foxtail website audit

WEBSITE AUDIT

EXECUTIVE SUMMARYWebsite optimization will play a foundational role in your marketing campaigns, and this document provides our recommendations to help prepare your website to meet search engine guidelines, optimize content relevance to target keywords, and match the expectations of visitors arriving from search. Our optimization method focuses on everything from website analytics integration and social sharing integration, to technical site architecture and search engine robot optimization. Every recommendation in this document is a result of years of expert analysis and experience with both common and uncommon issues that need to be addressed as soon as possible. The implementation of these recommendations is a critical part of setting your campaign up for success. The result will be a website that is easier for search engines to access and understand, and easier for users to use and share content.

LOGO

This is a summary of all the issues that we discovered in our Onsite Audit.

Foxtail will cover any issues that fall within the range of onsite issues. These include:

• Meta Titles• Meta Descriptions• Header Tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.)

Foxtail will also cover some offsite issues. These include:• Cleaning Link Profiles• Improving Link Profiles• Optimizing Citations on Listings

Any issues with website content can be fixed by Foxtail. These type of issues will take more time to fix, and will cause certain deliverables to be shifted around a bit.

Any issues with site speed, or dev work can be handled by Foxtail depending on how your site is built. It will require a heavy amount of communication and will cause certain deliverables to be shifted around a bit so please bear with us. Thank you.

IMPORTANT FIXES COVERED BY FOXTAIL

• Fix Duplicate Meta Descriptions• Fix Duplicate Title Tags• Fix Duplicate H1 Header Tags• Fix Lengthy Title Tags• Improve Link Profile• Insert Alt Tags for Images• Insert Missing Meta Descriptions• Insert Missing Title Tags• Insert Missing H1 Header Tags

Any issues with website content can be fixed by Foxtail. These type of issues will take more time to fix, and will cause certain deliverables to be shifted around a bit.

Any issues with site speed, or dev work can be handled by Foxtail depending on how your site is built. It will require a heavy amount of communication and will cause certain deliverables to be shifted around a bit so please bear with us. Thank you.

IMPORTANT FIXES COVERED BY CLIENT

• Fix Duplicate Content Issues

• Work on text-HTML ratio

• Improve Site Speed on Desktop and Mobile

• Get SSL for website

To begin, we crawled your website and record all the URLs that were found by our crawler.

This gives us a broad overview of the website, and helps us identify pages of the website that we should focus our time on within this audit. On http://www.URL.com, we found 56 URLs.

WEBSITE OVERVIEW

ACCESSIBILITYNext, we’ll look at how accessible your website is to visitors and the search engines. Every opportunity to make your website easier to access and understand gives your website an advantage in appearing in search results for relevant queries.

ACCESSIBILITY – ROBOTS.TXTWebsite owners and webmasters can use the /robots.txt file to give instructions about the website to web robots, including search engines. This file at the root of the domain can tell robots to exclude certain pages of the site.

Analysis: We have found a robots.txt file on the root of the domain, and it is configured correctly. We also determined that none of the important web pages have been tagged with the meta robots “noindex” command.

Recommendation: We have no additional recommendations at this time.

Every web page someone visits will return a specific status code, which gives the browser additional instructions and information. Some of these codes can impact a website’s SEO, so we crawled the website to identify important response codes that should be assessed.

Analysis: A majority of the website’s HTTP status codes are “200”, which indicates they are responding correctly.


ACCESSIBILITY – HTTP STATUS CODES

ERROR!

ACCESSIBILITY – SITEMAPSAccording to sitemaps.org, sitemaps are “an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling.” There are a few benefits to utilizing sitemaps on a website, including the ability to list all of a site’s URLs in one plage, and telling search engines which pages should have priority.

Analysis: No sitemaps were found.

Recommendation: We recommend creating XML sitemap and adding it to the root directory.

Level 3, Phase 1

Level 2, Phase 1

Level 1

Level 2, Phase 3

Level 3, Phase 1

Level 2, Phase 2

Level 3, Phase 4

Level 4, Phase 1

Level 3, Phase 2

ACCESSIBILITY – SITEMAPS

The purpose of Information Architecture is to help web users accomplish their goals on the website quickly and easily. It’s also important to know that great Information Architecture should never conflict with SEO.

Analysis: The website currently places the important pages within one click from the home page, but the Call-To-Action instances could be more prominent on each page.

Recommendation: We recommend placing a static header bar with the Call-To-Action to help website visitors understand what they should do.

