Findings and recommendations of 2 the Top Design's SEO Audit of Dr Jeff Cornwall's blog. Dr Cornwall is the Chair of Belmont University's Center for Entrepreneurship. His website was redesigned 7 months before our audit and experienced a dramatic drop in traffic.

1. DrJeffCornwall.com
SEO Audit

2. DrJeffCornwall
SEO
Audit Nashville SEO Group
Last Month:
WordPress
SEO Plugin
By Yoast
Last Thursday
Of Every Month

3. DrJeffCornwall
SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com

4. DrJeffCornwall
SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com

5. DrJeffCornwall
SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
Redesign 3/21/2012

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SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
Reasons for Redesign
• Relieve strain on Belmont IT
• Standardize on Belmont’s preferred CMS
• Update look/design
• Generate ad revenue
Main tasks
• Move to HostMonster
• Convert Movable Type to WordPress
• New theme/design
• Add Google AdSense

7. DrJeffCornwall
SEO
Audit Redesign Considerations
?

8. DrJeffCornwall
SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
What traffic are you getting?
How are you getting that traffic?
How do we protect/increase
traffic?

9. DrJeffCornwall
SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
6,000-11,000 visitors/month
• 43% from Search Engines
• 30% from Referrals / Links

10. DrJeffCornwall
SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
After Redesign:
Total Traffic Down 70%

11. DrJeffCornwall
SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com

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SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
After Redesign:
Search Engine Traffic Down 80%

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SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
“Importance of Small Business” post:
200-400 visitors/month to 0

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SEO
Audit

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SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
Duplicate Content

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SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
SEO Problems
Massive Duplicate Content
Misuse of Hx tags
Less content above fold
No meta description
No branding in titles
Added large tag cloud
Poor pagination
Canonicalization
Tons of new low-value pages

17. DrJeffCornwall
SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
SEO Problems
Duplicate Content issues
New low-quality pages
Canonicalization issues
Pagination issues

18. DrJeffCornwall
SEO
Audit The $200,000,000,000 Idea
Google was the 1st search engine to use the value of links to help rank pages in their results.
PageRank (named for founder Larry Page) is assigned to each webpage.
This was a HUGE leap forward in serving more relevancy with less spam.

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SEO
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SEO Problems

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SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
Duplicate Content

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SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
Duplicate Content

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SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
Duplicate Content

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SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
Duplicate Content

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SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
Duplicate Content

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SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
Duplicate Content

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SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
Duplicate Content

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SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
Duplicate Content

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SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
Duplicate Content

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SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
Duplicate Content

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SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
Duplicate Content

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SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
Duplicate Content

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SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
Duplicate Content

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SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
Duplicate Content

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SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
Duplicate Content

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SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
PageRank Dilution

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SEO
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SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com

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SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
Change of URL with no 301 causes:
• 404 error
• No SEO link value

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SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
Search Engine Traffic

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SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
Recommendations
Install Yoast SEO Plugin
301 old pages to new
Ask linking site to update links
Optimize Homepage title
Create default title & meta description
Remove tag cloud
Implement rel=canonical

41. DrJeffCornwall
SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
Recommendations
Duplicate Content issues
New low-quality pages
Canonicalization issues
Pagination issues
meta robots: noindex, follow
•tags
•date archives
•author archives
•archive subpages
Use excerpts

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SEO
Audit DrJeffCornwall.com

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Audit DrJeffCornwall.com
Recommendations
Implement Google+ Author Highlighting
“Tests show a 30 percent increase in organic search engine
traffic for websites using Microdata”
http://searchengineland.com/how-to-get-a-30-increase-in-ctr-with-structured-markup-105830
“…clicks to the site dramatically increased by +150%”
http://www.catalystsearchmarketing.com/how-rich-snippets-can-improve-your-ctr
“The final number settled down around a 35% increase in
click-through rate. That's 35% more traffic from Google than
what I received before, and it was all free.”
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-author-photos

44. DrJeffCornwall
SEO
Audit Nashville SEO Group
Next Month:
Rich Snippets
& Author
Highlighting
Thursday 11/29
Belmont 6:30p
McWhorter 114

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