SEO Audits

SEO Audits

Why should a company use a professional SEO audit service?

  1. Keep your existing SEO company, honest. Verify those traffic numbers and rankings from a 3rd party auditing service. Most SEO experts use black hat and/or fake traffic to fool unsuspecting customers into shady  services.
  2. Keeping your website up to date and cleaned of any excess issues helps you compete online. A search engine optimization audit will find any hidden errors that are causing rankings to stagnate online.
  3. Looking to and/or have recently redesigned your company website? A technical audit can save your existing SEO rankings from tanking after a site redesign. This is the most common issue we see at our offices.
  4. Looking to hire an SEO expert or company? Let us vet their expertise. 97% of the digital marketing companies we test, do not pass. Protect your company and investment dollars before signing a contract.

Learn more about our website auditing services by calling 775-870-0488.

Over 89% of digital marketing companies are not qualified to generate quality leads for their clients.

View our guide on the worlds best SEO experts here.

seo audit

We tested all of the top competitors in our local Reno market to see what keywords they ranked for in Google, and were SHOCKED to learn that over 97% of these supposed SEO companies did not rank for buyer intent keywords! How is it that a digital marketing company, that sells SEO services does not use SEO to acquire new customers?

Buyer beware. Even large, well known ad agencies are promoting their digital marketing services and do not use SEO either.

A quick search for the keywords that the agency ranks for will tell the truth of how technical savvy they are at their own marketing efforts.

Example report for a local Reno marketing agency where they rank for keywords, on page 7,8 or 9…where no one every goes!

seo stats

Some local companies do not even rank on the back pages of Google search. They use billboards and/or online ads via Google PPC in order to get SEO clients. Very strange indeed. More and more businesses are becoming educated in how these marketing scams work. It is getting harder to trick businesses into shady marketing services.

Eventually these fly by night marketing companies will fall by the wayside.

Quick tips to vet your SEO company

  1. Check out their reviews in Google. Why Google? Yelp and Facebook reviews are easy to game.
  2. Track the amount of keywords the marketing agency ranks for. What page do they rank in Google?
  3. Check the ranking stats of their customers as well.
  4. Hire a 3rd party vetting service.
  5. Make sure this company is actually located in the US. A number of foreign companies have front offices in the US, but all of the “work” is done overseas.

Arm yourself with the tools that experts use.

Invest in a company that has the experience and proven track record of successful wins for their own website as well as those of their clients. Always verify that data. There are ways that these companies can fake traffic and analytics. If you have been paying a company for marketing work and not seeing more sales, something is wrong. Do not trust their stat reports, verify with a 3rd party expert that will explain your real world rankings.

SEO Companies that reach out to you, unsolicited are usually in desperate straights (they can’t SEO their own company website) so they steal email addresses online and send out fake emails like the ones shared on the Worse SEO Hall of Fame WebSite here: https://www.claytowne.com/beats-digging-ditches/seo-marketing-spam-hall-of-shame/

Most small businesses get 3 – 5 sales calls a day from spammers trying to sell their Google ranking services. Think about it, if they were good at SEO, they would not have to call and harass you and your staff every day.

Calls from Google to Push Your Ranking a Fraudulent Indicator

Google will never call a business to assist them to improve their search engine rankings. Google provide various tools and knowledge bases to help web masters, search engine optimization experts and other information technology professionals understand the nature of SEO, but they never call businesses unsolicited.

Google has a support team, and customer service department that businesses can call for assistance, but never initiate contact with a business via telephone. source: https://themarketingfolks.com/seo-scam/

Those same small businesses receive several emails a day from supposed experts who just happened to stumble across your website and found some technical errors they can fix for real cheap. These emails are also scams. Never click on those links or call the sales number. They will automatically add your number to a spam call list, selling it to the highest bidder.

SEO is an investment, just like other forms of marketing.  Make sure to work with a vetted expert and try to not think that just by hiring a young person to do your companies SEO or Social Media Marketing will help save the day. More often than not, these people are grossly under qualified for the position and will do more harm than good to your rankings online.

You can save money by doing a lot of it yourself, but you should plan to spend at least 1-2 hours per day marketing your company, writing content, engaging with your audience, and building online relationships.

