what is in @rob's SEO audit?
6 Layers
61 Data Sources
1470 Metrics
138 Audit Factors
30 Aligned Goals
420 Audit Checks
Six layers of marketAIng
Rob Bertholf’s layered framework brings a holistic approach to modern marketing, aligning to the "practitioners journey".
Historically, marketing strategies have been contained in silos, such as marketing verticals. Detached from the larger picture, focus was put on separating marketing efforts into individual channels like social media, PR, website design, or email marketing. This creates blind spots between silos for everyone involved from practitioners, to agencies, to business owners.
The six-layered approach deconstructs various marketing channels and rearranges the strategy into a logical and practical order. By working your way through each layer, you will more thoroughly understand digital marketing as well as the connections between each vital layer and what impacts each. In today’s modern marketing world, you need all six layers to form a truly comprehensive strategy.
Our recommendations engine places a score for each layer to understand where to focus resources in order to achieve a balanced marketing profile.
* click on each of the tabs below to explore the 6 layers! *
Branding is the foundation of all marketing and is the first of @Rob's six layers of modern digital marketing. Often avoided and underestimated, branding is the process of creating an emotional connection with your audience and differentiating your business from other offerings.To some, branding may seem elusive and overpriced, but developing a strong foundation in branding will increase the effectiveness of all other marketing activities. No matter your digital marketing discipline, branding plays a key role in your ultimate success. As a web designer, having a well-defined brand practically creates the website for you. As a search marketer, a well-defined brand gives you the research and assets needed to quickly gain visibility and build authority. As a content or social marketer, having a well-defined brand provides the framework, backstory, and storytelling needed for targeted and consistent communication. The branding layer will help you establish a brand that is clearly identified by your audience and clearly differentiated from your competitors. This includes why you exist, your verbal and visual identity, how you’re seen by your customers, and how to live out your brand both in the real world and online. DIY:DIFM’s Brand Vault will help you establish, manage, and store each of your brand assets.
The following factors are related to the Brand layer of the audit. Factors with a Primary badge indicate that it is most closely related to this Layer, but may also be found in other areas of the audit.
Branded Queries Primary
When doing a search for a branded search term, it is recommended to control as many of the search engine results as possible, at a minimum the first page of results.
Branded Search Rankings Primary
Branded keywords or search terms are searches for your brand name and products. These checks show how well your branded search term rank in the SERP.
Branded Search Performance Primary
When analyzing the branded search term, how do they perform in the SERP.
AutoComplete Primary
Autocomplete (or autosuggest) refers to the search suggestions that appear as you type a query into the search box. These are more accurately described as "predictions" based on actual search history of the most common searches relevant to a given query. This is important to monitor in order to understand how your brand is being mentioned.
Related Searches Primary
Similar to autocomplete, related searches are predictions based on actual search history of the most common searches relevant to a given query but do not contain the original query. This is important to monitor in order to understand how your brand is being mentioned as this can be hijacked or unwanted results may appear.
Reviews Primary
The following is a high level overview of how your brand is positioned in the search engines. While this may seem unrelated to an SEO audit, review signals actually account for as much as 10% of the local ranking factors. While most reviews cannot be removed after being posted (although you should try!) you should, at the very least, post a response which is apologetic or empathetic. It's a good practice to respond to all reviews. It shows you are engaged with your customers and care about customer service.
Local Optimization Primary
Local optimization is important for businesses that serve a specific geographic area, especially if customers visit your business. It ensures your business gets found in maps and for search terms specific to your location and "near me."
Contact Details Consistency Primary
To avoid customers confusion it is important to keep contact details, opening times and address consistent across all assets such as website, social media profiles and directories.
Employer Reviews Primary
Negative, possibly fake or lying, reviews by digruntled ex-employees might shine a bad light on the business. Monitoring the most common and well ranked review websites is important.
Trusted Sources Primary
Customers often turn to trusted websites such as RipoffReport or Better Business Bureau to form an opinion about your business.
Wikipedia Primary
Wikipedia is one of the top 10 websites worldwide. A backlink or even a branded article (if relevance criterias are met) further strengthen your online reputation and relevance. Have a Wikipedia page built out citing any national/international press or citations from well known publications. Google will leverage this structured data to improve your search results.
Registry Primary
While search engines like Google may not weight the age of a domain name as a key factor in how trustworthy a website is, as a best practice if you accidentally let your domain expiration lapse it can be a very costly mistake.
