NIRS.org SEO Audit

@KWatier NIRS SEO Audit October, 2017 1

@KWatier 2 About Me • Owner of WO Strategies LLC
• 17 years of communications experience • 13 years of online marketing experience (SEO, SEM, social media, web analytics) • Built my first website in 1994 • Once crashed a website for 4 days and still received almost 1.3 million visitors/mo. (up from 300K) • Wrote master’s thesis on consumer adoption of wearable computers

@KWatier Today’s Plan • Show you easy ways to check
your site’s SEO friendliness • Outline common areas that limit SEO success • Go through a sample of issues found on NIRS.org’s site. • Provide you with my favorite lists of tools and resources you can use to check your own site. 3

@KWatier SEO Rules & Processes 4

@KWatier Four Major Rule Areas 5 For optimal results, start
with a solid base and then work your way up.

@KWatier Setting an SEO Strategy 1. Understand your target audience,
your business goals. a. Create data driven personas, keyword research, and customer journeys 2. Check to see if you follow the“Rules.” Do an audit: a. Fix tech issues b. Fix content issues c. Fix/build links d. Fix UX issues 3. Implement changes based on user data: a. Adjust content and promotion based on personas, journeys and data. b. Improve search engine result page (SERP) click through rate (CTR) & on site engagement. c. Check/measure on site usability. Fix. 4. Keep reading search updates and adjust based on search engine changes. 6

@KWatier The Path to Ranking 1. Discovery 2. Crawling 3.
Indexing 4. Ranking 7

@KWatier The Impact: 8 By just fixing the SEO technical
issues, we were able to increase traffic to the website by 27.89% in 3 months! Dashboard Dashboard

@KWatier 9

@KWatier Background on NIRS • No keyword research or previous
SEO work. • 8,286 URLs - Screaming Frog crawl 10

@KWatier Discovery Issues 11

@KWatier 12 Where are the 8K URLS?

@KWatier 3K Pages not in Sitemap file The xml sitemap
file uploaded to Google Search Console was not the XML Sitemap Index file and does not have all of the site’s quality pages. Fix: Create an xml sitemap file with the quality pages and add it to Google Search Console. 13

@KWatier 14 Loss of Backlinks

@KWatier Loosing Links Through Broken Redirects 15

@KWatier SEO Impact of Broken Links (404s) • Loss of
PageRank and ranking if that content has just moved. • Can lose the value of your historic deep links, and your domain authority can suffer. • Limits url discovery. 16 Flickr user GirlieMac

@KWatier Indexing Issues 17

@KWatier 18 Duplicate Page Titles

@KWatier Thin Content Also duplicate https://www.nirs.org/victory-2/ and https://www.nirs.org/victory/ Page Title:
VICTORY: NIRS 19

@KWatier Content Quality Questions: • Would you trust the information
presented in this article? • Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature? • Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations? • Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines? • Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results? • Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend? 20

@KWatier 21 Google’s Panda: • Google Panda was released in
February 2011 • An algorithm change focused on lowering the rank of “low-quality” sites or “thin sites”. • Now part of the core algorithm

@KWatier 22 Google Quality Updates

@KWatier Ranking Issues 23

@KWatier Missing Meta Descriptions 24

@KWatier Content Targeting 25

@KWatier Google & Bing Rule: Keywords “Think about the words
a searcher might search for to find a piece of your content, and make sure your site actually includes those words.” - Google 26

@KWatier 27

@KWatier 28

@KWatier MOBILE SEO 29

@KWatier Mobile Usability Issues 30

@KWatier 31

@KWatier PAGE SPEED 32

@KWatier Page Speed 33

@KWatier GA Page Speed Timings 34

@KWatier Why Improve Page Speed? • Page speed is a
Google ranking factor. • 53% of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. • According to surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com, nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within 3 seconds. 35

@KWatier Google Analytics Bonus Tips • Create a filter to
remove internal traffic • Set up goals 36

@KWatier Priority Fixes 1. Improve page speed 2. Set up
Google Analytics filtered view that removes employees, set up goals 3. Conduct keyword research and improve content (and metadata) 4. Reclaim lost links 5. Develop campaign to build more quality links. 6. Potentially block from indexing the low quality content 37

@KWatier Ready to get your hands dirty? Join me for
a full Tech SEO training workshop. http://bit.ly/techSEOcourse 38

@KWatier 39 Recap • The first step is getting Google
to put your page in their index. It is a privilege to be indexed. • You can’t improve your organic traffic if Google is having technical issues with a page (or your site). • A strong technical foundation is the first step in a strong SEO strategy. • Do keyword research • You need to create content that is BETTER than what is currently ranking for that term - so look at the SERPs!

@KWatier Want to Learn More? Sign up to be an
early student in my SEO Bootcamp course. Sign up for my technical SEO course in November. Download my SEO audit tools list. 40 KATHERINE WATIER ONG 202-930-1744 [email protected] @kwatier www.linkedin.com/in/katherinewatier www.WOStrategies.com

NIRS.org SEO Audit

NIRS.org SEO Audit

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