Sample Audit Report
Section 1
Objective
In order to compete on a national level, Your Company needs to optimize its online presence by leveraging the existing organic traffic to identify qualified paid traffic opportunities to reach new customers.
The most pressing need is to create clear customer journeys that seamlessly lead to increased purchases and subscription sales on the website.
To identify the opportunities presented in this report we have assessed the following:
- Technical Website Performance
- Market/Industry Research
- Local + National Competitors
- Technical Website Performance
- Existing Site Content
Your Company’s Brand Statement / Elevator Pitch
Your Company is a carbon-neutral, zero-waste provider of services in the heart of Nashville, TN committed to sourcing transparently, educating thoroughly, and delivering exceptionally great services.
Mission Statement | Your Company’s “WHY”
Our mission is to expand the number of people who share our belief that the experience we provide is an unparalleled adventure and we are devoted to inspiring happiness through doing good for each person we meet along the way.
Customer Personas
- Customer Persona A
- Customer Persona B
- Customer Persona C
Unique Characteristics
- Age: 25-45
- Gender: 50/50 split between male and female
- Socioeconomic Status: Middle to high
- Location (Local Customers): Tennessee, California, Texas, Florida, Georgia
- A socially conscious purchaser who cares about environmental impact.
Value Propositions for Your Customer Personas
Customer Persona A
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Customer Persona B
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Customer Persona C
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Section 2
How does Your Company stack up against
NATIONAL competitors?
How Your Company compares to NATIONAL competitors:
• Company X, Company Y, and Company Z are the industry leaders but there is still plenty of room to compete in this market.
• Your company is holding its own in the National “Game-Changer” quadrant.
• Gender is consistently split 50/50 between Males and Females on national brand sites analyzed.
Your Company has more competition right now with similar domains for organic search engine traffic instead of the local and national brands you need to compete with to increase sales.
It is important to leverage as many organic keyword opportunities as possible before targeting keywords for Paid Ad campaigns.
The more keywords two domains share in common, the more likely they are to compete with one another. In order to increase your odds of appearing in organic search results that will position you competitively alongside the local and national brands you need to focus on creating content that incorporates more overlap keywords that your target competitors also have on their sites.
What is “Search Intent” and why should we care?
Because it matters to the Google gods and it is how search engines deliver the best search results possible to the user searching online. It is important to create a balanced offering of content that aligns with each category. Understanding how Crema’s content compares to National competitors is a good way to elevate your content to consistently compete with them organically.
Section 3
Website efficiency impacts every other aspect of a marketing strategy. Future on-page and off-site SEO recommendations are based on the results of this assessment.
Sitemap Issues
The sitemap is a bit of a mess right now. A sitemap.xml file should ONLY contain pages that should be indexed and prioritized in search results. Currently, there are a lot of important pages missing and unimportant pages are included. This slows down your site speed and makes the search engines mad because they cannot figure out what information is important so they will not include your content in search results.
Click HERE to see the current sitemap structure.
Most Urgent Issues
- Out of 254 pages on the site, only 100 are indexed.
- The homepage is not included in the sitemap. The homepage is not in the sitemap.
- Looks like there are two blog post pages?
- The “shop2” page is very confusing to the site hierarchy.
- This might be why the search engines aren’t recognizing the Guide that should show the organic keywords being used since that page gets a fair amount of traffic.
Suggested Sitemap Fixes
- Add the homepage to the sitemap and resubmit for indexing! The homepage should show as “indexed, not submitted in sitemap”.
- Remove all URLs except the ones that should be included in the Google index. In the case of redirects, only include the final destination URLs.
- Make sure all important pages that need to rank are included in the sitemap.
- If you choose to no-index pages listed in the No-Index tab, remove those URLs from the sitemap.
- Check the Google Search Console Coverage report to see if there are any URLs in the sitemap that shouldn’t be: URLs set to no-index or blocked by a robots.txt file.
- Resubmit the sitemap in Google Search Console after fixes have been implemented on the site.
- Check the Google Search Console Coverage report to find URLs that should be included in the sitemap: URLs that are indexed but not in the sitemap.
- Consider creating a separate image sitemap after alt tags and schema have been added to images. (More about image sitemaps here.)
New Sitemap Recommendations
Section 4
What happens off-page, or off-site, matters too. Applying SEO best practices to your social channels and business profiles can help guide potential customers to your site if they discover your brand outside of your website.
It’s important to pay attention to the backlinks on your site to ensure that they are relevant to the quality of the content on your site. Backlinks impact your site’s Authority Score.
- Add the backlinks to Remove and contact site owners to delete them.
- Add the most toxic backlinks to Disavow, export to a file, and upload the file to Google’s disavow tool.
- Add backlinks you are sure about to Whitelist.
Local SEO is important to manage when you have multiple physical locations – especially in the food industry. This can be accomplished through managing the directories Your Company is listed in, Yelp and Google Business Profile are the big ones, but there are a lot of smaller directories that can create a lot of confusion in local search results.
• There are a lot of opportunities for Your Company to update and/or list their business on these directories to help increase local organic search results.
