- Listings
- Classified Ads
- Link Roundups
- Guest Posts
- Link Exchanges
- Alt Tag Optimization: images feature descriptive tags under 150 words
LOW PRIORITY: We will ensure that all images on the site have a descriptive alt text for appropriate images. This allows search engines to understand the images we show and allows them to be indexed in the Google Images search. We will ensure your Alt Tags are set up to best practices during our onsite meta tag update.
- Blog: a resource for users that doubles as a way to show search engines you are current
MEDIUM PRIORITY: Generally having a blog is a big SEO benefit over not having one; however, you need to keep in mind that having an out of date blog tells search engines that you are no longer interested in updating your website. A majority of sites should create a blog and then write and post a few new blog entries each month to keep things up to date. As long as you stay current, you can use blog entries to target keywords you want to rank for (see Keyword Research document for these potential keywords to target).
Keyword Research -
- Google Search | Avg. bids | SEO Difficulty | SEO Value | Priority
- Broken Links: is the site’s main navigation free of broken links
MEDIUM PRIORITY: The main navigation is how your user’s browse your site. If there is a link that does not work, this increases the chance for a user to leave the site without taking any action. We have ensured that there are no broken links in the main navigation and footer areas.
- Custom 404 Page: customized error page allows users to navigate to your site even for broken urls
MEDIUM PRIORITY: Custom 404 pages or 404 redirects allow greater user experience as it does not pull the user out of the site, rather helps direct them to a page that they may have been looking for. We have verified that there is a custom 404 page on your site:
- Domain Registration: when your ownership of the domain expires
LOW PRIORITY: How long your domain name has been registered does have a limited impact on your rankings in search results. The newer your domain, the harder it can be to achieve a higher rank. The length until your domain also plays a role in Search rankings as Google sees domains with longer registration as an authority since you have registered your domain for years compared to months.
Your domain was created 1 year ago and is due to expire in about 9 years. We recommend keeping your domain to a minimum of 2 years from expiration at any given point.
- Favicon: image included for simple, branded browser navigation
MEDIUM PRIORITY: A favicon is important to properly represent your brand in browser tabs and on iOS devices if someone bookmarked your site. This not only improves the user experience but tells search engines that you care more about your users. Your site currently does have a branded favicon.
- Meta Description Optimization: unique keyword-rich descriptions no more than 156 characters
HIGH PRIORITY: While Meta Descriptions play a less important role in rankings than Title Tags, having relevant and valuable content with keyword targeting helps to increase the chance for a user to click on your Organic Search Result. It is best to, as with Title Tags, create a keyword focus for each page’s meta description and ensure we have less than 156 characters used along with proper keyword density for search engine best practices.
- Mobile Optimization: does the site pass Google’s mobile friendly test
HIGH PRIORITY: More and more people these days are using their phones to browse the internet so it is becoming increasingly important for website’s to be able to handle different device sizes. Google also gives added SEO value to websites that cater to mobile devices with responsive sites. Your site currently passes Google’s Mobile Friendly test and has above average responsiveness:
- Privacy Policy: tell users and search engines what you do with their information
MEDIUM PRIORITY: Privacy policies help to increase the trustworthiness of your website, and they are useful both for users and search engines. Your site currently does not have an online privacy policy in place. We will provide a privacy policy template for you to review.
- Robots.txt File Setup Correctly: is the robots.txt file allowing bots to properly crawl the site
HIGH PRIORITY: The robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers how to crawl your site and if there are pages that shouldn’t be crawled. Your Robots.txt file passes our Wordpress best practices. Your robots.txt file can be found here: https://swlogisticsinc.com/robots.txt
- Server Speed: the ability of your website to load quickly for any user
MEDIUM PRIORITY: A site’s speed is important to user experience as users expect content to be delivered at a faster rate with the advancement of technology. The slower a site performs, the more likely a user will leave the site without taking any action. The optimal page load is about 2 seconds average - most loads on your homepage (usually the heaviest in terms of page load) averaged a little over 2 seconds (s). There are additional minor improvements that could be made to increase load times such as further Losslessly compressing images, enabling hosting CDN, as well as optimizing DNS lookups and minifying CSS/JS through a service like Cloudflare but would only help to a small degree from where you are currently at.
