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A website assessment is the process of analysing a website’s technical, visual and structural properties to unveil aspects of the website that could be revised and/or implemented to improve the overall site performance.

As the owner of a website, your idea of site performance may vary. For small to medium businesses with an online presence, the crux of your site performance may involve conversions in sales, and return on investment with your online efforts. If you are a not-for-profit organisation, the main aim of your website may be to increase the awareness of what you do through driving more traffic to your site and increasing subscriptions to online newsletters for example.

The point I’m attempting to illustrate above is that each website is different, and each has different goals. A website assessment can help put you and your website in good stead to achieving those goals.

At the outset of any project that Paramount Search Marketing undertakes, a website assessment is the first and foremost task that we undertake. It assists in developing an understanding of where your site may be corrected which immediately identifies opportunities to begin an  SEO, social media, link building or video marketing strategy to leverage your site, based on its aims, to its full potential.

What We Assess

Design and Navigation

There’s no good having a website if your visitors can’t even get around it. Navigation and visual design are key elements to making sure that everything you need to say online is being absorbed by those who land at your domain. We will assess navigational aspects such as the placement of menus, internal linking, and the implementation of forms. We’ll also assess crucial design elements such as colour schemes, branding and identity and the use of graphics. It’s important to note that even Google are putting the spotlight on website design by implementing page previews in search engine result pages, so by having this right from the get go you’ll increase click throughs from Google and reduce your bounce rate while you’re at it.

Site Structure and Technical Elements

If you’ve ever heard the term SEO-friendly then this is what we’re talking about here. Every website needs to ensure that their site runs technically well in terms of no broken links, no 404 error pages, correct use of siloing, and proper display of images and video. We will assess aspects of your website such as the hierarchy of pages and their internal links, optimising URL structures, not diluting themes, leveraging the flow of PageRank throughout the site and making sure nothing is broken on site. At Paramount Search Marketing we use a combination of our own knowledge and Google Webmaster Tools to analyse the structural and technical elements of your website.

Conversion Goals

As stated previously, your site may have specific goals. These may be anything like:

• Increasing leads to your business
• Driving subscriptions to newsletters or mailouts
• Boosting on site sales and orders
• Increasing awareness of your brand
• Increasing reservations/bookings or handling of other arrangements
• Directing traffic to social media platforms

During our website assessment we can assess how your site has approached reaching these goals, and recommend the implementation of conversion steps and multivariate testing to drive more traffic to dedicated areas of your website.

Analytics and Reporting

If you’re attempting to improve something or have it perform better you need benchmarks. By being able to track visitor data, site traffic, bounce rates, top pages and content and referrals you will have a much better understanding of what is and isn’t working for those that turn up to your website. During a website we will assess how to go about implementing analytics tracking code for your website. For all projects, Paramount Search Marketing uses the Google Analytics service to track visitor behaviour.

For more information, see how we identify your websites competition.

At Paramount Search Marketing, identifying the competition of your website is at the forefront of any SEO project that we undertake. This involves our SEO consultants taking time to align themselves with the industry that your business or organisation is involved in, and scouring the web to uncover two profiles of competitors.

These competitor profiles are:

Business Competitors

These are typically the guys you are fighting with directly for new customers or clients. In example if we were undertaking competitor research for McDonald’s, we might expect to find business competitors showing up in search results and utilising social media such as:

• KFC
• Pizza Hut
• Oporto
• Subway
• Red Rooster
• Hungry Jacks

In most cases, our clients can provide us with a short list of business competitors that they know they compete with, but throughout competitor research we may uncover business competitors you didn’t even know you were up against!

Ranking Competitors

In terms of SEO, these are the guys we want to chase down and overtake in the search results. Ranking competitors are websites that are populating the search results for keywords that your website is targeting. In example if we were doing competitor research for McDonald’s, we might expect to find ranking competitors showing up in search results for:

• Cheeseburgers
• Fries
• Salads
• Take away food

Sites that show up for these terms may be anything from informational sites like wikis (Wikipedia, Wiki.com), video sites (YouTube, Veoh), social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter) and even the avergae joe’s personal blog. They are online spaces that are doing SEO work and Google is rewarding that with rankings.

The majority of the time we will find that business competitors are in fact ranking competitors too. You either need to keep up with them, or allow them a huge advantage in driving website traffic and acquiring more market share than you.

To learn more about the tools we use for SEO, see here about how we go about keyword research.

We can’t stress the importance of keyword research enough. Many owners of websites think that it goes as far as brainstorming a few keywords they think people would enter into search engines, and throwing them into the meta tags and copy of their site. This is not even the tip of the iceberg. Sure, brainstorming potential keywords is an integral aspect of getting started with keyword research but there is a whole lot more to it. Here’s how we go about finding the most profitable or beneficial keywords to target for our clients.

