seo

Posted by GeoffKenyon

Back in 2011, I wrote a technical site audit checklist, and while it was thorough, there have been a lot of additions to what is encompassed in a site audit. I have gone through and updated that old checklist for 2015. Some of the biggest changes were the addition of sections for mobile, international, and site speed.

This checklist should help you put together a thorough site audit and determine what is holding back the organic performance of your site. At the end of your audit, don’t write a document that says what’s wrong with the website. Instead, create a document that says what needs to be done. Then explain why these actions need to be taken and why they are important. What I’ve found to really helpful is to provide a prioritized list along with your document of all the actions that you would like them to implement. This list can be handed off to a dev or content team to be implemented easily. These teams can refer to your more thorough document as needed.

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• Do a site: search.
• How many pages are returned? (This can be way off so don’t put too much stock in this).
• Is the homepage showing up as the first result? 
• If the homepage isn’t showing up as the first result, there could be issues, like a penalty or poor site architecture/internal linking, affecting the site. This may be less of a concern as Google’s John Mueller recently said that your homepage doesn’t need to be listed first.

Review the number of organic landing pages in Google Analytics

• Does this match with the number of results in a site: search?
• This is often the best view of how many pages are in a search engine’s index that search engines find valuable.

Search for the brand and branded terms

• Is the homepage showing up at the top, or are correct pages showing up?
• If the proper pages aren’t showing up as the first result, there could be issues, like a penalty, in play.

• Is the content showing up?
• Are navigation links present?
• Are there links that aren’t visible on the site?

Do a mobile search for your brand and key landing pages

• Does your listing have the “mobile friendly” label?
• Are your landing pages mobile friendly?
• If the answer is no to either of these, it may be costing you organic visits.

• Does the homepage have at least one paragraph?
• There has to be enough content on the page to give search engines an understanding of what a page is about. Based on my experience, I typically recommend at least 150 words.

• Do these pages have at least a few paragraphs of content? Is it enough to give search engines an understanding of what the page is about?
• Is it template text or is it completely unique?

• Is there real content on the site or is the “content” simply a list of links?

• Does the intent behind the keyword match the intent of the landing page?
• Are there pages targeting head terms, mid-tail, and long-tail keywords?

• Do a site: search in Google for important keyword phrases.
• Check for duplicate content/page titles using the Moz Pro Crawl Test.

• In addition to search engine driven content, there should be content to help educate users about the product or service.

• Is the content formatted well and easy to read quickly?
• Are H tags used?
• Are images used?
• Is the text broken down into easy to read paragraphs?

• Good headlines go a long way. Make sure the headlines are well written and draw users in.

• Since the implementation of Panda, the amount of ad-space on a page has become important to evaluate.
• Make sure there is significant unique content above the fold.
• If you have more ads than unique content, you are probably going to have a problem.

• Do URLs include parameters or tracking code? This will result in multiple URLs for a piece of content.
• Does the same content reside on completely different URLs? This is often due to products/content being replicated across different categories.

• Take a content snippet, put it in quotes and search for it.
• Does the content show up elsewhere on the domain?
• Has it been scraped? If the content has been scraped, you should file a content removal request with Google.

• Does the same content exist on different sub-domains?

• Does the content exist on a secure version of the site?

• Is the content replicated on other domains owned by the company?

• If there are “printer friendly” versions of pages, they may be causing duplicate content.

• 100-200 is a good target, but not a rule.

• Homepage links to category pages.
• Category pages link to sub-category and product pages as appropriate.
• Product pages link to relevant category pages.

• Category pages link to other relevant category pages.
• Product pages link to other relevant product pages.

• Does not utilize massive blocks of links stuck in the content to do internal linking.

• Does not use a block of footer links instead of proper navigation.
• Does not link to landing pages with optimized anchors.

• Link Checker and Xenu are good tools for this.

• Are 301s being used for all redirects?
• If the root is being directed to a landing page, are they using a 301 instead of a 302?
• Use Live HTTP Headers Firefox plugin to check 301s.