Speed Tests:
https://tools.pingdom.com/#5deb4ea0fc800000 (1.88s)
https://tools.pingdom.com/#5df2c27443400000 (2.64s)
https://tools.pingdom.com/#5df2c222e5400000 (2.17s)
- Social Media Links: your website links directly to social media outlets
MEDIUM PRIORITY: Search engines see social media engagement as a sign of popularity and relevance which are direct factors in a website’s rankings. So, linking correctly to those social media accounts helps search engines establish links between those social media accounts and your website easier. You are currently linking to Twitter and Linkedin.
- SSL Secure: does your website have an SSL certificate installed
HIGH PRIORITY: Your website is not forcing SSL security (HTTPS). While your site does have a valid SSL certificate, it does not appear to be forcing that secure protocol so Users are able to access your unsecured site via http://swlogisticsinc.com/. We recommend to force all traffic to the HTTPS version of your site: https://swlogisticsinc.com/. Contact your hosting / SSL provider on further instructions.
- Title Tag Optimization: unique keyword-rich page titles no more than 70 characters
HIGH PRIORITY: While you do have relevant Title Tags for your pages, a majority of them we found to be not optimized for specific keyword targeting and a bit long in character length. It is best practice to optimize meta tags for keywords you’d like to target as well as ensuring you have less than 60 characters per title tag.
- URL Structure: understandable and simple url structure with correct page hierarchy
LOW PRIORITY: The site’s URL structure is easy to read and reflects the overall hierarchy of the site. This ensures greater user experience as URLs reflect what the user is seeing on the page in a simple, easy-to-read format. The site is relatively small and therefore doesn’t require an overabundance of structuring. We have confirmed current URL structure meets best practices.
- WWW Resolve: website with and without www. redirects to the preferred domain
HIGH PRIORITY: The www and non-www addresses version of your site should redirect to one or the other. If not, this can be seen by Google as having 2 different sites and could be penalized for duplicate content. Setting up the www resolve is dependent on how your domain and hosting are configured. Your site is configured to resolve to the NON-WWW
- XML Sitemap: sitemap in xml format found in the root directory and submitted to search engines
HIGH PRIORITY: Having an XML sitemap is essential to communicating your site structure to search engines as they are structured in a way for Search Engine robots to properly (and easily) crawl every page of the site. Your site does have an XML sitemap, however, the sitemap does contain irrelevant posts / pages that are not necessary. We will update your XML sitemap to better serve the primary content of the site.
- Google Analytics: website linked to top free analytics software
HIGH PRIORITY: Google Analytics is a free reporting software provided by Google that tracks where your users come from and what actions they may take on the site. We have made sure that Google Analytics is installed correctly on the site.
- Google Webmaster Tools / Search Console: your site’s direct line to communicate with google
HIGH PRIORITY: Google Webmaster Tools gives you the continued ability to communicate with Google and to discover which search terms Google users searched to find you. Your XML sitemap will be registered with Google via the Search Console Dashboard. This will give Google direct access to your entire site’s content for the best chance to rank.
- Primary Social Media Accounts: engaging facebook business page set up correctly
LOW PRIORITY: We were able to locate Twitter and Linkedin. While it probably won’t offer too much value in terms of engaging with your customer base, adding additional Social Media profiles would add value in the sense of adding additional Branding (fills up Search Engine Results Page of your Brand versus competitor sites!) and general credibility. Having them also helps your general SEO especially for Local based searches as these sites help supplement your Google My Business/GMB listing (see below for further information on GMB).
Additionally, we discovered another company while researching your branded results which appears to be competing when searching for your brand. We would recommend at least creating a Facebook and Instagram account and linking to them from your site as well as claiming your GMB listing, which will help fill the results page wit
Finally, we found that the US Customs and Border Protection keeps a database of Brokers by Port: https://www.cbp.gov/contact/find-broker-by-port. While we couldn’t easily find you, if not already applied and if you, we’d recommend applying to be listed in this database and linking to it from your site while listing the Port(s) you serve.
- Performance --> Reports (30 day comparisons)
- Data Compare
- Clicks
- Impressions - Search Results Appearances
- Acquisition --> All traffic --> Channels
- Organic | Direct | Social | Referral Searches
- Users | Sessions | Bounce Rate | Goals
MEDIUM PRIORITY: A Google My Business page helps to create more of a local presence for the business enabling “Organic Map Results” if a user were to search for a relevant term that you’d rank for. Your business does have an auto-generated listing that is currently unclaimed and states your business is “Permanently Closed” . We would strongly recommend claiming the business (see below) and updating all relevant business information, as soon as possible.
