your site efficiently.
For technical optimisation, you should be:
Actively working to fix high-risk issues
Working through any redirects
Working on issues found through Robots.txt files and the site map
Removing or altering any harmful, pages, links and content
Optimising core SEO elements in the back-end of your site
Setting up any missed analytics
Adding in missed elements, such as page schema
For on-page optimisation, you should be:
Researching top performing keywords
Creating a content plan including these keywords
Optimising titles, meta descriptions and headings
Writing original, long form, well optimised and well researched content
Adding internal links
Making your content easy to scan
For off-page optimisation, you should be:
Evaluating your backlinks
Looking at your competitors backlinks
Improving your internal linking
Fixing broken links
Finding link building opportunities
Posting your content on social media, if relevant
Generating backlinks with guest blogs
Depending on the results of an SEO audit, there may be a lot of work to be done. The work on core, on-site technical issues should come first, as without a technically sound website, your future marketing efforts, no matter the scale, will have far less of an impact.
Further work on content production, links and PR will all be backed up by a well-optimised, technically-sound, fast, high performing website.
Google will be far more likely to rank content on a site that ticks all boxes when it comes to technical SEO, and link building and PR efforts will be easier when you have a great site to showcase.
Whether you choose to analyse and work on the issues found within an SEO audit yourself, then move forward with on-site and off-site work, or enlist the help of an SEO agency, the initial auditing services are vital to the progress and success of your business online.
The Six Best Free Design Tools for Entrepreneurs
Being an entrepreneur is no easy task, it takes serious effort, investment, and time. Keeping your overheads as minimal as possible is an important part of running the business, at least at the start of its life. There are, thankfully, a whole host of free design tools out there that you can use to kickstart your entrepreneurial journey.
Benefits of Using Free Design Tools
First of all, there’s the obvious reason that they’re free. There aren’t many people out there that don’t like free tools! The following tools are great for starting a business and the majority of them allow you to upgrade to unlock further features and tools. They’re essentially offering you a free trial with no time limit.
Using these free tools offers the major benefit that everyone in your team is able to use them, be perfectly aligned on production, and you don’t have to worry about purchasing extra seats if a new team member joins.
The beauty of the majority of these tools is that they’re all online-based, meaning that you can access them from any internet-enabled device, from anywhere, at any point. That’s a whole lot more convenient that having to download software onto a specific device.
Canva has rapidly become one of the world’s leading design tools for the entrepreneur market. Its easy-to-use accessible software makes it incredibly simple to create stunning artwork in seconds. If you’re not a graphic designer, Canva has everything you need to create branding for your business from business cards to videos, and infographics to logos. There are literally thousands of templates, all of which you’re able to use for your business.
The free version is extensive and has the majority of tools that the typical user will want to use. Upgrade to premium if you want access to a huge library of images, videos, and premium graphics, plus additional features such as background removers and animations. There’s also a handy mock-up tool, however it doesn’t work fantastically and sometimes stretches images, so you might want to consider Pixelied’s iPhone mockups tool as an alternative.
Within Wireframe.cc, you can create mock-ups of websites and apps easily within their online software and then share them with the team that will create them. It’s a great choice for when you want to retain some creative input without creating a website or app yourself.
Creating your brand takes time and effort, and a great deal of that time can be hunting around the internet for inspiration and similar effects or fonts that you’ve seen before. WhatTheFont takes some of the guesswork out of inspiration by helping you identify fonts and showing you where you can download them.
Simply take a screenshot of some text from a website, upload it to WhatTheFont, and within a few seconds, it will have either identified the font precisely or will offer you the closest alternatives that it can find.
Another great branding tool, but rather than focusing on fonts this one focuses on brand colours. In fact, it doesn’t even have to be used for branding, simply anything that requires a palette of colours.
Head to Coolors and load up their home screen, you’ll be presented with 5 random colours. If this is your first time using the site, start hammering the spacebar and you’ll see the colours change. Coolors aims to show you colours that complement each other and work well alongside each other.