Typosquatting Primary
In some cases over 50% of the traffic intended to go to the target domain name actually is mis-spelled and is sent to another domain name. Examples are gogle.com instead of google.com etc. This is referred to as typosquatting. Be cautious of scammers who buy up misspellings of your domain name to then sell competing products or services.
Available Domains Primary
Sometimes possible typosquatting domains are available to purchase and it may be wise to register them so that your competitors do not.
Email Primary
Certain authentication methods can help reducing unauthorized use, most commonly email spoofing and spam.
Malware Primary
Malware is malicious software that can infect the user's computer through the browser and potentially cause security warnings in the user's browser so they are unable to open the website.
Injected Spam Primary
Attackers often find ways to inject spam links into template files or into the database, so they appear on every page load. They are usually invisible to humans but visible to search engines.
Defacements Primary
A defacement is an attack on a website that changes the visual appearance of a website. A website that is partly offline or displays spam, offensive or illegal content can impact your brands reputation.
Theme
Goal Tracking
The Technical Layer utilizes tech to help you work smarter, not harder. It is the second of @Rob's six layers of modern digital marketing. The technical components of your marketing strategy play an incredibly important role in helping you reach your overall digital marketing goals. Tech is one of the most critical and most neglected areas of optimization because if key technical issues are not corrected, your website may not receive credit for all the other work you may be doing. The Technical Layer will add clarity to the tech you could be using or are currently using to leave you with a strong understanding of all that is technologically possible. This includes server/platform load times, content architecture, tracking analytics, 3rd party services, machine readability, and automation tools.
The following factors are related to the Technical layer of the audit. Factors with a Primary badge indicate that it is most closely related to this Layer, but may also be found in other areas of the audit.
Domain Primary
Your domain is the name of your website (e.g. yourdomain.com), independent of where the files are located (see Hosting). A good domain name provides relevance signals to search engines and trust with visitors as well as search engines.
Whois Primary
WHOIS (Who Is) is a database query that stores the information of the registered user or assignees of your domain name. Updated your WHOIS record ensures that your personal details are protected. The key items to look at in your Whois record include: * if your personal details are protected, * if you have opened yourself up to spam and other security concerns. The following is your public Whois data.
DNS Primary
The Domain Name System is a world wide distributed system that mainly translates domain names into IP addresses but is also used to store email and meta information about a domain.
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DNS stands for Domain Name Servers which is the worldwide directory of domain names and their corresponding IP addresses. Often called the internet's phone book because it tells the internet what domains belong to what IP addresses.
Host Server Primary
Technology Primary
The chosen technology plays a big role in security, performance and maintainability of a website.
Ping Report Primary
Ping is a network administration software utility used to test the reachability and latency of a host on a network.
Port Scan Primary
A port scanner is an application designed to probe a server or host for open ports. They are used by attackers to identify network services running on a host and exploit vulnerabilities.
Header Scan Primary
Security headers protect against common types of attacks that affect most websites. Header scans include information about security, accepted data formats, technology and speed.
Spam Database Primary
Spam databases contain IP or email addresses of previous offenders. An entry might result in rejeted emails or browser warnings for the users.
Website Blacklisting Primary
A blacklist is a list of email addresses, websites, or IP addresses that are known spammers.
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A blacklist is a list of email addresses, websites, or IP addresses that are known spammers.
Website Firewall Primary
A firewall is a network security system that monitors and controls incoming and outgoing network traffic.
Malware
Malware is malicious software that can infect the user's computer through the browser and potentially cause security warnings in the user's browser so they are unable to open the website.
Injected Spam
Attackers often find ways to inject spam links into template files or into the database, so they appear on every page load. They are usually invisible to humans but visible to search engines.
Defacements
A defacement is an attack on a website that changes the visual appearance of a website. A website that is partly offline or displays spam, offensive or illegal content can impact your brands reputation.
SSL / HTTPS
HTTPS is an encrypted version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Encryption is also de facto mandatory for the successor HTTP/2. SSL protects confidential data, affirms your site's identity, and improves visitors trust. SSL is mandatory for PCI/DDS compliance. Google flags sites as not secure on the URL bar if it does not detect SSL. A wide variety of certificate authorities offer SSL certificates, both for free and paid.
IP Address Primary
The following details are available on the current IP address.
IP Neighborhood Primary
It can be helpful to find out which other sites are also hosting on the same web server as your site. If you determine that you are on the same server as a website which is spammy or which has security risks you could request to be placed on an alternate server. You want to avoid being classified as spam or having your site be vulnerable to attack.
