With Google new interface being rolled out this week, vertical search engines (images, video, blog, news) are going to used even more. SEO professionals tasked with doing a website audit are going to have broaden their scope to include all areas of online marketing, not just on-page and off-page SEO.
No matter what the size of your business online, a website audit should now begin to look at all aspects of your online marketing efforts, including
SEO
Visibility
Usability
Social Media
Analytics
Website Audit Components
When starting the Website Audit where should you begin?
Benchmarking where you are now is always a good starting point. Before you start getting into the nitty gritty of what might be wrong with your online marketing strategy, take the time to look at your online landscape.
I would recommend that the first area to look at is the visibility of the business online. Online visibility, in the traditional sense, meant looking at the keyword rankings for a website. I think this approach needs to be evolved, you should be digging a little deeper and might want to start looking at the following areas:
Search Engines
Rankings
Bing
Yahoo
Target Keywords
branded Keywords
Indexed Pages
Social Media
YouTube
Flicker
Website Audit Visibility
Finding out what your website’s visibility is in the search engines is easy enough, you can manually check the rankings or use software like the SEO Workbench.
But what about your visibility in terms of indexed pages? How do you find out if a search engine has indexed all your pages? Some may argue that this component of the website audit should reside in the SEO section, but I think it’s important before you even look at the website, to find out what the search engine think about it in terms of indexed pages.
To find out how many of your websites pages are actually indexed in the search engine you simply go to any of the search engines and type in the command, site:www.yourdomain.com
It’s interesting to see the difference between the search engines. I tried this command for the domain www.getslipcovers.com and these were the results:
Google 91 pages
Yahoo 39 pages
Bing 146 pages
How many pages are actually on this site? It’s actually quite easy to find out using a web crawler, one that you’ve configured yourself! Seriouly though, there is a really quick to intsall and relatively easy to understand web crawler at WebSPHINX
According to WebSphinx there are 39 pages on Getcovers.com. As part of a website audit, the natural question to ask here is where are all the other pages coming from in Google and Bing?
If you actually try to go through Google’s and Bing’s SERPS to find what the last pages indexed are, you’ll find that both only allows you go as far as page 4 and Google reports 36 pages, while Bing is at 25 pages – interesting!
Why is that? Why would the search engine report a larger number of pages on an initial search and then only give you access to a few?
The larger number of pages are all the pages that a search engine has indexed from a website. When you dive a little deeper, it will only return those pages that the search engine deems to have enough quality.
In this case the search engines are reporting more or less the actual number of pages on the website. The thing to look out for when doing this yourself or getting someone else to do it for you, is are the search engines only indexing a small portion of your website? If they are, you can start looking at ways to address this. Maybe it’s an issues with your internal linking, or navigation?
After you have your benchmark in terms of visibility for pages and pages indexed, next you want to audit your Social Media visibility.
How do you find out (for free!) what people are saying about your brand online?
1.Twitter
There are numerous Twitter clients available to track what people are saying about your brand, here are some:-
- Hootsuite (My favorite)
- Pluggio (New to me, but looks very interesting)
- Twirl
Or, you can just query Twitter itself at http://search.twitter.com
If we use the example from above, www.getslipcovers.com lets see what Twitter returns. In this case nothing is returned , so not a lot of activity on Twitter for getslipcovers.com. Interesting though, if you do a search for ’slip covers’ on Twitter , quite a lot of activity, and consequently quite lot of opportunities for getslipcovers.com to engage with people who are talking about ’slip covers’.
2. Google Alerts
This service from Google allows you to get notified when your brand or website, or any keyword for that matter, is mentioned on Google’s vast network. You can get notifications from the following sources:-
- News
- Blogs
- Web
- Video
- Groups
Google Alerts
This is an incredibly powerful (free) service that lets you keep track of your major keywords and brand names.
3. YouTube
This may not seem like an obvious one, but YouTube is the second most searched on ’search engine’ on the web!
Search for your company name or brand name to see if people have tagged videos with your keywords. For our example above, ’slip covers’ on YouTube returns 870 results (videos) for this keyword term.
4. Flickr
Another website where you may not think of looking, but again, doing a keyword search on ’slip covers’ returns 6,186 results. Again, could be a good place to find people who are using images tagged with your brand/products and maybe you don’t like it?
5. LinkedIn
This is more competitor analysis than social media monitoring, but you can find out who your competitors are for chosen keywords and see what they are up to on LinkedIn.
6. Facebook
Again more competitor analysis, but very useful to keep close to your community, acting essentially as customer service online.
Lots of free opportunities to find out where people are mentioning your brand and what they are saying about you. Visibility uncovery should be a major part of any audit of your business online.
In the next post we’ll look at the next step in auditing your online business and find out what are the important components of a the SEO audit!
What areas do you think are important when auditing a business online?
Do you think Google’s new interface is going to change the way you audit a business?
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