If you already have some colours locked in, simply type in the # code and then hit the padlock to lock that colour in. You can also find shades of colours, check the contrast levels, favourite colours, and change the order.
It’s an incredible free tool, especially when combined with the export options so you can share your created palettes with your team.
Finding stock photos for your website, content, or social media is a bit of an onerous task, especially if you can’t find them affordably or without complicated royalty issues. This is where Unsplash makes life easy.
Unsplash is a huge library of free images taken by photographers (not necessarily professionals) from all around the world. The search engine lets you explore anything that you like, but relies on the photographer uploading using keywords in order to be found. Each image is free to download in a variety of images, they just ask that you name-drop the photographer or link to their portfolio (no obligation).
Finding out the codes of colours can be complicated if you don’t have extensive knowledge of pantones. Realistically, that’s a small segment of society. To make life easier, download the chrome extension Eye Dropper. When launched it turns your cursor into an eyedropper tool that allows you to pick any colour on any website, it’ll then tell you the specific hex code and RGB of that colour.
Key Takeaways
These free tools give you a superb base to build on, they’re certainly worth investigating before you dive into paying for more expensive paid tools. At least when you’re launching your business journey these tools will help you keep overheads considerably lower.
There’s no harm in trying these tools, and you’ll find they do almost everything similar paid tools will do.
Ensure you’re happy with the tool before upgrading to a paid version.
How we’re revamping the Simply Electricals website after acquisition
We’re excited to announce that we’ve acquired the digital assets from a well-established local business to help relaunch it as an electronics reviews and informational platform!
Simply Electricals willspecialise in honest, trustworthy and detailed online product reviews and updates to consumers through the new website, as well as providing a wealth of information to help consumers get the best out of their technology purchase.
The business, which until recently had a store not far from our offices in Bolton, has been operating for more than 70 years.
Simply Electricals will have the best, most experienced tech reviewers to help consumers make the choice that is best for them.
The website will feature a wide range of products, from coffee machines to the latest OLED TVs and popular brands, from Samsung to LG and Siemens.
Through the site we’ll offer expert advice and technical support via in-depth, quality reviews of a huge range of audio/visual equipment, along with domestic and commercial goods.
We want to help consumers feel confident in making the perfect choice to suit their needs when purchasing potentially expensive electronic items – this will help to reduce the risk of products being returned.
All the information provided is always accurate, honest and helpful, and this is even more important at the moment as people look very carefully to ensure that the limited money they have to spend is used in the most effective way possible.
Ruler Analytics: ‘How SEO became our best acquisition channel’
Laura Caveney, Head of Marketing at Ruler Analytics, has over six years of experience in digital marketing, working across digital content and SEO. She has worked in a variety of sectors, from the charity sector to the travel industry. Laura settled into Ruler in 2020 mid-pandemic to support the marketing team build on their current marketing strategy.
Here, she explains how SEO has become their best acquisition channel over the past couple of years.
Thank you for taking the time to chat with us! We love seeing examples of SEO becoming the best acquisition channel for businesses. Tell us why you decided to make this your main focus?
When I first joined Ruler, we were getting the majority of our inbound leads via partner referrals. While it was fantastic to have this resource and strong relationships with our agency partners, content and SEO felt like a huge opportunity to improve results.
The first job was assessing what we currently had and what was missing. Ruler had a small number of really high intent, middle-of-the-funnel blogs that were working well to drive demo enquiries.
When we looked over the content we had and compared it to the marketing funnel, we found we were missing content from the top and from bottom of the funnel. We know that many marketers aren’t aware of attribution or that it could be a solution to their problem. As such, there was a huge untapped opportunity there with keywords we could use to kickstart customer journeys.
Conversely, at the bottom of the funnel, we wanted to support current customers as well as those in the decision-making stage of the process to fully understand what Ruler was capable of and why it’s a better product than our competitors.