WWW Resolve Primary
Although you might not utilize a www-domain, users expect that www.yourwebsite.com will be reachable if they manually type in the "www" preceding your domain name. You want your website to display when a user types in either the version with the "www" or without it. However, search engines will see these urls as different sites and consider one as duplicate content. A "WWW Resolve" tells search engines to consider both urls as the same site.
WWW Redirection Primary
Your website should be reachable both under the www-domain and the naked domain, both with HTTP and HTTPS. Redirects must be set up as follows.
HTTPS Redirection Primary
If you are using HTTPS it is recommended to upgrade all requests to the server to encrypted HTTPS
Landing Page Redirects Primary
Redirects trigger an additional HTTP request-response cycle and delay page rendering. In the best case, each redirect will add a single roundtrip (HTTP request-response), and in the worst it may result in multiple additional roundtrips to perform the DNS lookup, TCP handshake, and TLS negotiation in addition to the additional HTTP request-response cycle. As a result, you should minimize use of redirects to improve site performance.
Client Side Redirects Primary
Client Redirect Chains Primary
Server Speed
Your site's load speed is an important factor for a good visitor experience. For this reason Google places a good deal of weight on your site's performance. Google has outlined some best practices for a number of speed categories that we will want to ensure we are meeting or faster: Below is how you current home page ranks against these metrics.
Compression Primary
All modern browsers support and automatically negotiate compression for all HTTP requests. Enabling compression in your webserver can reduce the size of the transferred response by up to 90%, which can significantly reduce the amount of time to download the resource, reduce data usage for the client, and improve the time to first render of your pages.
Platform Primary
The vast majority of websites nowadays uses a Content Mangement System or some kind of platform to create content; instead of hard coding HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Extensions / Plugins Primary
Keeping extensions and plugins updated is essential to the security of your platform.
URL Format Primary
Internationalization Primary
Especially if you have an international audience, it might be worth investing in translations
Language Primary
With the HTML tag hreflang the browser and search engines can be made aware of the language and possible translations of a website.
Crawlability Primary
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Search engines use bots (crawlers, spiders) to reach out to websites to find out what kind of structure and content a website has. This happens so that search engines know how to deliver the website. Well optimized websites make it easy for bots to crawl, resulting in higher authority and search rankings (SEO).
Indexation Primary
Crawl Stats Primary
The following statistics were notable when crawling the website.
Robots.txt Primary
For the robots.txt, the proper form is individual URL exclusions, then wildcard, then point to the sitemap (Please see attached robots.txt example). The purpose of this file is to remove crawl fatigue by restricting unwanted user agents. As we know this is only a recommendation and that spammer sites often ignore this. In instances where it is ignored you need to block the requests at the server level (e.g. htaccess or other).
XML Sitemap Primary
Canonicals Primary
A canonical link element is an HTML element that helps webmasters prevent duplicate content issues in search engine optimization by specifying the "canonical" or "preferred" version of a web page.
Directives Primary
Directives are HTML elements that give search engines more information about links on the website.
Crawl Errors Primary
The following errors were encountered when crawling the website
Machine Readability Primary
There are a number of formats to increase machine readability such as MicroFormat 1&2, RDFa or Mikroformat
Schema json+ld Markup Primary
Schema.org is the most popular markup for increasing the machine readability for websites.
Facebook OpenGraph Primary
Facebook's Open Graph protocol enables developers to integrate their pages into their global mapping/tracking tool Social Graph.
Twitter Cards Primary
Pinterest Rich Pins Primary
DOM Primary
Document Object Model (DOM) is an interface for looking at your website code as a tree structure wherein each node is an object representing a part of the website. Depending on how your structure the website, the creation of the DOM can be optimized so it takes less time to render.
Security Primary
Google Hacking Primary
Vulnerabilities can be found in a website by simply using Google search operators.
Internal Linking Primary
Your domain is given an authority based on the number of inbound or external links into it. The domain authority is then passed through to the pages in a waterfall like method. For this reason, as well as for easy navigation for your visitors, a clear internal navigation is recommended.
External Linking Primary
Navigation Primary
Breadcrumbs Primary
A breadcrumb is a graphical control element frequently used as a navigational aid in user interfaces and on web pages.
HTML Sitemap Primary
A HTML sitemap can help the search engines crawl a site easier. Even if the navigation in the header seems to be comprehensive having a link on the homepage to a sitemap which shows all of the content of the site is often used as a best practice to increase indexation
Broken Links Primary
Broken Links are links from your page that don't resolve anymore
Internal Search Primary
Internal search improves usability and is extremely important for large websites. If possible, we recommend that the most popular searches made on this website are logged, and that the results for these searches are reviewed periodically. Many websites have poor quality search within their website, or fail to optimize their search results for common queries. Search logs can also reveal important content which users are looking for, that isn't present on the website
Theme Primary
Soft Error Pages
This is the message when a visitor accesses a page which is not found or an error occured.
