Suggestions for a SEO Review

[unikey]

I think it would be beneficial to have a third party seo review of the network of sites my team and I manage and was wondering if any of you had suggestions for what sort of tests should be done or that we should expect to see done during one of these reviews.

We are a small team who has varying seo experience and have been working hard to make improvements to our sites in the past year. Most of our sites have been completely overhauled in the last 12-16 months and seo work that had not been done in the past has been setup, along with some corrections that may have been harming seo.

We believe we are on the right track and have learned a good amount about seo in that time, but it would be nice to have some "expert" feedback outside of our office to get a clearer picture on anything we may be missing or some suggested improvements. A sort of double check on the work we have done.

[Instabill]

From my experience, there are many things to look for when determining the quality of your SEO. There is a technical side of SEO as well as a content side. I handle the content side of SEO for my company and know that backlinking is very important.

What sites backlink to your site? What is the PR of the sites linking to your site? Does Google consider the site a good or bad one? (We had an SEO company provide us with several backlinks to one of our company sites. After the Panda update, Google deemed most of those backlinks as bad, which significantly hurt our SERPs.)

What keywords are your optimizing on your website? Are you stuffing keywords to a high percentage rate? Are you using your focus keyword properly throughout the text?

Are you using meta descriptions that include your focus keyword and are less than 156 characters (including space)?

What is your site loading time? (That is a more technical answer)

Is your sitemap working properly? (We also had a problem with an improper sitemap that was setup by a former employee.)

There are so many questions you should ask when having your site professionally reviewed by an SEO firm. I know I have missed several you can ask!

However, I hope this has helped in getting you started. I also hope this answers part of your question as I was a little uncertain of what exactly you were asking.

Best of luck!
Meghan

[unikey]

Thanks Meghan, that is helpful. Our biggest issue is that it seems as though so many opinions exist on what constitutes good seo. Our focus has been on strengthening the design and branding of our sites while creating as much content as we can. Technically, we have made improvements based on feedback obtained via moz and using other online tools and best practices.

At one point we considered bringing in an outside firm to manage all of our seo but felt that it wasn't practical for us considering our stance on content creation being one of the more critical areas of focus. In my opinion one of our biggest issues right now is obtaining good quality back links... it's been slow going.

Anyway, after a lot of self evaluation and discussion we felt like a review from a third party would be helpful to focus us in on the most critical areas that we can improve.  We also feel that we would be best to implement suggested changes and handle the seo work long term.

We have run into some interesting characters along the way and some really great companies who would do an amazing job if needing a more comprehensive and long term solution. I haven't seen too many that offer more of a "review". Just was wondering what others would consider important in an seo review so we can better evaluate potential seo's.

[masdigitalmedia]

Hi,

Are you running reports from MOZ to monitor errors, warnings, etc?  You mentioned the overhaul of your sites in the last 12 months.  Curious to know what measures (KPIs) you are using.  Are you seeing improvements?  With the timeframe you described, I would be curious to know how your rankings have improved during this time, how this translates to site traffic, and conversions within the site.  Are users engaging?

[unikey]

Hi, we are using MOZ to monitor errors and warnings. It helped identify some issues we didn't know that we had in terms of some duplicate meta data. The biggest error or warning that is still an issue is the number of links on some of our pages. Anyway, we actually have only had MOZ now for about 4-5 months out of the time frame I described.

We have seen some improvements. Our conversion rate has improved slightly and we have also seen less cart abandonment as a result of some of the changes we made to our sites. Traffic wise things are a little harder to address. On one level we are seeming to have more "new" visitors to our sites but our overall traffic is down. This is a little misleading though as our spokesperson has also started to take a step back as she nears retirement, so we have had much less major media appearances, etc. It does seem as though we are doing a little better in search rankings for some of our keywords though.