• These include 302s, 307s, meta refresh, and JavaScript redirects as they pass little to no value.
• These redirects can easily be identified with a tool like Screaming Frog.

• Redirect chains significantly diminish the amount of link equity associated with the final URL.
• Google has said that they will stop following a redirect chain after several redirects.

• Is content being served in JavaScript?
• Are links being served in JavaScript? Is this to do PR sculpting or is it accidental?

• Is content being pulled in via iFrames?

• Is the entire site done in Flash, or is Flash used sparingly in a way that doesn’t hinder crawling?

• Google WMT will give you a good list of technical problems that they are encountering on your site (such as: 4xx and 5xx errors, inaccessible pages in the XML sitemap, and soft 404s)

• Are XML sitemaps in place?
• Are XML sitemaps covering for poor site architecture?
• Are XML sitemaps structured to show indexation problems?
• Do the sitemaps follow proper XML protocols? 

•  Gzip Test

Enable caching

• Google’s guide to optimizing your images

• Consider using a CDN for your images.

• Google’s guide to optimizing your images

Mobile

• Is there a mobile site set up?
• If there is, is it a mobile site, responsive design, or dynamic serving?

Make sure analytics are set up if separate mobile content exists

If dynamic serving is being used, make sure the Vary HTTP header is being used

• This helps alert search engines understand that the content is different for mobile users.
• Google on dynamic serving.

• Do your mobile visitors have a different intent than desktop based visitors?

• If your site redirects mobile visitors away from their intended URL (typically to the homepage), you’re likely going to run into issues impacting your mobile organic performance.

• If a mobile site (m.) exists, does the desktop equivalent URL point to the mobile version with rel=”alternate”?
• Does the mobile version canonical to the desktop version?
• Official documentation.

• ex: site.com/uk/ or uk.site.com

• If the site is targeted to one specific country, is this specified in webmaster tools? 
• If the site has international sections, are they targeted in webmaster tools?

• Documentation

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This audit covers the main technical elements of a site and should help you uncover any issues that are holding a site back. As with any project, the deliverable is critical. I’ve found focusing on the solution and impact (business case) is the best approach for site audit reports. While it is important to outline the problems, too much detail here can take away from the recommendations. If you’re looking for more resources on site audits, I recommend the following:

Helpful tools for doing a site audit:

Annie Cushing’s Site Audit
Web Developer Toolbar
User Agent Add-on
Firebug
Link Checker
SEObook Toolbar
MozBar (Moz’s SEO toolbar)
Xenu
Screaming Frog
Your own scraper
Inflow’s technical mobile best practices

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Posted by randfish Depending on your industry, the more obvious and conversion-focused keywords you might target could be few and far between. With Google continuing to evolve, though, there’s a whole host of other areas you might look: inte… Continue reading →

Posted by ProfAlfonso

Being a digital marketer, I spend my day knee-deep in data. The time I don’t spend analysing it, I spend explaining its significance to a client or junior colleague or arguing its significance with a client or senior colleague.

But after many debates over the importance of bounce rate, time on site, mobile conversion rate and the colour grey for buttons (our designer partook in that last one), we’re never much closer to an agreement on significance.

Our industry is swimming in data (thanks Google Analytics), but at times we’re drowning in it.

Numbers without context mean nothing. Data in the hands of even the savviest marketer is useless without a context to evaluate its performance against competitors or the industry at large.

Which is why we need benchmarks. Through benchmarking, marketers can contextualise data to identify under-performing elements and amplify what is over-performing. They can focus on the KPIs that are important, and recognise whether they are achievable.

Benchmarks also give context to those who aren’t familiar with data. One pain point that digital marketers face globally is communicating their performance upwards. There are very few ‘digital natives’ sitting in company boardrooms these days but plenty of executives who know their numbers inside out.

Industry benchmark data arms us with perspective and framework when we need to communicate upwards. It ensures we get pats on the back when deserved and additional budget released when required.

Google Analytics Benchmarking Reports

Google, you might argue, have already solved these problems.