Missing Files Primary
If files from assets such as CSS, JS or images are missing a website might not be displayed correctly. Also, 404 errors are never cached, so each time a page ask for the file, the request hits the server, even if it is behind a CDN or cache.
Console Errors Primary
An error is the JavaScript console is most likely a sign of an error in the code.
Icons Primary
Doctype / Encoding Primary
The doctype tells the browser which HTML parser to use and the encoding determines how and which characters can be displayed.
W3C HTML Validation Primary
HTML5 needs to be written according to the W3C standard to avoid any unexpected behavior in the browser.
W3C CSS Validation Primary
Cascading Style Sheets 3 need to be written according to the W3C standard to avoid any unexpected behavior in the browser.
JS Validation Primary
Writing efficient and modern JavaScript can speed up loading time a lot.
Webfonts Primary
Webfonts are beautiful but heavy.
Browser Compatability Primary
Every browser interprets HTML, CSS and JavaScript differently and might parse and show your website differently.
Outdated Technology Primary
Using outdated technology can result in websites not being displayed correctly or open up the door to attackers.
Mobile Access Primary
Progressive Web Apps Primary
Progressive web apps are websites that look and feel like an app. This means users can access all information and capabilities without downloading a mobile app. Instead, progressive web apps use modern web technology to deliver app-like experiences to users, right in their browsers.
Mobile Responsiveness
Meta Viewport Tag Primary
When developing a mobile site with a meta viewport tag, it's easy to accidentally create page content that doesn't quite fit within the specified viewport. For example, an image that is displayed at a width wider than the viewport can cause the viewport to scroll horizontally. You should adjust this content to fit within the width of the viewport, so that the user does not need to scroll horizontally. Since screen dimensions and width in CSS pixels vary widely between devices (for example, between phones and tablets, and even between different phones), content should not rely on a particular viewport width to render well. Setting large absolute CSS widths for page elements (such as the example below), cause the div to be too wide for the viewport on a narrower device (for example, a device with a width of 320 CSS pixels, such as an iPhone). Instead, consider using relative width values, such as width: 100%. Similarly, beware of using large absolute positioning values that may cause the element to fall outside the viewport on small screens.
Rendering Speed
The second part of measuring the speed of a website relies on how optimized the code is written so the website can be rendered as fast as possible.
Input Latency
JavaScript Delivery Primary
Before the browser can render a page it has to build the DOM tree by parsing the HTML markup. During this process, whenever the parser encounters a script it has to stop and execute it before it can continue parsing the HTML. In the case of an external script the parser is also forced to wait for the resource to download, which may incur one or more network roundtrips and delay the time to first render of the page. See Adding Interactivity with JavaScript to learn more about how JavaScript affects the critical rendering path.
CSS Delivery Primary
Before the browser can render content it must process all the style and layout information for the current page. As a result, the browser will block rendering until external stylesheets are downloaded and processed, which may require multiple roundtrips and delay the time to first render. See render-tree construction, layout, and paint to learn more about the critical rendering path, and render blocking CSS for tips on how to unblock rendering and improve CSS delivery.
Resource Delivery Primary
Minification refers to the process of removing unnecessary or redundant data without affecting how the resource is processed by the browser - e.g. code comments and formatting, removing unused code, using shorter variable and function names, and so on.
Delivery Speed/Caching Primary
Fetching resources over the network is both slow and expensive: the download may require multiple roundtrips between the client and server, which delays processing and may block rendering of page content, and also incurs data costs for the visitor. All server reduce requests and responses should specify a caching policy to help the client determine if and when it can reuse a previously fetched response.
Visible Content
If the amount of data required exceeds the initial congestion window (typically 14.6kB compressed), it will require additional round trips between your server and the user’s browser. For users on networks with high latencies such as mobile networks this can cause significant delays to page loading. If your page loads too slowly for the visitor, it may cause them to abandon your site.
Image Sizing Primary
For image optimization, don't use Photoshop/Gimp or other image editing tools. Instead, use specialized tools such as [Kraken.io](https://kraken.io), Google's [Squoosh](https://squoosh.app/) or [ImageOptim](https://imageoptim.com/mac) on Mac. For SVG images, you can use [SVGOMG](https://jakearchibald.github.io/svgomg/) or [svgo](https://github.com/svg/svgo).
