This is an SEO audit of udacity.com for the purpose of figuring out what additional ideas for content creation can be pursued in order to attract interested visitors for the Udacity Digital Marketing Nanodegree Program.

1. Project 4: SEO Audit

2. Part 1
Plan your Audit

3. Marketing Objective & KPI
● Marketing Objective - Define the
Marketing Objective for your SEO
audit
To set the landing page so action-
oriented digital marketers can retrieve
the information they need to
determine whether Udacity is an
excellent fit for them or not.
Specifically, does the landing page have
the necessary keywords in place to
capture those interested soon-to-be
digital marketers.
● KPI - Define the KPI for your SEO
audit
Average Organic position ranking on
Google. (Traffic is of course what we
want, but raising the position rankings

4. Target Persona
Before you begin your SEO audit, share a description of
your target persona. (Please feel free to update your target
persona based on learnings from previous projects.)
Marketing Challenge: DMND, Corporate Training or your
own company.

5. Part 2
On Site SEO
Audit

6. Keywords
1. Using Moz Keyword Explorer tool, identify the
Keywords you might target to drive users to this
page. Be sure to use a mix of branded and non-
branded Keywords.
Head Keywords Tail Keywords
1 Digital Marketing Digital marketing
certificate
2 What is Digital
Marketing
Digital marketing
course
3 Marketing Digital Online Marketing
Courses
4 Digital Marketing
Certification

7. Keyword with the Greatest Potential
Which Head Keyword has the greatest potential?
What is digital marketing (and Udacity with the
projects can give individuals who don’t know digital
marketing just what they would be doing).
Which Tail Keyword has the greatest potential?
Digital Marketing Course,

8. Technical Audit: Metadata
Perform a technical audit on the metadata. Create a table, like below, to enter the
current metadata for the page you choose and your proposed revisions.
URL:
Current
Title Tag <title>Udacity Digital Marketing Nanodegree Program Website</title>
Meta-
Description
<meta name="description" content="" />
Alt-Tag Couldn’t find any.
Revision
Title Tag <title>Udacity Digital Marketing Nanodegree Program Website</title>
Meta-
Description
<meta name=“description” content=“This digital marketing course
offers real-world projects so you can get the necessary training to
showcase employers. Try it for free today
1”
Alt-Tag “A man showing a woman with his ipad a digital marketing proposal or results from a
campaign.” https://v.fastcdn.co/u/beb60d38/13815763-0-medium.jpg

9. Suggested Blog Topics
Write three Blog topics that incorporate the highest
potential Keywords. Include a short summary (150 - 300
words max) as to why you chose those Keyword topics and
what you might write about.
Note that you don't have to write these blog posts, just a
very brief summary (150 - 300 words max) and a motivation
about why you think they would work.
Topic 1 – What is Digital Marketing.
This blog would break down what is digital marketing
almost identical to the structure of the Udacity DMND
course. It would be a combination of not only words, but
videos as well (since all young people ages 40 and below
prefer videos over reading). The motivation is that we
would not only answer their questions, but in this case
show that Udacity not only knows digital marketing (strong
authority figure like a doctor). But with testimonials from
students, companies and teachers (social proof from
companies, experts and students) that Udacity is more than
qualified to teach individuals digital marketing.

10. Topic 2
Topic 2 - short explanation Digital Marketing Course
This blog would breakdown examples of the projects, using a
combination of words and videos. The words would be an
introduction to why projects are necessary and that this active
learning is superior to just watching random YouTube videos with
no structure. Also going into how these projects would be
incorporated into a portfolio of projects so that when applying to
companies, you can actually showcase experience and that you
are serious about breaking into digital marketing.

11. Topic 3
Topic 3 - short explanation How to be a digital marketer
This would be in between the “What is” and the “course” since if
someone knows what digital marketing is. And if they have an
interest into it, now they will be thinking “how do I do digital
marketing.” This would breakdown the topics into the roles
associated with digital marketing and Udacity would follow-up
with a project that would be associated with that certain position.
Thereby the reader knows that Udacity will give them the
experience, rather than the knowledge (since experience is more
valuable than knowledge).

12. Part 3
Off-Site SEO

13. Technical Audit: Backlink Audit
Using the Moz OpenSite Explorer tool, perform a backlink
audit on the webpage you have chosen.
Note: If you are doing the DMND challenge,
dmnd.udacity.com is a new site, perform this exercise on
Udacity.com.
List three of the top backlink URLs you discovered for the
website. These backlinks should add value to the website
and not be spam.
Backlink
Domain
Authority
(DA)
1 http://www.youtube.com/playlist
?list=PLAwxTw4SYaPlkESDcHD-
0oqVx5sAIgz7O
100
2 http://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com
/bizspark_au/2017/05/23/the-
everlasting-bond-between-
startups-and-education/
99
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S
elf-driving_car
98