The upgrade and roll-out of Google Analytics Benchmarking Reports has been met with plenty of excitement for these reasons. With its large data set and nifty options to chop up the data by geography and website size, for a minute it certainly seemed like the benchmarking of our dreams. And while we recognise its usefulness to benchmark against real-time data (comparing a surge of traffic from a particular location for example, or seasonal demands), it still left us short of the hard data insights we were looking for.

We wanted reliable KPI data that went beyond user behaviour. We wanted average conversion rates and average transaction values as well as ‘softer’ engagement metrics such as bounce rate and time on site.

Most importantly, we wanted to know which engagement metrics actually correlated with the conversion rate, so we could narrow our field of analysis and efforts in pursuit of a healthier bottom line.

Which is why we went out and got our own and generated this e-commerce KPI report.

Data and methodology

We analysed the 56 million visits and approximately $252 million (€214 million) in revenue that flowed through 30 participating websites between August 1, 2013 and July 30, 2014. The websites were in the retail and travel sectors and included both online-only and those with a physical store as well as an e-commerce site.

We averaged stats on a per-website basis, so that websites with high levels of traffic didn’t skew the stats. We had more retail participants than travel participants so the average e-commerce figures are not the midpoint between travel and retail but the average figure across all study participants. Revenue is attributed on a last-click basis.

Results

Here is a highlight of some of our most relevant and interesting findings. For all the data and results, download the full report on WolfgangDigital.com.

Average KPIs: Bounce rate, time on site, and conversion rate

First, we calculated some averages across engagement KPIs and commercial KPIs. If you are an e-commerce website in the travel or retail business, you can use these numbers to evaluate how your website is performing when set against a broad swath of your industry peers.

Well, remember the conversion measured here is a sale. If your conversion rate is lower than the study average don’t fire your CMO straight away; check if your average transaction value (ATV) is higher. If they balance each other out you are all good – if they don’t, it’s time to start digging deeper. Does the 1.4% conversion rate give you a smug tingly feeling or a stab of panic?

We often break down conversion rate into two parts: website-to-basket and basket-to-checkout. Industry norms tell us expect about 5% CR on website-to-basket and 30% on basket-to-checkout. Check which one of these conversion rates is most out of kilter on your site, then focus your attention there. This exercise will often give greater visibility on where the hole in your bucket is, Dear Liza.

Another factor in this analysis is that online-only retailers tend to enjoy higher conversion rates as the consumer must transact via the website. If you have an offline presence, a lower conversion rate comes with the physical territory as your site visitors may convert in store.

KPIs by device: Mobile under scrutiny

Next, we segmented the data by device: desktop, tablet and mobile.

We found that although mobile and tablet together accounted for nearly half of website traffic (43%), they contributed to just over a quarter of revenue (26%).

Mobile alone accounted for 26% of traffic but only 10% of revenue. This suggests that while mobile is a favoured device for browsing and researching, it’s the desktop where users are more likely to whip out the credit card.

When we looked at conversion rates by device, this confirmed it.

What data matters: The correlations

We wanted to know which engagement figures had an influence (if any) on commercial ones.

Then we’d know which behavioural metrics were worth trying to improve to lift conversion rate, and which metrics we could finally label insignificant.

We did this by calculating correlations. A correlation ranges from 0 to 1, so 0 indicates on no correlation at all, while 1 signifies a clear correlation. A negative correlation indicates that as one variable increases the other decreases.

Time on site (0.34) and pages viewed (0.35) both had positive correlations with conversion rate, so our advice is to look at how to improve these metrics for your site to benefit from a higher conversion rate.

We delved into the device data and found mobile was the only device with positive traffic (0.29) and revenue (0.45) correlations to overall conversion rate. In fact, that 0.45 correlation rate between mobile revenue % and conversion rate was actually the strongest correlation rate across all factors we measured.

We infer that while the mobile conversion rate is depressingly low, a mobile user is still somebody with purchase intent who is likely to convert later on another device. The lesson we took from this is to make sure your website is mobile-optimised, particularly for ease of research and browsing content.