ACCESSIBILITY – ARCHITECTURE


A website’s performance, along with its user experience, play a key role in both search engine rankings and conversion rates.

Analysis: Using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, we determined that URL.com tested at 64/100 for mobile page speed, and 76/100 for desktop page speed. Keep in mind that the website is mobile responsive, which means the same website is displayed for both mobile and desktop users.

Recommendation: We recommend compressing all the images on the website to reduce page loading time. We can also decrease the website loading time by removing lines of render-blocking JavaScript code.

ACCESSIBILITY – SITE PERFORMANCE

63%

85%

42%

56%

https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/BlockingJS

INDEXIBILITYOf the web pages that are allowed access by search engine crawlers, we look at how many of them are being indexed by those search engines.


By performing a [site:url.com] search in Bing and Google, we calculated a rough estimate of the number of pages each website has indexed.

Analysis: Google has indexed 688 pages, while Bing has indexed 7,490 pages. Ideally, both search engines should have indexed an equivalent number of pages.

Recommendation: We recommend creating a Bing Webmaster Tools account to improve the website’s performance in the Bing search index.

INDEXIBILITY –NUMBER OF PAGES INDEXED


By auditing the website’s indexability, we can determine whether a website has been assessed any penalties by the search engines.

Analysis: Based on the information from this audit so far, there is no reason to suspect the website has been penalized by either Bing or Google.

Recommendation: There are no recommendations at this time.

INDEXIBILITY – PENALTIES

ON-PAGE RANKING FACTORSNot only does the indexibility and accessibility of a website impact its potential to rank in the search engines, but the individual pages of the site can influence search engine rankings as well.

Here, we analyzed various on-page ranking factors to identify any optimization opportunities.


Sometimes the home page can be displayed on more than one URL, which can be confusing for search engines and visitors. We checked for all of the following home page variations:www.URL.comURL.comhttp://URL.comhttps://URL.comURL.com/index.htmlURL.com/index.phpURL.com/home

Analysis: We see that there are multiple versions of the home page being indexed and displayed in the search results.

Recommendation:

ON-PAGE RANKING FACTORS – HOME PAGE VARIATIONS

http://www.url.com/

http://url.com/

https://url.com/

ACCESSIBILITY – SITEMAPSON-PAGE RANKING FACTORS –URL STRUCTUREThe URL is typically the easiest place to start when analyzing a website’s ranking potential. Best practice suggests that short, user-friendly URLs are ideal, and that the URL should use relevant keywords to describe the page’s content.

Analysis: The website’s URLs are short and user-friendly, and include relevant keywords for each page.

Recommendation: We recommend including “title” attributes with each anchor tag on pages. This will help search engines better understand the sections within each page in relation to the anchor tags within the main navigation.

ACCESSIBILITY – SITEMAPSON-PAGE RANKING FACTORS –DUPLICATE CONTENTWhile there is no penalty from search engines to a website having duplicate content, the presence of duplicate content can be confusing to both search engines and human visitors alike.

Duplicate content is when two or more pages share the same content.

When that happens, search engines may not display the correct page for a given query, or may not display pages from the website at all.

Analysis: We checked for instances of duplicate content on the website and externally on other domains, and have not found any.



Have you heard the phrase “Content is king”?

A website should be viewed as a living document, and should continually provide valuable and substantive content for a particular topic.

Analysis: There are a number of ways that we can use website content as leverage to boost page authority, help search engines better understand how to rank certain pages for specific queries, and help website visitors understand how the page can answer their most immediate questions.

This includes adding and changing heading tags, adding more text content to include relevant keywords.

Recommendation: Each page of the website needs additional text content. Currently, the pages rely heavily on images, but increasing the text on each page will provide additional opportunities for calls-to-action, and give website visitors a better understanding of the actions they need to take.

ON-PAGE RANKING FACTORS –PAGE CONTENT

INFORMATION ARCHITECTUREThe Information Architecture Institute’s definition of information architecture is “the organization and labeling of website content to support usability and findability.”

In this section, we make recommendations to optimize the labeling and organization of your website to conform to search engine guidelines, and to improve usability and contextual relevance for visitors.

http://www.iainstitute.org/


Before making these recommendations, we consider the algorithmic approach taken by search engines to dissect, analyze, and categorize content.

Some examples of signals search engines rely on to categorize information include title tags, internal links (often in website navigation), folder and URL structure, categories, and heading tags.

Analysis: While each page includes relevant and adequate information to help website visitors understand what the page is about, the organization of the pages could be optimized.

