Professional SEO Audit

MrMedia

MrMedia

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I have a site that I just cannot get momentum on. I have a feeling there are fundamental SEO issues at play that are beyond my brain cell.

Has anyone ever hired a professional SEO Auditor to review and recommend action points? How did this differ from Site Audits contained within SEMRush and AHrefs?

There are a couple of names that keep cropping up in the space. The going rate seems to be low $x,xxx.
 
Seems like a waste of time, if you have a decent idea of what you're aiming for.

You should be able to identify the bottleneck holding you back from the goal, no? Then start digging in to what could potentially be causing that.

You also didn't state the context, which will change everything... "cannot gain momentum" to some people, means I can't rank for "business web hosting" on my 8 month old site, with no NYT network to leverage.
 
momentum defined for this particular site...

It is a site I bought of a non savy owner. A real fixer upper that I got a good deal on.

I have upgraded the whole site, better longer content, images for Pinterest, better interlinking, fresh external links (on top of an already very solid profile - DA 58).

But still the traffic seems stuck.

I've pumped about $20k of value into the site and it is pretty much at the traffic level of where it was the week I bought it back in Sept 17.

Its doing well revenue wise but it is frustrating to me that no matter what I throw at it it makes little difference.

Other than keep adding content and links and sniping out competitor kws I am at a loss as to how to move this from a low $xx,xxx per month site to a high $xx,xxx site.

I'm almost minded to sell it to someone who could take this to the next level and take a fair profit on where it is at present but the thing that stops me is I know it has the potential to be very big if I can just unlock the growth.
 
Hmmm, seo wise it'll probably be very VERY niche specific. And there are probably people here who can better advise you than I...

But perhaps a content marketing/funnel audit is in order. For instance, if you've already hammered the ever living hell out of the niche stuff and it's not budging, maybe it's time to go wide on content marketing and create a new funnel.

Of course knowing where to tap will save a ton of time here...

We'll stick with the vague business web hosting bullshit example above to keep it simple:

Business web hosting > providers > reviews > comparisons > tutorials >> tapped out/niched out

Get more customers > online marketing > websites > seo > lead gen > tutorials >> fresh hosting leads/untapped/rinse and repeat for every industry specific sub niche with the winning combo

It's the same way TurboTax hammers the shit out of signups with business owners NOT looking for tax software, etc...
 
Without knowing your niche and competitors here's a few things I'd think about.

1. what are your competitors doing. in my sig currently there's a post about how to analyse that and see if you've just been say building 10 links, everyone else doing 20 etc... you're falling behind.
2. really what content is any good on your site? I've seen sites pick up a lot from trimming dead pages that get little traffic and are years old and 301ing them to new pages/better pages for the search intent of that original content
3. site structure/logical grouping of content (and interlinking of articles accordingly) - everyone is calling this kind of thing 'siloing' now so look for guides on that
4. as others have pointed out look at ways to improve conversions/your funnels
5. content refreshing - @stackcash talks about this tons on our SEO Unmasked YT show. his team goes back for his sites and refreshes content every 3 months or so. adding words/removing outdated bits and republishes. that could be worth a significant boost to your existing ranking stuff - the odd place moved up here and there repeated over hundreds of articles... could be a 10% revenue boost just for some relatively cheap words. If you can't do it at scale give WordAgents a shout and they'll write it for you etc. Don't let internal capacity hold you back if the site is making money. Throw everything at it if you want to grow.

Hope that helps!
 
Do you know what key phrases you're optimized for and how you're ranking for those currently? Sometimes you can throw the kitchen sink at a site in terms of more content and more links, but if there's a fundamental problem with the on-page optimization nothing will change. Could be an over- or under-optimization issue.

It could be the case that you've sucked up all the traffic you're going to get from the current niche or at least the keywords you're targeting, especially if you're ranking highly for it all.

Also, have you done a backlink audit? People are generating an ungodly amount of spam sites these days and linking to anyone with decent rankings. They're scraping Google Images, Google Search, Alexa Rankings, and Wikipedia. Some are kind enough to use nofollow tags, many don't. I've seen sites catch penalties from this stuff, even with links straight to images.

I'd get a list of backlinks from Ahrefs, where you can easily see the title tags of the pages linking in and the anchors they use, and disavow those domains. It's fairly fast, all things considered, since you'll be swinging with a broad axe. You'll pick up the pattern nearly immediately too based on the anchors and title tags of the pages. You won't even need to visit the sites or pages to see it. I unlocked an algorithmically penalized site this way within days and saw it pick up traffic.

It's not always penalized / not-penalized. There seems to be negative juice applied that gets lifted. It's definitely a gradient.
 
Thanks guys some good points here.

Here is my action plan. I will post it here as a way to clarify my own thoughts and maybe someone else can find some use for the process too.

In no order -

1. I have already trimmed 150+ low quality / no traffic pages. I will continue to trim and 301.

2. I have my writers working on 500 words of new content for all remaining posts (600+ posts).

3. Once content has been updated a new publish date is set on each post. I will include a "last updated..." text to accompany the date.

4. Continue to prioritise pages ranking 4-20 position in the SERPs with additional internal and external links.

5. Get a list of all pages in the 4-10 spot and do a deep dive comparison compared to the other sites ranking on page 1. SEMRush is good for this as it spits out exactly what steps to take.

6. Start to dig into external links. I have never submitted a Disavow for any site. This makes me nervous for some reason even though I have never PBN'd or spammed.

Anyone want to add to this?
 
MrMedia said:
Anyone want to add to this?
Click to expand...

Sometimes it is good to get a fresh set of eyes to look at a problem for you.

You could use a tool like https://pageoptimizer.pro to do an onsite audit with comparisons to your competitors who are ranking for your KWs. I've never used SEMRush. Pageoptimizer is pretty in depth but does require a lot of manual work (input) to get the most accurate results.
 
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