SEO audit for NIRS.org - #giveback October and a lesson in how to conduct an SEO audit for a nonprofit the DC, MD, VA Search Marketing Meetup group.

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NIRS SEO Audit
October, 2017
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About Me
• Owner of WO Strategies LLC
• 17 years of communications experience
• 13 years of online marketing experience
(SEO, SEM, social media, web analytics)
• Built my first website in 1994
• Once crashed a website for 4 days and still
received almost 1.3 million visitors/mo. (up
from 300K)
• Wrote master’s thesis on consumer
adoption of wearable computers

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Today’s Plan
● Show you easy ways to check your site’s SEO friendliness
● Outline common areas that limit SEO success
● Go through a sample of issues found on NIRS.org’s site.
● Provide you with my favorite lists of tools and resources you can use to
check your own site.
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SEO
Rules & Processes
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Four Major Rule Areas
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For optimal
results, start with a
solid base and then
work your way up.

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Setting an SEO Strategy
1. Understand your target audience, your business goals.
a. Create data driven personas, keyword research, and customer journeys
2. Check to see if you follow the“Rules.” Do an audit:
a. Fix tech issues
b. Fix content issues
c. Fix/build links
d. Fix UX issues
3. Implement changes based on user data:
a. Adjust content and promotion based on personas, journeys and data.
b. Improve search engine result page (SERP) click through rate (CTR) & on site
engagement.
c. Check/measure on site usability. Fix.
4. Keep reading search updates and adjust based on search engine changes.
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The Path to
Ranking
1. Discovery
2. Crawling
3. Indexing
4. Ranking
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The Impact:
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By just fixing the SEO technical
issues, we were able to increase
traffic to the website by
27.89% in 3 months!
Dashboard
Dashboard

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Background on NIRS
● No keyword research or previous SEO work.
● 8,286 URLs - Screaming Frog crawl
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Discovery Issues
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Where are the 8K URLS?

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3K Pages not in Sitemap file
The xml sitemap file uploaded to Google Search Console was not the XML
Sitemap Index file and does not have all of the site’s quality pages.
Fix:
Create an xml sitemap file with the quality pages and add it to Google Search
Console.
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Loss of Backlinks

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Loosing Links
Through Broken
Redirects
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SEO Impact of Broken Links (404s)
● Loss of PageRank and ranking if
that content has just moved.
● Can lose the value of your historic
deep links, and your domain
authority can suffer.
● Limits url discovery.
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Flickr user GirlieMac

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Indexing Issues
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Duplicate Page Titles

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Thin Content
Also duplicate
https://www.nirs.org/victory-2/ and https://www.nirs.org/victory/
Page Title: VICTORY: NIRS
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Content Quality Questions:
• Would you trust the information presented in this article?
• Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well,
or is it more shallow in nature?
• Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same
or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
• Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the
site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search
engines?
• Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in
search results?
• Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or
recommend?
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Google’s
Panda:
● Google Panda was
released in
February 2011
● An algorithm
change focused on
lowering the rank
of “low-quality”
sites or “thin sites”.
● Now part of the
core algorithm

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Google Quality Updates

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Ranking Issues
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Missing Meta Descriptions
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Content Targeting
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Google & Bing Rule: Keywords
“Think about the words a searcher might search for to find a piece of
your content, and make sure your site actually includes those words.”
- Google
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MOBILE SEO
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Mobile Usability Issues
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PAGE SPEED 32

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Page Speed
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GA Page Speed Timings
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Why Improve Page Speed?
• Page speed is a Google ranking factor.
• 53% of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes longer than three
seconds to load.
• According to surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com, nearly half of web
users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a
site that isn’t loaded within 3 seconds.
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Google Analytics Bonus Tips
● Create a filter to remove internal traffic
● Set up goals
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Priority Fixes
1. Improve page speed
2. Set up Google Analytics filtered view that removes employees, set
up goals
3. Conduct keyword research and improve content (and metadata)
4. Reclaim lost links
5. Develop campaign to build more quality links.
6. Potentially block from indexing the low quality content
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Ready to get your
hands dirty?
Join me for a full
Tech SEO training
workshop.
http://bit.ly/techSEOcourse
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Recap
• The first step is getting Google to put your page
in their index. It is a privilege to be indexed.
• You can’t improve your organic traffic if Google
is having technical issues with a page (or your
site).
• A strong technical foundation is the first step in
a strong SEO strategy.
• Do keyword research
• You need to create content that is BETTER than
what is currently ranking for that term - so look
at the SERPs!

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Want to Learn More?
Sign up to be an early student in my SEO Bootcamp course.
Sign up for my technical SEO course in November.
Download my SEO audit tools list.
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KATHERINE WATIER ONG
202-930-1744
katherine@wostrategies.com
@kwatier
www.linkedin.com/in/katherinewatier
www.WOStrategies.com