Finally, the time came to talk about bounce rate. Our Excel wizard had converted the data to an ‘un-bounce rate’ (1 minus the bounce rate) for consistency with positive time on site and pages viewed metrics. We gathered round the spreadsheet.

He revealed there is actually a negative correlation (-0.12) between un-bounce rate and conversion rate. This correlation signals that it couldn’t be less influential on conversion rate, so for those unable to sleep at night for bounce anxiety, we’re delighted to let you sleep easy.

Increasing your conversion rate may not be as complex a task as it seems.

Our KPI study shows that if you can increase pages viewed and time on site it will push up your conversion rate (content marketing for conversion optimisation anybody?).

We’ve also proved that mobile matters. Don’t be discouraged if your mobile conversion rate pales against desktop’s performance; keep driving mobile traffic and revenue (however minor) and you’ll see the difference in your bottom line.

Read the full results broken down by industry level by downloading from the Wolfgang Digital e-commerce KPI Study.

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Posted by EricaMcGillivray

Slide decks are a powerful way to back up any type of presentation from team meetings and sales pitches to conference keynotes and workshops. We’ve all seen presentations with poor design that takes away from talks, and at worse, completely distracts the intended audience. However, most presenters aren’t graphic designers. Slide decks can be frustrating to build, and great slide decks help communicate what an audience needs to hear.

At Moz, I’ve had the pleasure of working with many speakers on their decks, whether for a  biweekly webinar or for MozCon. And while you aren’t going to turn into a god of slide decks overnight, there are some easy ways to go from terrible to decent. Decent won’t get you heaps of praise for a deck, but it also won’t leave a sour taste in someone’s mind about your slide skills and will allow them to focus on what you actually have to say.

Here are seven simple tips to sharpen up any deck.

Download the checklist version to help you get started.

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Outline your way to success

While we all have different creative processes, I can’t recommend enough outlining your deck before you start in on the slide-building. This will help you focus. It will also let you organize the narrative of your presentation’s story.

I always refer to my outline as the “everything and the kitchen sink” version. It’s typically 2-3 times longer than my allotted time. But it helps me fine tune for the specific audience and make sure tactics (or my message, if not a how-to) stand out.

For example, a few months ago, I gave a social media 101 talk at a burlesque conference. My initial draft and brain-dump outline was way too long, and I quickly realized I could make easy cuts by removing advanced tips. I thought they were cool, but my audience was going to lose me. The tips would’ve taken away from the presentation.

Make better presentations by outlining them.

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Get readable fonts and font sizes

Use legible fonts. I know they can be boring, but that’s better than most of the audience being frustrated by not being able to read your slides. There are plenty of great free fonts if you hate Times New Roman, Arial, or Calibri, and typographers have put together cheat sheets for matching common font types with each other.

Even at conferences like MozCon where there are two 16-foot (4.8 meters) high screens, font size is still an issue. For legibility, even for the back of the room, we recommend speakers do not use lower than a 36pt font. Or no one will be able to read it.

Ideally, 48-60pt font should be your smallest range, depending on the font. Let’s face it, not all of your audience will have perfect vision.

Extra font tip: If you are using any non-standard fonts, please send the fonts to the conference organizer along with your slide decks. Or send a PDF. Fonts are embeddable in most slide deck software, but it’s best to make it easy.

For presentations, use a font no smaller than 36pt and, ideally, 48-60pt.

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Keep important information away from the sides and bottom

Often times, projectors don’t line up perfectly, and there’s nothing more distracting than your words slightly sliding off screen. This is also something you can’t check beforehand at most events. So add a little padding on either side.

Additionally, unless you’re on a very tall stage, put a buffer at the bottom. Even with the raised stage of MozCon, if speakers put text or other important information near the bottom, the heads of the people in closer rows will block it. I recommend putting repetitive branding, such as your company logo or your Twitter handle there.

For assistance, here’s an example widescreen template for PowerPoint, Keynote, and PDF that blocks off where images and text should be in your presentation.

Avoid putting important info too close to the sides or bottom of your slide decks.