14. Link-Building
Using the SEMRush tool and research, strategize a link-building
campaign.
Identify three websites that you think would be relevant, high traffic
sites that you would like to gain backlinks from to help drive traffic to
dmnd.udacity.com.
Site Name Amazonaws.com
Site URL https://www.semrush.com/analytics/backlinks/overview/?q=a
mazonaws.com
Organic Search Traffic
Site Name Android Developers
Site URL https://www.semrush.com/analytics/backlinks/overview/?q=wi
kipedia.org
Organic Search Traffic
Site Name Microsoft.com
Site URL https://www.semrush.com/analytics/backlinks/overview/?q=mi
crosoft.com
Organic Search Traffic

15. Part 4
Performance
Testing

16. Site Performance Audit: Performance
Tests
For each of the submissions, please take a screenshot of
your results and post your screenshot on your submission
presentation.
1. Using the Pingler tool, research how many of DMND’s
website or your company’s pages are indexed by
Google.
2. Using the Google Page Speed Insights tool, perform a
speed test of dmnd.udacity.com’s or your company’s
mobile presence.
1. Using the Think with Google tool, assess the mobile-
friendliness of the dmnd.udacity.com or your
company’s website.

17. Page Index
Using the Pingler tool, research how many of DMND’s
or your company’s website pages are indexed by
Google.
Explain why the number of pages indexed is
important.
Indexed pages are first off, pages of a website that Google,
Bing, Yahoo (search engines) have visited, analiyzed and
added to its database. This is important because (assuming
consistent average quality pages), the more URLs that a
website has (like Investopedia.com, newyorktimes.com,
harvardbusinessreview.com) the more the main domain
will rank higher as more subdomains become avaiable. This
is because it tells Google the URL is actively engaging with
its audience, more people are coming to the domain and
subdomains, thereby the more pages Google can access,
the more it will analyze and bring relevant content to the
audience. Which is excellent for Udacity, since if they put a
blog on machine learning, Google will likely cite Udacity to
the first page due to a high Domain Authority.

18. Page Speed
Using the Google Page Speed Insights tool, perform a speed test
of dmnd.udacity.com’s or your company’s website’s mobile
presence.
Explain why evaluating the Page Speed is important
(https://web.dev/performance-scoring/)
For an ecommerce site, every .1 seconds in delay can hurt
conversion rates by 7%. A page load speed from 1s to 5s would
increase the bounce rate from 30% to 57%. This means that if our
page loads too slowly, all our traffic will not even check out our
page. And we can’t make sales or have interested customers if
they get off our webpage too quickly. In short, slower load times =
lower sales, less speed = less revenue (1).
(1) Source: https://www.gigaspaces.com/blog/amazon-found-
every-100ms-of-latency-cost-them-1-in-sales/

19. Mobile-Friendly Evaluation
Using the Think with Google tool, assess the mobile-
friendliness of the dmnd.udacity.com website.
Explain why having a mobile-optimized is important.
Because half of internet traffic came mobile phone devices
in 2019. This means that it is likely that half of Udacity’s new
visitor traffic comes from mobile phones. Thereby let us
say a 30-yr female named Suzan who works as a mid-level
product manager is looking to increase her skills in digital
marketing so she can improve the sales of the products she
is managing. If she decides to search Udacity on her iPhone
XR and if it takes 5 seconds to load onto udacity.com, she
will be much more likely to not even give Udacity a chance
as compared to the web page loading at 2 seconds. Suzan
could have been $800-$1200 in revenue over 3 months for
Udacity, but because the website took too long to load she
did not even give Udacity a chance.
Source:
https://www.broadb
andsearch.net/blog/i
nternet-statistics

20. Part 5
Recommendations

21. Recommendations
Now take a moment to evaluate your findings and
provide at least three recommendations you would
make to DMND to improve their website from an SEO
perspective. (250 - 500 word max)
1. When taking into consideration that the majority of Google searches are in the U.S.
(look it up on Google) are done on a mobile phone, along with internet activity in
general (https://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/internet-statistics). A score of 26
according to Google Site Speed is unacceptable. For instance, removing “unused
JavaScript” would save an additional 2.5 seconds when loading from mobile. So first
reccomendation is to remove “unused Javascript”

22. 2nd Reccomendation
● 2. Along with the blog answering “what is digital marketing”,
the blog should also include how Udacity will uniquely train
students through projects, rather than solely watching videos.
● Video Lectures 6 main topics:
● Topic 1
● Topic 2
● Topic 3
● Topic 4
● Topic 5
● Topic 6
● Project
● How Udacity will help students market themselves to
employers through either a job or freelancing.

23. 3rd Reccomendation
● On Udacity’s blog, there was not a section for digital
marketing. Besides adding that, there should be some kind of
career personality quiz since it is possible a lot of students
coming not Udacity might be still undecided on their career.
To add on that, there could be one class that goes offers one
project that represents all of the main occupation (business
analysis, software development, UX designer, digital
marketing, product manager, AI car, etc.)