Image Responsiveness Primary
Analytics Setup
Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager can be used to combine multiple Google products
Remarketing
Webmaster Tools
Google Search Console and Google Analtics are important data sources for analyzing a websites performance.
Conversion Tracking
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Conversion Tracking is a Google Analytics feature that tracks the number of people who perform a certain action on a specific website. Conversions can be defined as an event such as watching a video or making a purchase.
Events
Google Analytics can be used to manually record events not otherwise tracked.
eCommerce Tracking
The Content Layer bridges the gap between your customer’s needs and your brand’s offering. It is the third of @Rob's six layers of modern digital marketing. Content isn’t an optional aspect of digital marketing. In order to fully achieve your online marketing goals, you need to have a consistent content strategy. That doesn’t mean creating any and all content. Your content needs to be strategic and backed by reliable research. You need to understand the intent of your content so you can position each piece to align with your target persona’s aspirations and pain points. Remember, content is not the end goal, it is the catalyst for conversion. The Content Layer encompases the many steps involved in content creation that come before you can click Publish. This includes market research, strategy, consistency, style guide alignment, CTAs, and repurposing.
The following factors are related to the Content layer of the audit. Factors with a Primary badge indicate that it is most closely related to this Layer, but may also be found in other areas of the audit.
Context Primary
WWW Resolve
Although you might not utilize a www-domain, users expect that www.yourwebsite.com will be reachable if they manually type in the "www" preceding your domain name. You want your website to display when a user types in either the version with the "www" or without it. However, search engines will see these urls as different sites and consider one as duplicate content. A "WWW Resolve" tells search engines to consider both urls as the same site.
WWW Redirection
Your website should be reachable both under the www-domain and the naked domain, both with HTTP and HTTPS. Redirects must be set up as follows.
HTTPS Redirection
If you are using HTTPS it is recommended to upgrade all requests to the server to encrypted HTTPS
Client Redirect Chains
Canonicals
A canonical link element is an HTML element that helps webmasters prevent duplicate content issues in search engine optimization by specifying the "canonical" or "preferred" version of a web page.
Google Hacking
Vulnerabilities can be found in a website by simply using Google search operators.
Internal Linking
Your domain is given an authority based on the number of inbound or external links into it. The domain authority is then passed through to the pages in a waterfall like method. For this reason, as well as for easy navigation for your visitors, a clear internal navigation is recommended.
External Linking
Internal Search
Internal search improves usability and is extremely important for large websites. If possible, we recommend that the most popular searches made on this website are logged, and that the results for these searches are reviewed periodically. Many websites have poor quality search within their website, or fail to optimize their search results for common queries. Search logs can also reveal important content which users are looking for, that isn't present on the website
Freshness Primary
Intent Matching Primary
Visible Content Primary
If the amount of data required exceeds the initial congestion window (typically 14.6kB compressed), it will require additional round trips between your server and the user’s browser. For users on networks with high latencies such as mobile networks this can cause significant delays to page loading. If your page loads too slowly for the visitor, it may cause them to abandon your site.
HTML Title Element Primary
An HTML Title element is an HTML tag that defines the Title of the document. The page's title shows up in the browser's title bar or the tab. The page title is also displayed on your listing in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
Meta Description Primary
A Meta Description is an html tag that search engines display on a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) under the Title Tag that summarizes your page's content. A compelling description can help to persuade the reader to click through to your content over the other listings. The description should be relevant and match the page's content so the reader doesn't pogo stick off your page if they decide your content does not answer their search intent. If your post or page does not have a meta description, search engines will grab text from your page that it deems relevant, so you won't have control over what gets displayed.
Headings Primary
Headings are text within html tags that display as titles and subtitles within your content. Heading tags are designated as h1 to h6; most prominent or important to least prominent, respectively. Heading tags help search engines and readers understand the structure of your content.
Image Usage Primary
Images are an important part of content and enhance the visitors experience. But they can slow down your site which can decrease the user experience. However, there are several ways to manage images and the way they load to improve loading and site speed.
Keyword Usage Primary
Keywords are words or phrases that visitors enter into search engines, also referred to as "search queries." Building content to answer these search queries will allow your content to get displayed on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), bringing new, quality visitors to your site. When using keywords, it's important to build content to answer the search intent of the keyword rather than merely inserting the keyword onto the page.