Brainstorming

Our first step is to brainstorm the biggest list of potential keywords for your site. In example, if you are a tree lopping business these may be, tree lopping, tree surgeons, tree care and so on and so forth.

Using Keyword Tools

We would then take these core or ‘seed’ keywords and run them through our keyword tools which identify a wide range of synonyms and other search terms that are relevant. We can then analyse local and global search volumes, cost per click data and advertiser competition. At a glance, we can now see which keywords are really competitive, and which ones we may go after.

Spider Competitor Websites

To add to this list, we then spider all of your competitors websites to retrieve all of the keywords that they are targeting. This broadens the scope of our keyword research, and in most cases, can uncover a few little gems that may have slipped through our tools.

Google Insights

To expand our list, we may then conduct some searches through Google Insights, to get an understanding of rising searches, and in particular geographical information behind where these queries are coming from. This is really handy if your website and business only targets specific areas, because then we can see the most popular searches for that region.

Refining Relevancy

After all of the research above we may end up with a list of potential keywords about 500 long, or perhaps 2000 or so. Either way, there will be a lot! So our next step is to manually refine the relevancy of each of these keywords to your business. If you are restaurant that sells italian cuisine, but you’re targeting keywords such as chinese food, you will end up receiving the wrong types of visitors. This is why assessing only highly relevant terms to your website is extremely important, and it further tells Google exactly what you’re about. Targeting a wider scope of keywords will result in diluting the strength of those that you want to rank for, so appearing on the first page becomes much more difficult. It’s all about quality, not quantity.

Assigning Keywords to Content

Once we have determined the optimal keywords to target for your site, it is now a matter of implementing them across your site. This may include but isn’t limited to, adding keywords to meta tags, within copywriting, headings, internal and external links. It’s also a matter of theming all of your websites pages so that each silo of your site is extremely relevant to a particular keyword that’s being targeted. That’s how Google determines that your top pages are the best choice for them to display in search results, and the better optimisation of keywords across your site, the stronger your pages become, and the higher they will rank.

To see what’s next in our SEO process, visit our page on link building.

A lot of people ask how Google ranks particular pages in their search results, and a lot of the time the answer isn’t so clear cut. Google assesses over 200 different variables of a web page to determine it’s rank to a search query. One of them, if not the most important, is authority. And how does one determine the authority of a web site or web page within it? Google determines it by links from other websites pointing to yours. These links act as ‘votes of confidence’ and shows Google that other websites out there consider you an expert at what you do, therefore you have more authority over sites with less of them.

This is why link building is an essential practice that we at Paramount Search Marketing take very seriously. We use a wide variety of tools along with our general knowledge to scour the web for potential opportunities where your site could acquire a link. The more links your site acquires, the more authority it builds and higher rankings it will enjoy. Here’s how we go about link building.

Assess Competitor Link Profiles

A link profile of a website shows all of the links that the site has acquired. Usually we can gather information on their most valuable links, and from which sites they are coming from. This is a great way to seek opportunities for building links, and by gaining similar links to your competitors you will be on a level playing field in terms of authority. It’s by investing more time to link building then your competitors are that will give you an authoritative edge when it comes to rankings.

Determine a Strategy to Gain Links

There are many different ways to gain links. Some include article exchanges, link magnets (something valuable exclusive to your site that people will link to), social media campaigns, offering widgets, guest blog posts to a site in exchange for a link and even those that you gain without even making an effort! What we will do is determine the best strategy to go about receiving these links, and do it in a way that depicts a natural link acquisition profile for your website. Getting too many links to quickly shows Google that you’re a spammer, and can potentially lead to your site being de-indexed and possibly blacklisted by Google. Obviously, we wouldn’t advise a strategy like this.

For the final phase of our SEO methodology, see our page on analytics and reporting.

There’s not much point investing time and energy into SEO if you’re not going to build on it. Website analytics provide us with an opportunity to gauge the performance of the site across a wide range of criteria.

This is important to be able to track your website’s progress over time. A lot of people forget that search engine optimisation is completely measurable, and your ROI is definitely calculable. Some questions you might want answered include:

• How many people visited your site last month?
• How long did they stay on the site?
• Which pages did they visit?
• How did they get there?
• Where on the site did they exit?
• How high is your bounce rate?

These are but a few of the questions that our analytics services provide you. We also provide extremely detailed and full documentation of our analysation of visitor behaviour to you on a monthly basis and are happy to talk you through it. This gives our clients the opportunity to continually set goals for their website and measure the success of achieving those goals. To get started with Paramount Search Marketing, see what we can do for you here.