Digital Marketing Site Analysis And Best Practices
Whether you are trying to begin or to get better at SEO, PPC, Social Media or improving site conversions, a digital marketing site analysis is an important first step towards the development and implementation of a digital marketing strategy.
This article will focus mainly on “on-site” analysis, and after taking care of all of your on-site analysis you should make sure you analyze your off-site factors, as they are usually a huge factor in determining the success of your online marketing efforts.
This is an overview of a digital marketing assessment. To “dig-in” on any one of these topics in more detail please visit our resources page or contact us for a free assessment here:
Step 1: Know Your Audience
Before we get all “technical”, we need to start at the foundation of your marketing strategy. It is vital that you know who your target audience is and how to best engage with them. It is surprising to me how many businesses do not understand the importance of this step.
Once you understand your target audience at a deep level, you will understand the pains they have and the solutions for which they are looking that are driving them to look for you (or your competitors) in the first place. Once you have defined that, you can begin to position your company as the ideal solution provider for your target buyers. This step will help to ensure that your website and all of your marketing efforts are maximized.
This step will help to guide all of the content you develop and your keyword research, which is step two for this analysis.
To learn more about how to develop the right messaging for your business, you can view and download a presentation here:
Step 2: Keyword Research
Before you can assess how well your search engine optimization is or is not doing, you need to know which target keywords you should be targeting. You can learn about keyword research via a number articles and tutorials we have available for free on our resources button at the top of this page, or one of these links below:
5 things you’re doing wrong during keyword research
Step 3: Ranking Analysis
Once you have your list of keywords you can plug them into a ranking analysis tool. There are a vast number of tools available for you to use to analyze how well you rank for your target search terms. Here are a few we recommend that have free versions:
Brightlocal
Brightlocal is an excellent tool if you have a significant need to rank for local searches. It allows you to track up to 10 keywords for free, and it allows you to set the location for the searcher so that you can see how you are truly doing in a specific market, rather than from wherever you are sitting when you do the search.
Mozilla, SEOBook Toolbar and “Rank Checker”
Rank checker is a free tools you can use from within a Mozilla browser. It is always free and gives you some good basic data on your rankings.
Other tools you can use include Moz, SEMRush, Google Webmaster Tools, and there are many more.
Once you know how your site ranks, you will begin to see where the gaps are from where you are now and where you want to be.
Step 4: Website Analysis – On-Page
One thing you will need to note from your ranking analysis is which page Google is bringing back for specific searches. For example, our home page is the page that comes back on the first page of Google for the search “Denver SEO”, but for the search “denver ppc management” Google is bringing back an interior page focused on denver and ppc in the search results.
In this case, we are willing to focus our home page content a bit more on “denver seo” related terms and optimize the interior page for “denver ppc management”. Now we know that we need to analyze each of those pages in the context of the specific audience it is targeting.
For every page on our website, you will need to check off these things on the list and make sure they are done correctly. None of these is a magic bullet that will alone rank your website. However, making certain all of these are done correctly will help to ensure that nothing is getting in your way. Taking care of these things will remove any virtual “head wind” that could limit your results:
From a Site Level Perspective
Proper Internal Linking
Unique Content on Each Page, Including
Title & Meta Data
Pictures
Video
An xml sitemap
Google Analytics
Mobile Friendliness
For Individual Pages
Unique Content on the Page
Proper URL structure
Title Tag Optimization
Description Tag Optimization
Keyword Tag Optimization
Quantity of Content (You may need 600-1,600 words on a page to improve ranking results)
Header Tag Optimization: (H1s, H2s, H3s)
Properly Named and Formatted Pictures
Video
Trust Signals
Testimonials
Awards
Certifications
BBB Logo and Link
Social Media Links
Calls to Action – Are you addressing people in different stages of the buying cycle?
Lead Capturing
