I’m enjoying some time off in Phuket, Thailand and it’s been an incredible experience. One of my long time passions has been revitalized and today I got a chance to meet with the owner of the Cocoville Phuket hotel and talk about my 2nd love … SEO.

I thought it would be fun to go through my process for search engine optimization and help the hotel with some fundamental basics and some free bonuses like a steak & sea food dinner sweetens the deal. 🙂 So let’s dive in.

 

 

seo process

Step 1: Perform a crawl of the entire website

BrandGuard Software’s crawler is a personal favorite. It goes through every single of of the website’s pages and checks the following:

  • Site Errors – client & server problems , such as 404 errors
  • Redirects – checks whether redirects are permanent 301’s or temporary 302’s
  • Duplicate Pages – identifies pages with the same content
  • Page Title Tags – identifies missing,duplicate or incorrect length
  • Meta Description Tags – similar to page title identifiers
  • Headings – looks for (h1, h2, h3) and the keyword in each

Once you’ve have every page of  your website crawled you can export the data into Excel as a CSV file which makes the audit process faster.

Step #2: Pull in Google Webmaster Tools & Analytics Data

This is a critical step as the data points pulled will be used to benchmark  and baseline where the site has been performing so that when we make changes to the site we know the direct impact and can measure the ROI of our efforts for the business. Here is the link to Google Webmaster Tools if your site is not registered.

 

Step 3: Keywords

This is one of my favorite steps in an SEO audit. I just love keyword research. By crawling your entire website you can get a solid understanding of what your site is attempting to rank for and combine that with Google Analytics to see what keywords are driving traffic and conversions.

 

Step 4: Page Load Speed

Google’s recommends a page load speed of 1.4 seconds or less.

Step 5: Inbound Links

The simple explanation is the more links to your site the more keyowrds you will rank for and the more traffic you will get. This is an oversimplification but, there are two things to consider. The anchor text from those links and the quality & quantity of total links at the domain level and the page level.