Content Saturation Primary
Marketing Videos Primary
Marketing Images Primary
Marketing Presentations Primary
Marketing Documents Primary
Contact Pages Primary
Contact pages help your visitors find your contact information quickly and easily. They also help search engines display your information and help your website get found on local search queries.
Legal Pages Primary
Websites should have a Terms of Service page to limit liability, prevent abuses and claim ownership of your content. A Privacy Policy is legally required. It discloses your practices on how you handle personal information and data collection.
Spelling Errors Primary
While not a direct factor for Search Engine Optimization, spelling mistakes are unprofessional and might not give the user confidence in your brand.
Non-Branded Queries Primary
The Authority Layer helps to place you as an expert in your marketplace. Your authority is directly linked to how well your content is marketed, making it the fourth of @Rob's six layers of modern digital marketing. Content can’t be created in a silo. It needs as much visibility as possible through everything from paid ads, to social media shares, to backlinks. If other sites in your industry that have high authority are linking to your site, search engines are more likely to recommend your site. The Authority Layer is all about what happens to your content after you hit Publish. This includes off-site distribution, paid marketing, social sharing, link acquisition, and competitor analysis.
The following factors are related to the Authority layer of the audit. Factors with a Primary badge indicate that it is most closely related to this Layer, but may also be found in other areas of the audit.
Branded Search Rankings
Branded keywords or search terms are searches for your brand name and products. These checks show how well your branded search term rank in the SERP.
Branded Search Performance
When analyzing the branded search term, how do they perform in the SERP.
Reviews
The following is a high level overview of how your brand is positioned in the search engines. While this may seem unrelated to an SEO audit, review signals actually account for as much as 10% of the local ranking factors. While most reviews cannot be removed after being posted (although you should try!) you should, at the very least, post a response which is apologetic or empathetic. It's a good practice to respond to all reviews. It shows you are engaged with your customers and care about customer service.
Local Optimization
Local optimization is important for businesses that serve a specific geographic area, especially if customers visit your business. It ensures your business gets found in maps and for search terms specific to your location and "near me."
Contact Details Consistency
To avoid customers confusion it is important to keep contact details, opening times and address consistent across all assets such as website, social media profiles and directories.
Employer Reviews
Negative, possibly fake or lying, reviews by digruntled ex-employees might shine a bad light on the business. Monitoring the most common and well ranked review websites is important.
Trusted Sources
Customers often turn to trusted websites such as RipoffReport or Better Business Bureau to form an opinion about your business.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is one of the top 10 websites worldwide. A backlink or even a branded article (if relevance criterias are met) further strengthen your online reputation and relevance. Have a Wikipedia page built out citing any national/international press or citations from well known publications. Google will leverage this structured data to improve your search results.
IP Neighborhood
It can be helpful to find out which other sites are also hosting on the same web server as your site. If you determine that you are on the same server as a website which is spammy or which has security risks you could request to be placed on an alternate server. You want to avoid being classified as spam or having your site be vulnerable to attack.
Indexation
Domain Metrics vs. Competitors Primary
Referrers Primary
Referring Domains Primary
Anchor Text Analysis Primary
Referring Pages Primary
LinkDetox Primary
Link Acquisition Primary
Link Reclamation Primary
Domain Reanimation Primary
Link Intersect Primary
Social Validation Primary
The Community Layer is the human side of your business and brand. It is the fifth of @Rob's six layers of modern digital marketing. Community encompases the conversations and engagements you have with your audience both online and offline. Every engagement you have influences audience perceptions, followings, and search results. From an SEO perspective, Google rewards return rate, social shares, and branded mentions; meaning there are long-term benefits to building and regularly contributing to online communities. The Community Layer will help you spark engagements with and around your brand. This includes audience building, social interactions, and how your brand is conveyed offline.
The following factors are related to the Community layer of the audit. Factors with a Primary badge indicate that it is most closely related to this Layer, but may also be found in other areas of the audit.
Claim Profiles Primary
Social Validation
The Behavior Layer focuses on the experience that visitors (including search engine robots) have while on your website. It is the sixth and final of @Rob's framework for modern digital marketing. but behavior is something you should be thinking about throughout each and every layer from Branding to Community. A poor user experience (UX) on the human side will result in a less enjoyable visit for your audience and potential customers. A negative experience can occur due to broken links, poor navigation, difficult to read fonts, unclear copy, and any other confusion someone has while on your website. Unhappy, frustrated people are less likely to come back to your website or to purchase a product or service. On the robots side, search engines measure how visitors interact with your website as well as the way content is displayed to determine how future visitors are likely to receive your site. The better the user experience, the more likely it is that Google will recommend your website. The Behavior Layer will help you look at all of your digital marketing in a more human-centered way. This includes reading and utilizing metrics, KPI reporting, and creating positive user experiences for both humans and robots.
