SEO & Domains: New gTLD Testing & Research
Search Engine Optimization,
Audits and Analytics

About Me
• CEO, Hartzer Consulting: Hartzer.com
• Blog: BillHartzer.com
• Chief Data Scientist, DNProtect.com
• Founder, DFWSEM Association (2004)
• US Brand Ambassador, Majestic.com
• Brand Ambassador, OnCrawl.com
• Practicing Organic/Natural SEO since 1996
• Former Senior VP, Advice Interactive
• Senior SEO Strategist, Globe Runner
• Director of SEO, Standing Dog

Search Engine Optimization, SEO Audits
• Search Engine Optimization Process
• SEO Audits of websites
• Questions about SEO

How Do We Optimize?
• Use an SEO Audit to identify issues, fix issues
• Think about E-A-T
Expertise
Authority
Trust
• Keyword Research, Identify Topics, Keyword Lists
Use PPC to identify best converting keywords

Optimize Current Content
• Optimize current pages first
• One keyword (phrase) for each page
• Identify competitors (pages ranking)
• Compare your page with pages ranking
• What do ranking pages have in common?
Length of content on page
Page structure & use of HTML tags, elements

On-Page Optimization
• Title Tags – Keyword in Title Tag
• Meta Descriptions
• Headings H1, H2, H3, H4, etc.
• Use of italics, bold, lists, tables, etc.
• Internal Anchor Text
• External Links (outgoing links)
• Enough content? Too much content?

On-Page Optimization
• Schema Types, Word Count

Optimize Internal Links
• Manually add internal links to optimized pages
• Add links in sentences with keyword anchor text
• Blog posts, articles – opportunity to add links
• Links in navigation is not enough

After Optimization – Ask for recrawl
• Ask for a recrawl of page after optimization
• Google Search Console – URL inspector tool, request indexing

Additional Optimization - Repeat
• Identify pages not ranking in top 100 results
• Re-optimize/update/change those pages (even small tweaks)
• URL inspector tool, request indexing again
• Manual process, but works—up to 2,000 pages a day

Search Engine Optimization Process
• SEO Audit of website is key
• Use crawlers, SEO tools to identify issues
• Keyword research, topic research, use PPC conversion data
• Optimize pages, add internal links
• Manually submit URLs to Google Search Console

Existing Websites: Why Start With an SEO Audit?
Why is an SEO Audit a necessary first step?
• Helps establish a baseline (traffic, rankings)
• Helps identify technical issues
• Helps identify what’s working
• Audit results: list of action items
• Audit results: strategic plan going forward

SEO Audit Process
• Before You Begin
• Gather Data
• Analyze

Before You Begin – Info to Gather
• Access to website (if possible), log file data
• Google Analytics, Search Console access
• Bing Webmaster Tools access
• Prior history: What SEO was done in past?
• Prior history: Domain Names used
• List of Domain Names owned, redirected
• List of Competitors
• Ask: anything else I need to know?

Content – Review Content on Site & Rankings
• Google Search Console - Performance
• SEMrush.com Keyword Research
• Review Current Rankings
• SimilarWeb Traffic and Data
• SERPStat Data
• Google Analytics Data

Google Search Console
• Performance:
Search Results
Discover
• Pages Analysis
What does
Google Think?

SEMrush –Traffic, Content Analysis
• What is site ranking for?
• Which content is ranking?
• Potential opportunities?

Gathering Phase
• Gather the Data
• Save the Data (MS Excel, MS Word)
• Start making notes (Notepad)

Google Searches
• site:domain.com
• Click to the last page of search results

Crawlers
• OnCrawl
• Screaming Frog
• Sitebulb
• Deep Crawl
• Siteliner

Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Reports:
• Server Response codes
• Meta Data
• Canonical Tag data
• Internal Link data
• Traffic data (Analytics)
• More

Compare: Pages Crawled vs Pages Indexed
• SERPS Redux bookmarklet,
compare lists of URLs
in MS Excel

Siteliner.com
• Crawls site, scans content, identified duplicate content
• Important to limit
duplicate content on site
• Duplicate content
uses up crawl budget
• Less pages crawled,
less indexed and rank

Bing Webmaster Tools
• More data
about your
website
than Google
• Bing & Yahoo
Data Combined
• Website
Verification
Required

Bing Webmaster Tools
• Spot issues to fix

Google Search Console
• Website Verification
• URL Inspection
• Performance
• Coverage data
• Sitemaps
• Mobile Usability
• AMP Data

Website Log Files, Crawl & Analytics
• OnCrawl.com combines all
• Import other data
• Any data in .CSV file
• Online, Offline Sales Data
• Rankings Data
• Call tracking Data

Website Log Files, Crawl & Analytics
• DeepCrawl.com combines all, as well

Audit Website Structure
• Internal Link Structure
• Manual Review of Site
• URL Hierarchy
• Grouping of Topics
• GA: In-Page Analytics,
Internal click data

Sitebulb
• Internal Link Structure
• Review Silos
• Review Content clusters
• Other SEO audit issues

Cora SEO Software
• Measures over 800 ranking factors
• Calculates which ones matter most
• Run on site’s main keywords
• See the most important factors for each keyword
• On-site, on-page, and offsite factors included
• Shows you what factors your site is missing based on correlation data
of top 100 results for that keyword

Gather Off-Site Data
• It’s not all about on-site-and on-page optimization.

Link Data
• Google Search Console Links
• Majestic.com
• Ahrefs.com
• Link Research Tools

Majestic.com Topic Review
• Topics of links pointing
to your website
• Should be same topic
• Review off-topic links
for link spam
• Disavow/remove
spam links

Majestic Trust Flow, Citation Flow
• Trust Flow = # of clicks from seed set of trusted sites to a URL or Domain
• Citation Flow = Number of citations to a given URL, or Domain

Majestic Anchor Text Review
• The keywords in text links (anchor text) is important
• But must be natural: brand mentions more than exact keywords

Page Load Speed
• Faster loading sites can rank better
• Google Pagespeed Insights
• WebPageTest.org, Gtmetrix.com

Other Misc. Issues
• Robots.txt issues
• Robots.txt vs. Meta Noindex tags
• HTTP vs. HTTPs
Does site qualify HSTSpreload.org?
• Subdomain issues
Dev copy of site on subdomain?
• Canonical Tag issues
• Use of Structured Data

Analyze Data, Create Tasks Lists, Fix Issues
• SEO Audits designed to identify current issues
• Analyze the data, identify technical issues
• Create tasks lists, fix issues first
• We can’t optimize if we don’t
have a good foundation to work with.

Contact
Bill Hartzer
Hartzer Consulting
Email: Bill@BillHartzer.com
Phone: (214) 236-4378
Web: https://www.hartzer.com
Twitter: @bhartzer
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/bhartzer
SEO & Domains: New gTLD Testing & Research
@bhartzer