Recommendation: We recommend arranging the sections of each page to give visitors and search engines a better understanding of the purpose and flow of the page’s information.

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE


A page’s title tag appears in search engine results pages and social media, so it’s important to use succint, descriptive and optimized titles for each page.

While meta descriptions don’t impact a page’s ranking ability, they do impact the page’s click-through rate from search engines and social media sites like Facebook, Pinterest and Google+. Analysis: The website’s titles don’t adequately describe each page’s content. Each title should include multiple keywords in a natural way, to entice search engine users to click through to the website.

Recommendation: We have written new titles and meta descriptions for the main pages of the website, and also recommend automatically generating titles and meta descriptions for the website’s blog posts.

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE-TITLE TAGS & DESCRIPTIONS


Google and Bing have a search index specifically for images, so it pays to audit your site’s images to ensure they’re all optimized and able to be ranked.

Analysis: The website’s images should be optimzed for search engines and visitors who are visually impaired, and should also be compressed to decreased page load time.

Recommendation: We have created a list of recommended image file names and alt tags.

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE - IMAGES

ACCESSIBILITY – SITEMAPSINFORMATION ARCHITECTURE- INTERNAL LINKSInternal links connect pages within the same website, and can give additional context for website visitors on a particular topic.

An optimized internal link structure can also increase the indexation rate of the website, and help to spread authority across the site.

Analysis: Based on the amount of content currently on the website, there is an adequate number of internal links. However as previously mentioned, we recommend creating additional content with internal links to other pages. We have identified an adequate number of vertical and horizontal link structures.

Recommendation: We recommend creating the following link structures: Home page to category pages Category page to other relevant category pages Blog post to other relevant blog posts

ACCESSIBILITY – SITEMAPSINFORMATION ARCHITECTURE-OUTLINKSExternal links point to pages outside of the website’s domain, and also give additional context to site visitors. This helps to build trust and loyalty with readers.

Analysis: There is an adequate ratio of outlinks within the blog posts.


ACCESSIBILITY – SITEMAPSINFORMATION ARCHITECTURE-HEADINGSThere are a few things to keep in mind when using tags within the body section of a page.

Heading tags should be used to separate sections, with the H1 tag used with the targeted keyword.

Iframes should be used sparingly, and there should be an appropriate ratio of content to advertisements.

Analysis: Each page’s content is not effectively using H1 heading tags to indicate the targeted keyword phrase.

Recommendation: We recommend adding H1 heading tags to each page of the website. This can simply be the page’s title tag.

OFF-PAGE RANKING FACTORSJust like SEO best practices put into place within the website, there are external factors that determine traffic, leads and conversions. This can include the website’s authority and trust, a natural and diverse backlink portfolio, and social engagement.


Since trust is a somewhat subjective topic, we look at the best practices around a website’s trustworthiness, including checking for malware and spam.

Analysis: The WordPress version running on URL.com is outdated, but there are no indications of malware or spam detected on the website.

Recommendation: We recommend updating the WordPress version to the most recent release.

OFF-PAGE RANKING FACTORS -TRUST


Links to your website are like votes, and we analyze your backlink portfolio to see where we can improve the diversity and quality of inbound links.

Analysis: A natural backlink portfolio would include a wide variation of unique root domains, no-follow links, varied anchor text and topically relevant links.

Recommendation: We would want to secure links from a wide variety of sources, including blogs, business directories and press mentions.

OFF-PAGE RANKING FACTORS -BACKLINK PROFILE


There are a number of factors that determine a website’s authority, including its popularity, backlink portfolio, trustworthiness, and more. These strengths and weaknesses are best explained through two specific metrics: Domain Authority and Page Authority.

Analysis: Currently, the Domain Authority of the website is 38/100, and the Page Authority of the home page is 42/100.

Recommendation: We recommend building additional links to deeper pages of the website, and tying all the pages of the website together with an internal link structure.

OFF-PAGE RANKING FACTORS -AUTHORITY


Like acquiring high quality and diverse backlinks, social mentions are rapidly becoming a way to drive relevant, converting traffic to a website.

Analysis: The website currently displays each of the brand’s social profiles, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Google+, but there are no social sharing buttons found on the website pages.

Recommendation: We recommend installing a social sharing plugin for WordPress, to display the main social networks on each page of the website, including Facebook Share and Tweet.

OFF-PAGE RANKING FACTORS -SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT

THANK YOUw: www.foxtailmarketing.comp: 1-800-273-2113

foxtail website audit

Business