The following factors are related to the Behavior layer of the audit. Factors with a Primary badge indicate that it is most closely related to this Layer, but may also be found in other areas of the audit.
SSL / HTTPS Primary
HTTPS is an encrypted version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Encryption is also de facto mandatory for the successor HTTP/2. SSL protects confidential data, affirms your site's identity, and improves visitors trust. SSL is mandatory for PCI/DDS compliance. Google flags sites as not secure on the URL bar if it does not detect SSL. A wide variety of certificate authorities offer SSL certificates, both for free and paid.
Calls to Action Primary
A call to action, commonly abbreviated to "CTA" is the mechanism used to allow your potential customer to take action, ensuring that this is obvious and clear is critical to the reason for your web marketing to exist. A call to action could be anything that enables the website visitor to take the next step forward, be it going to a particular page, playing a video, downloading a document, signing up for a newsletter, adding a product to a shopping cart, or similar.
Landing Page Redirects
Redirects trigger an additional HTTP request-response cycle and delay page rendering. In the best case, each redirect will add a single roundtrip (HTTP request-response), and in the worst it may result in multiple additional roundtrips to perform the DNS lookup, TCP handshake, and TLS negotiation in addition to the additional HTTP request-response cycle. As a result, you should minimize use of redirects to improve site performance.
Client Side Redirects
Server Speed Primary
Your site's load speed is an important factor for a good visitor experience. For this reason Google places a good deal of weight on your site's performance. Google has outlined some best practices for a number of speed categories that we will want to ensure we are meeting or faster: Below is how you current home page ranks against these metrics.
Compression
All modern browsers support and automatically negotiate compression for all HTTP requests. Enabling compression in your webserver can reduce the size of the transferred response by up to 90%, which can significantly reduce the amount of time to download the resource, reduce data usage for the client, and improve the time to first render of your pages.
Navigation
Breadcrumbs
A breadcrumb is a graphical control element frequently used as a navigational aid in user interfaces and on web pages.
HTML Sitemap
A HTML sitemap can help the search engines crawl a site easier. Even if the navigation in the header seems to be comprehensive having a link on the homepage to a sitemap which shows all of the content of the site is often used as a best practice to increase indexation
Broken Links
Broken Links are links from your page that don't resolve anymore
Internal Search
Internal search improves usability and is extremely important for large websites. If possible, we recommend that the most popular searches made on this website are logged, and that the results for these searches are reviewed periodically. Many websites have poor quality search within their website, or fail to optimize their search results for common queries. Search logs can also reveal important content which users are looking for, that isn't present on the website
Theme
Soft Error Pages Primary
This is the message when a visitor accesses a page which is not found or an error occured.
Outdated Technology
Using outdated technology can result in websites not being displayed correctly or open up the door to attackers.
Mobile Access
Progressive Web Apps
Progressive web apps are websites that look and feel like an app. This means users can access all information and capabilities without downloading a mobile app. Instead, progressive web apps use modern web technology to deliver app-like experiences to users, right in their browsers.
Mobile Responsiveness Primary
Rendering Speed Primary
The second part of measuring the speed of a website relies on how optimized the code is written so the website can be rendered as fast as possible.
Input Latency Primary
Delivery Speed/Caching
Fetching resources over the network is both slow and expensive: the download may require multiple roundtrips between the client and server, which delays processing and may block rendering of page content, and also incurs data costs for the visitor. All server reduce requests and responses should specify a caching policy to help the client determine if and when it can reuse a previously fetched response.
Click Through Rate Primary
Image Alternate Text Primary
An image element in HTML can contain an alternative text used by screen readers or if the image can not be loaded correctly.
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Alternate text is the description of an image that's not usually displayed to viewers, but used by search engines to identify the image and how it relates to content. Alternate text is important to search engines (and your website's SEO) because they must rely on the text to describe the content of the image. If a web browser cannot support the display of a visual, the alternative text will appear instead. Alternate text, when used effectively, can also help the visually impaired experience your website to its fullest.
Spelling Errors
While not a direct factor for Search Engine Optimization, spelling mistakes are unprofessional and might not give the user confidence in your brand.
Accessibility Primary
Apart from the W3C there are a few other governmental and non-governmental organizations that release guidelines about accessability.
WAI/WCAG Compliance Primary
The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) is an effort by the W3C to improve the accessibility of the internet.
