Pinpoint what’s missing with industry-leading tools
Although a good SEO will know where to look to search for onsite issues, this is an incredibly time-consuming process. To check every page for the technical SEO requirements that are needed, the content and keyword density that’s needed, broken links, schema markup and more would take hours. Instead of making this a manual process, we use SEMrush to audit our sites in a matter of minutes. There are hundreds of auditing tools out there, and Zinc has tried them all. As with everything, there are ones that are worth the time and ones that aren’t, but we’ve found that the amount of data that we’re able to access about a site is best with SEMrush. This enables us to search quickly to find anything onsite that is a cause for concern.
Fix technical issues
The first place to start with an SEO strategy is onsite. There are some basic technical SEO must-haves that ensure that the Google crawlers can find, read and index your site correctly. We’ll always check this first to make sure that there’s nothing stopping your site being seen by Google.
Complete keyword research
Keywords are often the first, or only, thing that people know about SEO. They’re vitally important, but they’re often misused. It’s easy to get a number one position for a keyword that doesn’t have any competition, but the ones that turn into conversions are the ones that are getting plenty of searches. It’s a good idea to do extensive research here to find out what brings traffic and conversions, and what you might have missed because you’re focusing on a granular keyword without seeing outside opportunity.
Complete link audit
Google looks at links to your site as a seal of approval from others. If other sites think you’re worth linking to, your site must be relevant and user friendly. The more links you have, the higher your site’s authority becomes, and the higher authority the sites that link to you, the better. Unfortunately, the world of links can get muddy. It’s possible to buy them, which can lead to penalties, and sometimes links appear that bring a site down without any fault of the site owners. We’ll have a look to see what’s linking to your site, and whether they are having a positive or a negative effect on your business.
Mobile analysis
Google switched to a mobile first index in 2018, but a mobile optimised site is still often seen as an afterthought for many website builders. We often get enquiries from customers who are doing everything right, but their sites aren’t responsive. If Google can’t see what’s on your site because the crawlers are looking from a mobile perspective, ranking is going to be much harder.
Analyse your competitors
Once we’ve got our to-do list to bring the site health up to scratch, it’s time to look at the bigger picture. It doesn’t matter if your site has 100 links if your competitors are working with 1000. We don’t like to do the same thing that everybody else is doing, but it’s never a bad idea to know what they’re up to. With competitors, we like to take a look at their backlink profile, the amount of content they have and the paid advertising they have, as well as some of the SEO tactics they are using.