The presentation was given as a lecture to the Search & Social Media MBA at Salford University - it is a guide to evaluating a website in terms of its search performance (SEO & PPC) and social performance.

1. How to evaluate a website for search &
social

2. Intro
@venndigital
@nwheldrake

3. Search & Social Recap
Search - SEM
Organic – SEO, Content Marketing
Paid – PPC, Display
Social – SMO, SMM

4. Insight & Research
Understand the website/client
• Industry/sector
• Products/services
• Audience/demographic
• Focus/goals
• Competitors
This will start to build a picture of keywords and coverage needed…

5. Benchmarking
Understand your current performance in order to identify
areas for growth and opportunity.
In order to understand where a site sits currently you must
benchmark them within their industry and via each channel.

6. SEO - Benchmarking
Historic Data – Year on Year

7. SEO - Benchmarking
Algorithms & Penalties
Data taken from semrush
Example used is Interflora

8. SEO - Benchmarking
Algorithms
• Penguin
Identify using backlink profiles.
• Hummingbird
Semantic search – giving the user good content
• Panda
Quality of content, variety, duplications

9. SEO - Benchmarking
Site Audit
• H1’s
• Meta descriptions
• Duplicate content
• Site speed
• Schema mark up
• Sitemap.xml
• Robots.txt
Important signals to Google to help it read your site.

10. Paid - Benchmarking
Current Account Audit
• Current costs vs ROI
• Performance Metrics & Data
• Structural setup
• Keyword analysis
• Ad copy quality
• Settings
• Additional features

11. Social - Benchmarking
Current Coverage Analysis
• Profiles/ownership
• Channels
• Followers/Fans/Likes ect…
• Average engagement/reach
• Referrals back to site

12. Competitors
Understanding and benchmarking against competitors
will allow you to better target new site visitors and map
out a path to get better site performance.

13. SEO - Competitors
Basic - Identify keywords and check rankings in comparison.
Intermediate – Use tools like sem rush
Advanced – Compare backlink profiles

14. Paid - Competitors
Identify via searching for head terms and long tail keywords.

15. Social - Competitors

16. Conversion Rates
On-page/Landing pages
Conversion paths
Competitor comparison
Call to actions
Usability/Experience

17. Conversion Rates
https://mixpanel.com/

18. Strategy
Identify goals and objectives for each channel, feed competitor research
into strategy, when using multiple channels integrate your strategy.
SEO
Objective: More traffic
Paid
Objective: More sales
Social
Objective: Brand engagement

19. Opportunities
Identify areas of growth…
SEO
Technical – bad technical is unlikely to rank
Content – bad content is unlikely to rank
Outreach - needed to strengthen and build (backlinks, social
signals)

20. Opportunities
Identify areas of growth…
PPC
Structural – relevance provides higher conversion rates
Quality scores – lower cost per clicks
Conversions – Optimising performance
Coverage – New opportunities for testing

21. Opportunities
Identify areas of growth…
Social
Audience profiling – identify influencers and engage
Engagement – ongoing activity
Innovation – creative campaign ideas
Strategy – focus on how your personas/brand in
developing.

22. Summary
1.Research
2.Benchmark
3.Competitor
4.Conversion Rate
5.Strategy
6.Opportunities

23. Useful Tools
Webmaster tools
Semrush
Searchmetrics
Google Analytics
Google Adwords
(keyword planner tool)
Google Trends
Hootsuite/Buffer
Sharetally.co
Followerwonk
Excel