Situation Analysis

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

The role of situational analysis

Although they are separate disciplines, there are intersections between SEO, paid search, ecommerce, and display, and they can all help feed into each other. As part of ongoing efforts to optimize your SEO strategy. It is important to conduct a situation analysis of your organization’s SEO technical setup and current search marketing activities. It is important to assess your technical SEO and ensure that everything is correctly configured for Google and other search engines to crawl and index your website.

Assessing existing strategy

It is also essential to assess your existing search marketing activities to ensure there are no issues present that may impede a user's journey from search to your site, to purchase. Looking at data for existing search marketing activities, can also reveal your top-performing messaging in terms of click-through rate. It can also help shape your keyword research and help to identify top-performing search markets.

In assessing your technical SEO setup, you will need to consider varied factors, like, stakeholders, markets, and consumers with varied needs. While SEO is typically subjective, in terms of strategy and implementation, technical elements relating to search engines require following clear-cut guidelines

Categories to evaluate

Google offers five key guidelines in this area, and without adhering to them you will not be able to maximize your impact.

Company

First, there is your company. Now, your company will be interested in the content that’s on the website. This feeds into the technical side of things because technical SEO can tell you how well indexed the website is, how legible it is both for search engine and the user, and how well they’re interacting with it. This means measurable factors like bounce rates will come into play.

Customer

Second, there is your customer. If you’re looking to assess how your customer interacts with your website from a technical SEO standpoint, you’ll be looking at usability factors. Do your analytics reveal any blockages experienced by the customer, for example?

Competitors

Third, look at your competitors. In this area, technical SEO guidelines can help you steal a march on the competition by improving things like site speed.

Sector

Fourth, look at what’s happening in your sector. A lot of what is going on in SEO and in paid search is about mobile, so again the guidelines will focus on site speed.

Industry trends

Finally, there are guidelines around industry trends. Looking at industry trends, it follows logically that mobile optimization is a key area. What that means will change over time, which makes it a bit broader than guidelines about site speed for your sector. This means that industry trends around mobile optimization can mean focusing on accelerated mobile pages, for example.

Evaluating website optimization

[10.2.1.3] When measuring technical SEO, you need to understand the level of website optimization that is already in place, including areas such as

• On-page analysis
• Crawling
• Keyword tracking
• Backlink analysis
• Website speed
• Sitemap
• Local SEO

On-page SEO

On-page SEO relates to keyword matching. We have seen how Google is moving away from a keyword matching approach. As it becomes more sophisticated, it does not require obvious keyword matching to understand what your page is about. This means the semantically related terms that feature in the page will provide a topic-related insight into what you’re doing. So, you’re actually in this area looking to avoid obvious keyword matching if you can, and instead make it read as naturally as possible.

Crawling

To measure crawling, there are a lot of tools such as Google Search Console, but an industry favorite is the freely available Screaming Frog. Whichever tool you choose, it will show you how accessible your website is for search engines and highlight any issues that need to be addressed.

Keyword tracking

With keyword tracking, you need to measure historically, or over a period. By tracking the keyword changes you make and comparing them to your starting point, you can see the impact of your technical SEO fixes in the future.

Website speed

Website speed is an increasingly important SEO performance factor. You can use a free tool like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to check on your current site speed and this will also provide some automated recommendations for improvement.

Sitemap

It is good practice to review your sitemap, as this file will help direct search engines through your web pages. The sitemap also tells search engines about the relationship between the different pages on your site. You can submit and review this file in Google Search Console under the ‘Index’ section.

Backlink analysis

It’s worth remembering that backlinks still drive a lot of SEO Google uses these in the same way as the academic reference system. If you get a reference from someone that’s reputable in your industry, say a news website like the Guardian, you will be seen as relevant in your industry. But watch out for negative backlinks. This could be due to historical activity, and remember you have the option to disavow these within Google. When you disavow links, it means that although Google knows they’re there, they don’t take them into account when ranking your website.

Local SEO

Finally, you’ll measure local SEO. This will be more important for some businesses than others, and if you have bricks and mortar stores it will be especially important. You need to optimize for local search, not just with Google, but with other services like BrightLocal to maximize your impact there.

Evaluating technical SEO

Working in digital we all know that our consumers and anyone who interacts with our content is doing so across multiple devices. To maximize our effectiveness in this area, and to ensure a good user experience, there are three main SEO areas to look at.

Page speed

First, there is page speed. This is of paramount importance for all SEO activity, and particularly for mobile search. Page speed is about user experience. If things load slowly, your users will easily click away from your website and visit your competitors. Also, the slower your page loads, the greater the chance Google will penalise your rankings.

Indexation status

Second, look at your indexation status. This is crucial and focuses on whether Google has taken your pages and stored them within its index. When Google receives a search query, that’s where it goes to find the most relevant and authoritative results to serve. If you are not in that index, you cannot be served. Simple things to look for within your source code would be a no index tag, which can be placed for numerous reasons. But if you have one, you will not rank for anything with that page.

URL validation status

Finally, look at your URL validation status. This is where there’s a hygiene element to technical SEO. There will be 404 errors, especially if you’re a retailer, that will show up quite often. You want to make sure those are permanently redirected, as 301, to a page that shows a 200-status code which essentially says it’s okay.

Evaluating mobile experience

The phrase mobile first has been used for many years in the industry, and it’s increasingly important when serving results. Google has now decided it wants to make mobile results the first port of call, even if someone searches on the desktop. Now, for most sites that are responsive, there aren’t too many issues here. But bear in mind that if you have an adaptive site, or if you still have a mobile version of your website, that is what you’ll be judged on. This is something you need to consider in conducting a situational analysis.