Want to learn the latest, up to date Search Engine Optimization techniques, tips, and best practices? Here’s your chance. Bill Hartzer will show you how to create websites that are search engine friendly, while taking advantage of all the latest SEO techniques and code markup. He’ll show you how to analyze websites that are currently ranking well in the search results, get your own web pages to rank well, and how to continually tweak and repeat the process. He’ll also discuss SEO audits and why they’re a necessary part of the overall SEO process and why analytics is so an integral part of SEO.

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

2. 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

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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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?

7. On-Page Optimization
• Schema Types, Word Count

8. 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

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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

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

14. 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?

15. 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

23. 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

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

25. Bing Webmaster Tools
• Spot issues to fix

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

27. 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

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

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

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

31. 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

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

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

34. 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

35. 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

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

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

38. 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

39. 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.

40. 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