While we knew building our SEO would take a lot of time and effort, it was clear even just from the handful of blogs we already had driving demos, that it would be worth it.
How long have you been focusing on this?
Organic search has always been a priority for us and we have been making small waves of improvement incrementally. But, we really saw a shift after we realigned our strategy in January 2021. That’s where we found our feet in terms of content and SEO and started seeing amazing results.
Now, we regularly assess our content and our strategy and shift to ensure that organic traffic grows month on month.
Talk us through your strategy over the years. Has anything shifted through trial and testing?
When I first joined Ruler, the aim of the game was to just write more content. We got through a lot of blogs, and while traffic went up, there wasn’t a huge shift in traffic.
We assessed what we had done and looked critically at what types of content we were creating and who they were aimed at. We found that a lot of our content was very top-of-the-funnel heavy. And, we were popping in demo CTAs left, right and centre and hoping they would stick.
So, we decided to split out our content strategy into three funnel stages and we defined six content pillars. We went through all of our current blogs and applied each to the relevant stage and pillar.
This exercise left us with clear gaps in our content that made it easy for us to see what was missing. From there, we researched keywords and titles that would fit the gaps that were left and got to work.
While we created huge numbers of new blogs, we also capitalised on the SEO goodness of existing content. It took a year to get through our rewrites but we’re now in a position where we can do short, snappy updates and get our content into top rankings with much less effort.
Our final focus for content in 2021 was creating data-driven pieces of content. We found highly relevant keyword opportunities and created our own data. Whether that was using the data from our product or tapping into our community, we were able to create strong, relevant statistics that other marketers would find interesting.
This helped in two ways. First, we were creating highly-optimised content that was ranking well. And second, users were landing on our data and linking back to it. As such, our domain rating increased from 55 to 69 in a year with very minimal work on backlinking.
Now, for 2022, we’re shifting again. We’ve nailed our SEO process, but now, we want to expand out into thought leadership. While our SEO content is working great at driving new inbound traffic, what we’re missing is the key to getting more people to stay.
So this year, we’re going to share more data still. Our own tests and successes as marketers, plus insights to what we’ve learned during our time in marketing. I’m excited to see where this latest shift takes us.
How have you found the process so far?
The process has been a long slog but our traffic has increased by nearly 300% from December 2020 to January 2022. And that year of hard work has put us in good stead to diversify our traffic while knowing that we can expect fairly consistent levels of organic traffic month on month.
Some months we were writing 20 blogs between just two of us and at the time, it was hard to believe that that hard work would be worth it. And while getting through that big push of content was difficult, it’s got us to a really good base of organic traffic now that we can improve on and optimise.
SEO is definitely a long-term game, but the rewards are so worth it. What advice would you give to others in a similar position in terms of timeline expectations?
Stick at it. The hard work is worth it in the end. There were times in 2020 when I felt like I couldn’t write another word. But, by getting through a big content shift like that, you just don’t know where you could end up. And just know, while it feels like all that effort is futile in the moment, in three to six months it’ll pay dividends.
Do you have any future plans for increasing SEO focuses, or perhaps focusing on other areas?
Yes, we’re looking to continue creating data that is useful and valuable. And we’ll always keep our ear to the ground. We’re very lucky to be able to use an attribution tool as part of our regular reporting.
With it, we can see the levels of traffic blogs are getting and how that’s translating into leads and sales. Even better is that we can see how organic search is informing customer journeys. Whether it’s from a first-click view of a blog or last-click conversion, we can definitively prove the impact of our content. This insight helps us understand a blog’s role in the customer journey, better plan for future content, plus tweak existing content.
It’s been particularly useful from a CRO perspective too as it shows us if a blog is getting high traffic but low conversions, or vice versa. That gives us clear actions when it comes to rewriting and updating existing content.
Ahead, we want to use this inbound traffic to develop our email offering. We love the idea of creating a community and want to use our success in dominating niche keywords to better support marketers with attribution, lead tracking and more.
