Scenario: you just got offered an PPC/SEO role & your 1st order of business is to audit & improve performance?

Thank you for inviting me to answer this scenario!

To make a website technically strong and competitive, SEO audit is an important activity to be done, even if it consumes lots of time and effort. Being an SEO professional, I always carry out a detailed audit of a website that helps me in identifying coding issues, highlights its flaws and errors.

As per the updates from Google, I follow the following evaluations in SEO auditing:

• The Content Assessment

Content evaluation is done to make the website contents more useful and valuable to customers. All the outdated contents will be removed and a well-written, thorough, valuable and detailed information about a particular topic will be added accordingly. Also value propositions will be added to make it business centric. This will drastically open up lots of opportunities to increase conversions and traffic to your website.

• The Technical Assessment

The second phase includes the technical evaluation of the website which will be needing the help of a developer from your IT department. Even if the goal is same for both of the assessments, improved technical quality will always help in improved user experiences. . In this audit, it will make sure that your website is fast, responsive, flawless and mobile friendly. This will also identify any kind of dead or broken links, technical errors and other serious technical issues.

• The Website Functionality

 Here the checking on extensive coding will be done to minimize the loading time. Too much flash or Javascript contents are needed to be magnified. Some of the on-page optimization metrics are checked and finalized during this assessment.

The benefits you can gain from website auditing is:

• Improvement of the overall performance of your website as the auditing delivers absolute perfection to website’s structure and functionality.
• Enhance your SEO efforts with the evaluation of the technical aspects and website functionality.
• Reevaluate the effectiveness of your website in terms of conversion and lead generation.

I hope this will help you!!!

Assess the quality of your onpage optimization. You need to see whether your website is SEO friendly. Else, it is quite possible that your website’s internal factors may be hampering your SEO. Among the things you need to keep an eye on are the title tags and Meta tags you are using. They have to be relevant, keyword-rich and accurate. Furthermore, the content you post on your website should be relevant to its theme and be of a high quality.

Secondly, you need to remove any links or backlinks to and from your website which are no longer active. Often, webmasters don’t pay much attention to broken or dead links. As a result, the links remains there even though they don’t work. Link building is more important than ever when it comes to SEO therefore it has to be a part of your SEO site audit.

Ensure that your website is open for indexing and that the search engine robots can crawl through it without any hassle. One of the major reasons why a website’s ranking may take a hit is because it is not geared for crawling

Go over your backlink profile. Then, run a look over of the profiles your closest rivals have built. What you need to check is the quality of links that you are using with reference to the ones being used by your competitors.

Give your website a thorough look over. If you feel there are any issues with user experience design, including website navigation, loading speed, etc, take the necessary action to rectify the situation there and then. Your website’s SEO could get hurt because of poor UX design.

Thank you for inviting.

Yes, you need to do a complete audit and sitemap to understand the status of the website.

I would rather do audit second,

• First i would go through the website try to understand if the content and the layout of the pages meet the objectives it was meant for.
• once the front end seem ok then will move to the back-end and this is where i would bring out the SEO tools and do various audits
• Does it have GA codes
• Check for broken links and error codes
• Meta tags and descriptions are appropriate for each page
• Page loading time etc etc

Now i know what is  the front end user journey/ experience is like and also how strong its back-end is.

Then start filling the gaps.

Some of the SEO tools i may use are:

• Screaming Frog/  Deep Crawl : SF is one of the most important tool to perform SEO audit as it give deep diagnostic insight into the website's SEO technical issues- long titles, duplicate pages, error codes, images tags, page tags, long meta tags etc.  DC is a pumped up version of SF and useful for websites with very large no. of pages (I think SF is limited toK pages).
• Ahref: it is very useful for link auditing i.e to know domains referring to your site, link authority, number of duplicate links, lost / broken links, anchor text etc.
• Spyfu: This tool help dig deep into what keywords a site ranks for both in organic and paid searches and most importantly you can compare about3 site at a time and understand what your competitors are doing better than you in term of keyword ranking.
• Adword keyword planner: it is a good tool to keywording planning optimization for maximizing opportunities.
• Google Analytics: SEO is incomplete without GA, it offer many different data points to analyze the organic search performance, customer behaviour patterns etc.
• Pingdom  or Google pagespeed insight: Page speed is important to rank better in google searches. these tools analyse how fast each page loads in terms of time and file size and provides ranking for each page. Pingdom stores ur test results therefore it also helps you to analyze improvements done over a period of time.

i hope its helpful .

Audit & Improve Performance

Prepare

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                Generate Site audit Report

Research keyword popularity & density

                Check current visibility in search engines

                Find out broad keyword popularity search

                Find out match keyword popularity search

                Find & Generate Target Keywords

                Find Keyword Difficulty (calculate the value)

                Search Domain Popularity, Density, Strength

Competitor Analysis

Keywords Mapping

Page Structure set as per SEO

Title Tags checking & change as per SEO

Meta Tags checking & change as per SEO

Alt Tag checking & change as per SEO

Anchor text checking & change as per SEO

Google analytics setup

                Finalize 3 keywords for site

                Start optimize final keywords for site

Assess

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                Check Current Rankings

Improve website

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                Detect on-site issues and fix them

                Get rid of negative keywords from site

                Optimize pages content

                Optimized pages as per keywords

Content Pages

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                Create content as per keywords if needed

Improve backlinks

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                Get rid of toxic links

                Build quality backlinks

For PPC, you should consider these preliminary steps:

1. Evaluate the existing PPC on targeted keywords and the ROI you are getting from it.

2. Look at what your competition is targeting and monitor their performance via webmaster tools such as ahrefs, google analytics, etc.

3. Go back to your keyword research and compare the current keywords, competitor keywords, and potential keywords. Look at the on-page targeted keywords.

4. Select the best keyword based on traffic, bid, and competition. You'll know probably by now which keyword is most competitive when you did competitor analysis. 

5. Optimize your content with the keyword and select the bid for the specific keyword you want to rank for. Remember: Higher is not always the best.

I will set short term and long term goals

Long term goals will be SEO in which I will do the website audit, keyword research and off page campaign.

Short term goal will be PPC in which I will test the campaign and optimize the it according.