Expert tips from a leading SEO services New York Team
Search engine optimization is arguably one of the most vital of all digital marketing activities. Data from Smart Insights suggests that a staggering 3.5 billion searches are performed on Google each day. That’s an almighty 1.2 trillion per year! Other figures show that 89% of consumer purchases start with a web search while 81% of business to business buyers begin with a search engine. There is little wonder that our SEO services New York are in such demand.
With all of these figures in mind, it’s hard to make a business case for not investing in SEO. Of course, Google is notoriously tight-lipped when it comes to disclosing how it decides on search position. The search engine will often provide some general context when a major search algorithm update takes place but, otherwise, it very much keeps its own counsel.
Although there is no definitive list of SEO ranking factors, our SEO services New York team has years of experience at the forefront of search engine optimization. We routinely help clients to improve their Google listings and get to the bottom of poor performance issues. If your Google rankings aren’t as good as they should be, or your efforts are yielding little reward, it could be time to conduct an SEO audit.
To help you carry out this process, we’re sharing the secrets of excellent auditing, direct from our search engine optimization New York HQ.
#1 Keywords
The purpose of investing time and money in SEO is to move your brand through the results pages for certain keywords. Therefore, it’s highly advisable that you begin your SEO audit with a keyword review. Although there will be certain phrases that will be a steadfast part of your optimization processes, others will change over time.
Your keyword selection should be fluid and guided by search habits as well as your products and services. Language and search engine use changes over time, which means new ways of searching for products and services changes too.
You can use a keyword research tool such as Wordtracker to audit your keyword list and ensure it’s still relevant. Google Trends is also a great source of data and will show breakout terms related to your main search terms. This means you can add new phrases as they begin to be used by search users.
#2 Content review
Whether you’re working with a local SEO company New York or taking your SEO in-house, it’s a good idea to begin the audit process with an impartial analysis of your on-page content once you have your updated keyword list finalized. Our SEO services New York team suggests you split this into three parts:
- General web page content: such as the home page and about us page
- Shopping pages – such as e-commerce product descriptions and category pages
- Blog posts – including all blogs, white papers, articles and news items live on your site
When auditing your content, you should be looking for things like:
- Quality of content – do blog posts need updating? Are they long enough? Sufficiently detailed?
- Keyword focus – is each page built around a particular keyword?
- Keyword prominence – are you using keywords in page titles, headers, link text and body content?
- Uniqueness of content – are all product descriptions, category pages and web content pages unique?
#3 Inbound links
Links are the web’s currency. Think of a link back to your site as a vote of confidence. The more of those votes you have, the more favorably you’ll be viewed by search engines. Links are like roads too. They provide pathways into your site. The more you have, the easier it is for traffic to arrive on your site.
Carrying out a link audit can be a tedious and time-consuming task, but it is vital work. You’ll need to collate a list of all inbound links pointing back to your site. There are lots of software programs which will help with this process, including Moz and SEMRush. You can also use Google Analytics.
Once you have your list of links, you’ll need to comb through the data. You should focus on:
- Volume of links – how many links in total do you have? From how many different sources?
- Quality of links – are the sites linking back to you of good quality? Are they from sites related to your core product or service offering?
- Anchor text – do your keywords appear in the anchor text?
- Variety – are links pointing to a range of site pages or concentrated just on the home page? Is link text varied? Are links from a wide range of sources?
Once you have conducted your SEO audit, you should be well placed to understand where gaps in your strategy exist. You should also have a framework for improvements you need to make on-site, content to be created or updated and an accurate, useful set of keywords to work from.
If you’re interested in improving your search ranking speaking with our SEO services New York team is an excellent way to learn more about an SEO audit. Give us a call today. 516.883.3851
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