Click HERE to view the Local Directory Listings Report
- Google Business Profile looks good. Important to update photos occasionally, check reviews, and keep an eye on competitors in the “People Also Search For” section.
MailChimp Review
- Onboarding Flow set up Aug 2020. It looks like the 3rd email was recently added. Email 1= discount code. Email 2=brewing guide. Email 3=guide to local shops, food + drink. Suggest removing that for a national audience.
- Cannot tell if there’s an Abandoned Cart email in place – assuming that might be coming from Squarespace?
- Revenue feels low; maybe because it’s been a whole year with only campaigns happening periodically?
- One audience with most emails sent to that audience; there is a local segment that they send to occasionally about local events.
- Content includes: new roasts, local classes, and other news (like the Food + Wine mag recognition)
- 5300 subscribers (but 10.5K contacts – not sure why over half of their contacts are not subscribers?)
- Evidence of A/B testing with emails.
- Each campaign brings in roughly $300 – $800 on average in sales, with some higher/lower. A monthly coffee release email usually provides a pop of sales.
- ShipStation has 6362 customers – need to merge all ShipStation emails into MailChimp if they aren’t added through the website.
- Shipstation customers are from all over the map! Lots of TN, but also seeing Nevada, Massachusetts, Wisconsin…
From Mailchimp’s Industry Benchmarks
Social Channel Review
INSTAGRAM @cremacrema
- Set up IG shopping tags through Facebook.
- Investigate selling class registrations on IG (Facebook can be weird about who can sell what when.)
- Change “Brewing Tips” to “Brewing Guides”
- Follow more profiles – focus on competitors, national and local.
- Update profile logo/colors on link list page
Product Partners (B2C)
- How has this partnership worked? Pros/Cons
- Any other collaborations in the works?
Wholesale Partners (B2B)
- This page of Wholesale Partners needs to be more prominently listed on the website. These are great links! You need to make sure that all of these locations are linking back to your website and tagging you on social channels when relevant.
Section 5
“Content is the reason search began in the first place.”
– Lee Odden
High-quality content has evolved into the most important ranking factor online. In order to increase your online visibility while building trust with new prospects, you must prove your ability to provide valuable resources that offer solutions to your potential customer’s problems.
Blog Observations
- Website has a blog
- Evidence of a consistent blog posting schedule
Blog Recommendations
- Blog content hierarchy needs reconfiguration
- Clarify categories
- Brewing Guides need to be included as a category of blog posts
- Blog needs to be “Education Central” for all things that matter to Your Company
- Blog posts need to be optimized. Clarify keywords; add internal links; add external links; upsell related products; promote guides where relevant
- Edit length of post excerpts on Blog landing page to visually align display
Brand Voice Observations
- Brand voice is consistent and high-quality but not necessarily written in support of any clear customer journeys.
Brand Voice Recommendations
- Each page should have one primary purpose/function
- Customer Journeys need to be mapped out and implemented
- Impact/Sustainability needs to be featured more prominently on the site
- Emails need to reflect the website design and the same brand voice
What is “Cornerstone Content”?
Cornerstone content pages are the core of your website. It consists of the pages or posts you want to rank highest in the search engines along with the best, most important articles on your site.
- Cornerstone content needs to be identified
Optimized Page Observations
- Helpful, useful, informative, relevant content driven by keyword
- Number of words on cornerstone content pages looks great
Optimized Page Recommendations
- Fully optimize landing pages for products, services, and offers
- Content needs to be designed to move users one step in the buyer journey at a time
- Naming conventions for page URLs, image files, and Alt Tags need to be cleaned up
- Headings need to be optimized
- Meta Descriptions need to be optimized
- Structured data needs to be implemented for Guides, Products, Physical Locations, and Menus
- Breadcrumbs need to be fixed sitewide. Multiple menus are very confusing for users. This will be easier after the sitemap gets revamped.
Visual Element Observations
- Major content pages include relevant, engaging visual elements
- Relevant design assets that align with brand goals
Visual Element Recommendations
- Website design needs to be re-aligned to meet the target customer’s needs/expectations while aligning with relevant search intent for each page
Call To Action Observations
- Footer opt-in form is well-placed but could be smaller to take up less real estate on the home page while accomplishing the same goal
- Social sharing buttons are easily accessible in the footer
Call To Action Recommendations
- Homepage currently has a LOT of CTAs. Once the customer journeys are mapped out it will be easier to determine which CTAs make the most sense to feature on the homepage.
- Product links are hard to access in the eCommerce Shop due to confusing navigation
- Secondary menu links create confusion on the product page
Section 6
Now what?
- A new WordPress/Woocommerce website
- Re-organize Site Content
- Clean up GA and GSC
- Optimize Cornerstone Pages, Blog Posts, and Brew Guides
- Define Customer Personas in greater detail
- Map out Customer Journeys for each customer persona
- Create landing pages and email flows to match customer journeys
- Merge/cleanup email lists
- Set up dashboard for reporting
- Address Backlink situation
- Optimize Google Business Profile and select directories to register/update business info
- Create Content Calendar
- Engage Reddit and TikTok audiences
- Add FB/IG Shopping Feeds before the holidays
- Paid Ad Campaigns