A good budget for a national business or a competitive local business is typically in the $2500 – $5000 per month range depending on the competitiveness of your industry. For a quality company that isn’t looking to make massive profits on you, that kind of budget should produce good results. You may not reach all of your goals depending on the competitiveness of your industry or if there is additional work that needs to be done (site design, etc) but you should see measured improvement. source: https://moz.com/ugc/how-to-avoid-seo-digital-marketing-scams

SEO is still in the early stages of development. Most businesses do not even know what it is and how it can help or harm their businesses. This opens up room for sharks to surf in and make a lot of easy cash.

I once heard a meteorologist admit that forecasts that predict the weather beyond three days are essentially just guesses. “Then why do you still offer them?” the interviewer asked. “Because the audience demands them,” he answered. Left unsaid was “Because the audience doesn’t know any better.” That’s where SEO is now. The public is still largely ignorant of the truth about Internet marketing, and the stakes are so high that there are more than enough dupes willing to pay for SEO that doesn’t work.

It takes many forms. Fast talking consultants pitch SEO campaigns that cost $50,000-$75,000 to medium-sized businesses, and even though the business owners are skeptical, they often pay because they don’t know what else to do. Web development firms charge small businesses $500 a month for ongoing SEO maintenance, which means precisely collecting $500 for doing absolutely nothing. Marketing companies charge you to enlist popular bloggers to link to your site despite the fact that their blogs have nothing to do with what you’re selling. SEO “experts” charge you to submit your site to hundreds of fly-by-night Eastern European web directories in the name of link building. Most of these experts won’t explain to you what they’re actually doing, and almost none of what they do works. In fact, they’re more likely to get you penalized than to actually help you. source: https://techli.com/2013/12/the-truth-about-internet-marketing-part-2-seo-is-a-scam/

How to spot fake reviews on Amazon?

Fake reviews are one of the biggest hurdles in the way of a good online shopping experience. Like all other online shopping sites, the menace of fake reviews also plague the e-commerce giant – Amazon.

Though Amazon tries hard to weed out the fake reviews, however as a buyer, we need to play our part. Spending a few minutes before making a purchase is all it takes to not get scammed by those glowing 5 stars.

So in this post, I’ll help you identify fake reviews with a few tricks that help me make sound shopping decisions.

Note: As an example, I will be using this new MaxBoost Google Pixel 2 case that my analysis (and my gut) tells me has fake reviews.

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE: https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/identify-fake-reviews-on-amazon/

How to rank your website in Google

How to rank your website in Google

Google is the top search engine in the world. With millions of searches happening each hour across the globe, how are you to get your companies website in front of as many searchers as possible?

SEO or search engine optimization is constantly evolving. Google updates twice a day on average. They are updating their algorithm and website to keep them as the top search engine. With those many changes, comes great opportunity for small and large businesses to reach the growing numbers of website searchers in Google.com.

Ranking a page from your website high in search results is the ultimate goal of most SEO companies, but we take it a step further and secure top sections of the first page of this popular search engine with SERP elements that have been proven to gain the most views online.

 Some SERP elements include:

source: https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2018/01/seo-marketing-strategy/

  • AdWords – up to four at the top with optional extensions can make each ad deeper
  • Knowledge Graph – boxes that include data ranging from companies to celebrities on the right of search results page
  • Sitelinks – multiple links to subpages within the website result visible below the primary website
  • Local packs – several local listings appear together (often under a map marking the location of each one)
  • Carousel listings – interactive visual display of results for things like movies, songs, and restaurants
  • Reviews with star ratings (make some organic results deeper)
  • Image packs – often a single row of images appearing on the results page
  • Video
  • In-depth articles
  • Twitter content

Most of our SEO clients rank #1 for their most profitable keywords. They also rank multiple times on the first page of Google using the above strategies, gaining most of eye balls or views within a Google search result.

Contact Sandy Rowley today to learn how she can help your company gain the lion share of views for your keywords today. Call 775-870-0488.

Reno SEO Expert

Voted best SEO expert, Sandy Rowley is a leading small business SEO coach and mentor.

SEO audit template

  1. verify domain age.
  2. check website mobile friendliness.
  3. assess website speed is less than 3 seconds load time.
  4. review on site SEO factors.
  5. check click through rate.
  6. verify in Google Search Console.
  7. check sitemap.
  8. check htaccess file
  9. check robots.txt file
  10. check duplicate content stats.