To begin set up, go to or use the below link: https://www.google.com/business/
Example of your business’ Google My Business Listing appearing and how to claim: https://gyazo.com/b176ff0fd0e9ae0548456d8ad8e20836
- Title | Industry | Posts | Insights | Reviews | Ads | Map Listings | Promotions & Events | Calendar | Engagement Metrics
- Direct - searched | Discovery -category/product | Branded - Affiliate brand
- Listing on Search | Maps | Customer Actions [ calls, directions, messages, site visits ]
- Queries | Pages | Countries | Devices | Search Appearance | Dates
- GMB Share Business Profile
- Cliengo
- Whats App
- For reference, setting up Conversion Tracking is best done by setting up "Goals" in Google Analytics so that all traffic sources can be tracked; they can then easily be imported into the Google Ads account.
- Company Project -> Site Audit
- SEO Backlinks
Monthly PPC Report for December 2021.
Some key terms to know when looking at the attached report that will be good for the client to understand:
Clicks / Impressions: The Clicks are the number of times a User clicks on our ads and Impressions is the number of times the ad is seen by a User or appears on the page a User is browsing within Google’s Search Engine Results Page.
CTR - Click-Through-Rate: the number of clicks our ads receive over the amount of times they are shown - this is a good indicator of the performance of our ads; anything above 2% is considered "Above Average" by most industry standards.
CPC - Cost-Per-Click: the average amount of money each click generates. This is best determined by how much competitors are bidding on the keyword we are targeting along with how much we are willing to bid.
Search Top IS (Impression Share): this is the average amount our ads appear in the Top ad placements out of all the Impressions the ads received. Being in the top placements is best for CTR.
Bounce Rate, Pages / Session, Session Duration: These metrics measure the "Quality" of traffic coming into the site. Where, lower Bounce Rates means users do not leave the site immediately, Pages / Session is the average number of pages a user visits when they come to the site (more pages means better engagement), and Session Duration is the average amount of time a user spends on the site.
Conversion, Cost Per Conversion (CPA), and Conversion Rate: These metrics are the most important performance indicators we use to manage and optimize the account. We gauge our overall performance on our conversion activity we can generate for a given month. As we optimize, we usually see a lower Cost per Conversion (you pay less for every conversion) and a higher Conversion Rate (you get more conversions for the same amount of money).
How we measure conversions: Currently, we are counting "Leads" through form submissions or online chat submissions (through both WhatsApp and Cliengo) as Conversions. These leads are aggregated into conversions reported in the account tied to what Campaign/Adgroup/Keyword/Ad triggered that conversion, making the optimizations we do more effective.
NOTE: costs are shown in Mexican Peso (MXN) but we have added a conversion table for our main overview cost metrics to USD for greater clarity.
Monthly Analysis
Looking at the performance of the campaign in December when it ran,
- We were able to generate a total of 155 Clicks to the site at a cost of MX$67.95 (about $3.33 USD) per click.
- Our starting average CTR is on the higher end at 2.82% (by most industry standards, anything above 2% is above average) with 3 total leads reported: 1 from a form submission and the other 2 from Cliengo chat submissions (what Cliengo determines as a “Conversion”).
- This put our Cost per Conversion at about MX$3,510 (about $172 USD) with a Conversion rate of about 1.94%.
- The conversion numbers are a bit lower than we’d like but this can be expected for any new campaign while we get things optimized. The good news is that most of the conversion activity occurred during the later half of December when we were able to do our optimizations and hone in the campaign further.
- January 2022 is already proving to be strong with 2 conversions reported in the first 5 days, which is far above the performance we saw in December already.
Important: We noticed that the current account has been paused due to the balance being exhausted as of yesterday, 1/4. To resume the ads, billing will need to be updated ASAP. Keeping consistency with the ads running is extremely important to how Google’s algorithm serves the ads; if the ads do stop due to billing, the learning phase may restart which could cause unexpected drops in performance. We’d recommend maintaining consistent billing during the campaign’s lifecycle.
New strategy - focus on driving more qualified leads to the site.
- Current strategy is showing a lower CPC and a little better “Quality of Traffic” looking at the Bounce Rate staging consistent with about a 40% increase to the average time spent on the site.
- Option - to test the same type of campaign but include or target the countries where the business provides the service versus targeting companies within the US looking for those terms.
- Result - qualified traffic as it would still target US businesses but only those interested in the target locations. ( Language Ad changes )
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