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Add the conference hashtag

Marketers love to tweet. I recommend that you put both your own Twitter handle and the conference hashtag on every slide to help facilitate the love. The bottom of the slide is a great place for it.

Marketers love Twitter! Don’t forget to add the conference hashtag to your presentations.

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Ditch “about me” and promotional slides

Never spend more than one very condensed, slightly fun slide about yourself, and never spend more than 30 seconds on it.

A good emcee or moderator will introduce you based upon the bio you submitted with some other information from social media stalking. They’ll toot your horn. They’ll tell the audience why you’re qualified to be speaking on this topic.

If you’re presenting before clients or a small audience, who may not know you, keep it short and sweet. And if everyone knows you, no need to include it.

An audience wants you to dive right into the good stuff. If you impress the audience with your presentation, they’ll be hunting you down. And hopefully, they can do this easily because you’ve added that information to your slides. Also, a thank-you ending slide with your contact information is always a nice gesture.

Dive right into the good stuff and ditch “about me” slides to earn audience respect.

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Kill those bullet points

Rarely are bullet points a good idea for your slides, unless you are making a true list. If you find yourself spending any time explaining points, it’s definitely time to break them up.

Audiences will read slides before they listen to speakers. Bullet points typically leave slides copy-heavy and speakers ignored. At least for however long it takes for someone to read the slide. Reviewing your outline is a great way to determine if those bullet points need their own slides before you start practicing your talk.

Okay, how do you break up those bullets? Let’s say you have five items on your list. Time to turn them into six slides. Slide #1: put down your list’s title, e.g. types of social media metrics to track. (Bonus points if you use a font or style signaling that you’re transitioning into a deeper dive.) Slide #2: the first bullet, e.g. conversation engagement. Slide #3: the second bullet, e.g. applause engagement, and so on until your list is exhausted.

Bullet points kill slide decks. Learn more about how and why you should remove them.

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Planning anything beyond static slides? Loop in the event organizers

If you are doing anything beyond just slides—video, audio, musical production, live polling, audience participation, etc.—sync up with the conference organizers well in advance. They want to make sure you look good. Additionally, they may need to order extra equipment or do testing beforehand. And if they say no, be respectful.

If you’re trying to explain on-stage to an audience that cool thing you had planned but technical issues prevented you, you’re spending a lot of their trust in you (not to mention their attention spans) for nothing. Make sure the flashy fun works and make sure it enhances your presentation.

Making your slide deck multimedia? Contact event organizers pre-show.

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Print, pin, or share this checklist.  Download the high-resolution PDF or snag the image below:

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Always keep learning more

Brilliant presentations and their accompanying decks are an art form in their own right. This tips will only take you so far. Besides practice, experience, and getting help and feedback, there are a ton of resources out there to help you improve. Here are some of my favorites:

Books:

• HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations by Nancy Duarte
• slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations by Nancy Duarte
• Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences by Nancy Duarte

Articles:

• How to Give a Killer Presentation by Chris Anderson, curator at TED
• How to Become a Confident Public Speaker by Matthew Capala
• The Evolution of My Public Presentations by Rand Fishkin
• The Making of SearchLove by Mack Fogelson
• Too Busy To Succeed: How I let ‘busyness’ make me choke at MozCon by Adam Audette (make sure to read comments too!)
• 11 Things To NEVER Say In A Presentation by XCamilleWong
• Presentation Horrors: Don’t Do These Things by Ian Lurie
• Being a MozCon Community Speaker: A Look Inside by Zeph Snapp

Videos:

• TED: The secret structure of great talks by Nancy Duarte
• 8 Rules for Exceptional Slide Presentations – Whiteboard Friday by Rand Fishkin
• 30 Tips for Awesome Presentations – Video and Slides by Ian Lurie

Best of luck!

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Posted by Cyrus-Shepard How big is local SEO? Our latest Industry Survey revealed over 67% of online marketers report spending time on local search. We’ve witnessed demand for local SEO expertise grow as Google’s competitive landscape continues to … Continue reading →