Sandy Rowley

SEO Audit expert

775-870-0488

Audit SEO | Why you need an audit before and after a site re design

Audit SEO | Why you need an audit before and after a site re design

Company websites are one of the most important pieces to a successful marketing campaign and even business plan. Companies that focus their efforts on creating an engaging experience for their customers online, tend to out perform their competitors.

The look and feel of a custom web design is paramount to  its success, but what lies beneath that branded website, is where SEO audits redirect their focus.

Most of the new SEO auditing services we provide each month, come from new clients who started to lose SEO organic traffic and wanted to know why.

The usual culprit is a site redesign.

A full technical SEO audit shines light onto areas of the new website design that may not be up to par with Google’s SEO requirements. Most of the findings fall along simple and careless changes done by the ad agency or web design company.

SEO audits can take up to two weeks. A full report includes action steps needed in order to correct the issues. After these errors are corrected, we can get a websites rankings back within a few months or less.

Learn more about SEO audits:

How to perform an SEO audit

SEO audit template

SEO audit report sample

SEO audit software

SEO audits

SEO Site Audits

Schedule a Custom SEO Site Audit with Sandy Rowley @ 775-870-0488.  

Importance of SEO Audits in Online Marketing Strategies

Getting your website optimized for top listings is probably the focal point of the internet marketing work you do for your site. It’s is very important however to periodically check your sites for areas that need updating or corrections from errors that have occurred since you started your SEO, to ensure that it maintains the best position in the rankings that it can.

Whats an SEO Audit? Sounds stressful…

Let’s make it clear from the start that SEO audits are not quite like traditional audits. The latter is done for marketing purposes. A well-executed audit – right at the onset- would mean that you have better knowledge on the performance of your site, its overall performance and the performance of the individual pages. Improved search engine rankings make for the only purpose of these audits. They are performed before the beginning of a project and at the beginning of a new quarter.

The purpose of an SEO audit is to source out positive actions that need to be taken to improve your site performance. This process should be performed on a monthly basis to ensure your website stays current and up to date.

An SEO audit is a vital process in any good Internet marketing campaign. It evaluates the performance of the entire marketing plan. Analyzing your marketing and website effectiveness is more than just checking the number of clicks your website had over a given period. It’s aimed at knowing the origin of each click, the percentage of clicks on your site that followed through to sales, weak points in your marketing scheme, other opportunities available to increase your clicks and other threats that may undermine your marketing abilities. Additionally, an excellent SEO audit will show you if the marketing you are doing is reaching the proper demographic.

Items Reviewed with a Custom SEO Audit

On-Page Review
It focuses on keywords on the website, where we place them, and whether or not the pages are set up to leverage the most important signals to their full effect (such as the use of <h1> and <h2> tags, Page Titles, Image Alt Text, etc.)

On-Site Review
Here you look at issues which affect the whole site, rather than each page individually. This is often where serious issues are uncovered (such as problems with internal linking, duplicate content, crawler accessibility, URL structure). This probably the more technical part of the audit and something which require a trained eye.

Backlink Analysis
Once you’re done checking out the pages of the site, then the entire website itself. You start looking at where the site is featured elsewhere on the web and who links to it, as well as how they do it. In addition to this, you build a list of desirable linking opportunities that people can either take away to a link builder or bring back to you to action.

Using a Free SEO Audit tool could be a good start in the right direction, but implementing a Full Technical SEO Site Audit can leverage useful data to grow your online rankings above and beyond what a free tool can offer.

Would you like a free 15 minute review over the phone? Call or text Sandy @ 775-870-0488.   with your website address, name and phone number. We can quickly assess your immediate website needs and offer a custom quote to perform a full technical SEO audit and even fix SEO errors that are found.

What is included in a Full Technical SEO Audit?

A high level and detailed overview of what technical items are hindering online SEO growth.

Some items that could be included in a custom SEO site audit are:

1. Page and Server speed.
2. Mobile friendly.
3. Structured Data errors.
4. Crawl Errors
5. Meta Issues
6. Robots.txt review
7. Internal linking
8. URL Structure
9. Incompatibility problems

The custom report will use down to earth language, easy to understand and digest as well as in depth technical clarifications needed to assess proof of findings. Most Full Technical SEO audits start at around an investment of $1900 and up depending on the size of the website property. Read more about SEO site audits here.

 

Full technical SEO Site Audits start at $900 and are ready for review in 2 – 4 weeks. I may require access to Google Analytics,GMB, FaceBook Insights and Google Search Console. Call Sandy now at 775-870-0488.