Where to start when evaluating your SEO performance? — Jordan Koene // Searchmetrics

Quotes

• “Often the websites start off with very specific intent or purpose as you alluded to here. One of the first questions I askis, What is it that youre doing for SEO to ensure that you have a sound, technical site? because if you do not have those elements in place, even the tactical and transactional content that you have is not going to perform well.” -Jordan

• “Evaluatingsite speed in your case would be getting started and jumping in Google Search Console and seeing what kind of speed scores and metrics you are getting back from Google within that platform.” -Jordan

• “Obviously in platforms like Foursquare, there is only so much you can do but there are some aspects that you can control, like image sizes.” -Jordan

• “So I pulled up, Google Search Console here and weve got a little over 300 pages. In terms of site speed, weve got zero slow pages. That sounds like a win. And we have 105 moderate pages and no fast pages. What is the assessment for this breakdown?” -Ben

• “This is commonplace to be and to be honest with you, okay is good enough in this particular instance because you are not some behemoth that is trying to compete in a very specialized vertical.” -Jordan

• “You need to look at what are these moderate pages. Is there a common theme within these? Are all these pages a particular directory? Do all these pages have any particular experience on them that may be causing a slow down for you. Thats the first step. Evaluating the situation and understanding what you can systematically resolve or fix.” -Jordan

• “The next phase of your effort is evaluating what is going on in your content. What is it that you are publishing and why are you publishing it and really getting a sense of, is your content addressing an audience thats in Google.” -Jordan

• “I want to make sure that people understand this. This is not about making more content. Right now, its just about what do you have and why you have it. Then, ensuring that you are leveraging that content to its full potential. Is it providing the maximum potential possible and if it is not, then you may have to look at other issues. But if it is matching its full potential, maybe you need more content.” -Jordan

• “When you were talking about these data points, there are two that really stand out for me. One of them was the average position. Your average position is remarkably low, so what I would start to understand is, what are some positions that I can improve. Subsequently in theory, if you are able to improve those rank positions, that would drive your click-through rate up.” -Jordan

• “One of the things that you want to understand is going back to the previous technical component. It seems that Google is crawling inindexing all of your content. So in theory, there isnt necessarily some limiting factor that is preventing you from getting your content into Google.” -Jordan

• “What is going on there is that your content isnt moving into a position of high authority.Often times when we work on sites like these, we try to find a sweet spot of where you can actually move content into an authority position to be in traffic.” -Jordan

• “There is a lot of misleading sentiments in the SEO space. But one of the best ways to understand where your authority stands is how many backlinks do you have? Are you actually getting enough references from other websites and domains.” -Jordan

• “I think that one of the challenging components of SEO in the last 3 to 4 years has been the mystical cons of the backlinks. For the established brand, those with a multi-year footprint and have an established level of authority with Google, backlinks have become less and less relevant but for net new domains and businesses, this becomes a massive hurdle.” -Jordan

• “Theres really a pendulum that takes place here. How old and established is your website and brand online? That is a factor that Google takes into account. And then, how many links in backlinks do you have to drive the awareness of this brand in page.” -Jordan

• “So what I am hearing, the first thing you are looking at technically is Google going to have access to your page and if that is not happening, it doesnt matter what content you have or what your domain reputation is. Once you get past the technical component, you look at the content and say, “Okay, Google is getting access to the content, it is ranking all of the content and the problem that you are having is not what is on the page, its how many people know your brand. Youre not giving a strong enough signal to Google that you have authority where they should rank you over more established or more recognized properties. So really what I have is a reputation problem.” -Ben