Senior Digital Marketing Specialist Nicolette Beard walks through the 5 most important benchmarks for a new SEO client and how to create benchmark reports.You can craft marketing reports in minutes with Raven: https://raventools.com/reporting-engine/
The 5 Most Important Benchmarks for a New SEO Client
1. THE 5 MOST
IMPORTANT
BENCHMARKS
FOR A NEW SEO CLIENT
Nicolette V. Beard, Raven
2. Welcome!
Business Owner
Editor / Publisher
SEO Consultant
Ghost Blogger
Online Marketing Strategist
@RavenNickiB
3. Reach-Based Benchmarks
Reach represents SEO work toward increasing
visibility and traffic.
More reach means more visitors.
More visitors take more actions.
More actions lead to more results.
4. Our Sample Client
BulkCandyStore.com,
an eCommerce website
based in Florida
Sells candy to
consumers, primarily
for special occasions
Raven’s Evaluation Tools
• Site Auditor
• Site Performance
• Backlink Explorer
• Research Central
• Competitor Manager
5. Benchmark No. 1: Crawlability
For Web Design firms:
• Is there a proper site
map?
• Are pages blocked in the
robot.txt file?
• Is the site architecture
creating duplicate or error
pages?
Search engine bots
need to find your website
and its content quickly.
Common issues:
Blocked pages
Redirected pages
Load time
6. Benchmark No. 2: On-Page Factors
For Marketing Agencies
• Are your writers, SEOs
and developers working
together to created
optimized content on the
page and in the code?
Search engines require
quality pages to index.
Common issues:
Stub pages
Duplicate content
7. Benchmark No. 3: Link Value
For Marketing Agencies
• Is the content link
worthy?
• Is there evidence of
sharing social content
with industry peers and
customers?
• What outreach has
attracted online media
outlets?
A valuable external link is
trustworthy and relevant to
readers and search
engines.
Common issues:
Few .EDU and .GOV links
Few social shares
8. Benchmark No. 4: Link Diversity
For Marketing Agencies
• Does the target website
have evergreen content?
• Are there ways to add or
promote content that
would encourage linking
and sharing?
• What niche forum might
your audience participate
in that could drive traffic?
A large, diverse set of
trustworthy sites linking to
yours indicates quality.
Common issues:
Total linking domains
Types of linking domains
Quality of linking domains
9. Benchmark No. 5: Deep Links
For Marketing Agencies
• Does the target website
contain a resource hub or
newsroom?
• Are there ways to add
content that would drive
deep links without
creating a huge burden
for your client?
Deep links can drive more
traffic to the most relevant
destination.
Common issues:
Too many links to home page
Too few links to key hub pages
10. Goals and Results
These benchmarks help
you set goals that clients
can understand and you
can reach.
Report milestones
Remind clients why your
services are valuable
Photo credit: Flickr
A business loses roughly 25% of its online visitors if its site takes over 4 seconds to load. At 13.34 second, this website is loading 3x longer.
Read: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/ecommerce-load-time-hazards/
301 redirects are okay and won’t affect any page rank unless there are thousands of pages being redirected. Alternatively, would be to use rel=canonical. See http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
Since 2010, Google’s been using site speed as a ranking factor. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html
Any metric shown in Site Performance can be hidden from view on a user-by-user basis. This means that the preferences you choose will carry over between Profiles and Campaigns in Raven, but they won’t overwrite the preferences chosen by another user on your account.
Link opportunity: If your site has a lot of images, create a Flickr account and add links to images. Every time the image is used on the Internet, your website gets credit. This can improve your diversity exponentially.
Link Alert: exact match anchor text was part of the Penguin update to penalize sites suspected of spam. http://www.wordtracker.com/blog/7-top-tips-to-avoid-a-google-penguin-penalty-in-2014; http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2279845/Googles-Penguin-2.0-Algorithm-The-Definitive-Guide