Printability Primary
Printable stylesheets allow for extensive control over the printed version of a webpage, for instance removing navigation and adjusting the layout to fit.
Readability Primary
The following readability tests have been performed
Analytics Setup Primary
Tag Manager Primary
Google Tag Manager can be used to combine multiple Google products
Remarketing Primary
Webmaster Tools Primary
Google Search Console and Google Analtics are important data sources for analyzing a websites performance.
Conversion Tracking Primary
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Conversion Tracking is a Google Analytics feature that tracks the number of people who perform a certain action on a specific website. Conversions can be defined as an event such as watching a video or making a purchase.
Events Primary
Google Analytics can be used to manually record events not otherwise tracked.
Goal Tracking Primary
eCommerce Tracking Primary
Invest in an SEO Audit to get a thorough analysis on how your website performs against these factors that are impacting visibility, traffic and sales.
- Quantitative Analysis
- Qualitative Analysis
- 60 Minute Call
- Emailed Report
what would it look like working together?
Good question :) First, I have three traits that I require before taking on a client, the same three traits that they can expect from me. I don't care how big your budget is, if you lack any of these three I will not be working with you:
Yay! We align personally... Next, I always start with an intake and audit before giving you a proposal or recommending a strategy. Why? because I do not offer one-size-fits-all services, instead I want to create a specific plan that will ensure you are getting what you need for results.
The same way that you would not go to a doctors office and order a procedure off of a menu at the front desk, you should not be ordering services before we identify what you actually need done. Remember... prescription without diagnosis is malpractice.
To diagnose where the opportunity is, I need to really get in and understand where you are currently at, analyze your brand, content, technical stack, authority signals, social signals and user experience. Then I will have the insight to know where the competitive deficiencies are.
Because we are reasonable people, we do not expect anyone to work for free, so we would initially engage with a fixed fee web marketing audit learn more about rob's website audit. I used to charge $10,000 for this engagement, which was reasonable for the value, but because I have built software that automates marketing analysis I can now offer my detailed audit (quantitative and qualitative) and strategic plan. This provides a detailed roadmap of where to go along with what it will take to get there. Note that you can also purchase the quantitative audit (my brain turned into software) and the qualitative audit (human powered) from one of my mentees (who I have personally trained) for half of the price, should that fit your budget easier.
time to learn about you
Once we engage, I will send you an intake to fill out which has really straight forward questions about your company, your customers and your goals.
- Customer (Persona matrix, personas, problems/aspirations)
- Offering (Product/Service/Cause)
- Goals (What success looks like?)
- Assets (Images, videos, etc.)
- Key Messaging
If you are a brand new company, or unsure about who your customer is, we can instead engage with a branding exercise which honestly would be better value for your money.
find the opportunities
This is where the magic happens, it is a methodical process that allows me to develop a strategy which will make the greatest impact, aligning recommendations with your goals.
Customer Analysis
I will get inside of the head of your customer to understand what drives them and how to earn their trust.
Keyword Research
I'll conduct thorough topical research resulting in target search queries & questions to rank for.
Competitive Analysis
Then I will then analyze who you will be competing against for these topics and audit them to find their weak points.
Data Collection
I'll pull thousands of data points from over 60 different sources for you and your competitors to analyze.
Quantitative Analysis
I will then use my software to identify opportunities based on industry benchmarks or historical comparisons.
Qualitative Analysis
Lastly, I will then use my experience to find opportunities machines cannot see to round out the recommendations.
strategy & recommendations
We then meet (virtually) and I present the strategy along with specific recommendations. Each recommendation is prioritized based on the associated goal and expected impact or return on investment.
This includes a formal proposal on what I would charge to fix all of the items identified with an itemized list with prices. You can then determine how much you wish to handle in-house, what you would like to outsource, or what you would like me to do for you.
Based on what you would like me to do, you can decide how fast I do it. Example, if the total quote back is $24,000 you can decide if you want that completed in 3 monthly installments (results faster) of $8k/month or over 24 monthly installments of $1k/month.
Once the items identified are fixed and the opportunities identified are executed the initial engagement is completed and we can either enter into a monthly maintenance plan or identify new competitive goals for the next engagement period.
This way no matter what your budget is, we can find a way to work together. You are also able to increase or decrease how much work we are doing at any time.
get started
Once we agree on the scope, budget and timeframe, I will activate my team to execute on the scope of work. You will be notified of progress and updates to key performance indicators that align to the goals identified as the priority along with other relevant updates on activity and outcomes.