New Client Acquisition or Reporting to Existing Clients
Client acquisition is the first hurdle facing many digital marketing agencies. While there are many potential ways to reach out to those that may need your services, in practice, when selling a high value proposition such as digital marketing, it’s important to establish the value of your service early. This is where Website Auditor – part of SEO Powersuite can help
One of the most successful techniques I’ve tried in my time with Gambit Nash is to present potential clients, both those that have approached us, and those we are looking to actively reach out to, a tailored document which shows both their current position, and potential areas where digital marketing would improve their profitability. A core focus is always the ROI of any work we do for them
The following video and explanation show a method which is both repeatable and consistent. Using readily available tools and a simple to maintain template, it is possible to create a valuable document detailing in real and understandable terms to any potential clients the benefits of signing up for your own digital marketing services.
Appraising a Website.
In most cases, your potential client will already have a website. If not to the conversation regarding building a website for them needs to be undertaken first. While it is possible to offer digital marketing solutions that do not have a business website at their core, that is a more intricate topic for another time. We are going to assume that your services are required to act on an existing website or building a new website is part of your remit.
The video above shows how we use a simple tool called Website Auditor – part of SEO Powersuite to get as much information as possible on the website, this includes.
- Server speed
- HTML consistency and accuracy
- Tags and META data
- Appraisal or written content
- Navigation and internal linking
- Social media presence
- Competition analysis
Positioning Your Competence
At this point it is possible to export the reports the tools has created. The enterprise level of the tool allows full white label report export. Branded with your own company logo and address. This means that the value this report gives to your potential client is from yourself and positions your own competency at a very high level
The beauty of using a tool like Website Auditor is that for a one-off fee it can be used as often as required. If you need to run 20 or more reports a day – that’s fine. In practice creating dozens of reports a day to either send to prospective clients or to report on progress to existing web design or digital marketing clients is an almost hands-free operation. The tool does the work while you can be getting on with other issues.
Below we give a detailed example of a workflow that can be used with Website Auditor. How to run it, what each important function means and ideas of how to present that as a proposition to potential clients or as a report of ongoing work to an existing client for either website design or digital marketing.
Preparing Website Auditor
Initially you’ll need to open Website Auditor. The application is updated about once a week to keep up to date with any changes to the way websites are viewed, weighting of indexing factors and new website types. This initially loading might take a few seconds if the application needs to download one of these updates. A pop up in the lower right-hand corner of the screen will tell you what is going on.
Starting a Project
Using the menu in the top bar go to “File” then “New Project”. The dialog box above will appear. At this point you need to enter the URL of the site you wish to audit
You will then be presented with the “Specify Crawler Settings” dialog box. By default only the top radio button to follow “Robots.Txt” will be enabled. In almost all circumstances is safe, and advised to leave these default settings. You will notice a number of options across the top of the dialog that allow many different parameters of the audit to be changed including the filtering of pages to only audit pages with a specified URL format (using a wildcard if required), the ability to slow down the requests to the website’s server – very useful if you do not want to overload a very large website with many queries at once, the ability to enter a password which will be used appropriately to access password protected websites, a sub domain search to extend the audit to all subdomains found for the site and very powerful tools relating to the permissions and execution of Java script.
Viewing Your Site Structure
Website Auditors Site Structure Analysis
At this point Website Auditor will perform a scan of the site following the parameters specified above. The length of time it takes will depend on the size of the site and how “deep” you requested the scan to be.
Scan depth is worked out via link hierarchy. A quick explanation is that 0 scan depth would just be the home page (root URL) of the site. Level 1 scan would follow every in-site link found on the root URL and scan those pages. Level 2 would follow any new links found on these pages and scan the new pages discovered. Level 3 would follow any new links on these pages etc.
Content Analysis with Website Auditor
Much of a site’s strength in terms of visitor retention, SEO potential and conversion to sale is down the site’s content. Ideally it is correctly formatted, loads promptly, is grammatically and syntactically correct and “under the hood” complies with certain rules such as HTML conformance, the correct use of META data such as image Alt tags.
On the left-hand side of Website Auditor there will be a list of available functions and reports. The second from the top is “Content Analysis”
Clicking on this for the first time will bring up a dialog box asking which pages on the site under investigation you would like to analyse.
Tips For Website Auditor
In terms of SEO and relevance you will be asked to list a number of keywords or key phrases that are commercially important to the site. In some instances, Website Auditor will have picked up a number of phrases from the site scan completed previously. This means that the website designer added these to the meta data in the root domains HTML header. Often it is safe to assume that the website owner specified these terms as important.
Each page can have its own set of targeted keywords. However, the number of keywords should be limited to no more than 5 per page. If you wish to optimize a page for more than 5 words or phrases it is usually better to split the ideas that you are trying to convey into 2 or more pages and create optimized content for each new page based on the subset of terms selected.
There are important decisions to be made at this point. It is rare that every page on a website needs to be analysed for content. In practice the pages that you expect visitors to land on first – so called “landing pages” are the most important. These pages ideally would rank well in search engines, provide valuable information to your visitors, and then encourage these visitors to taker the next steps towards your site’s primary goals; such as make ins a sale, filling in a contact form or downloading a brochure.
A list of all the URL’s discovered in the initial scan will be displayed. Choose those that are important as landing pages. Ideally batch them with a maximum of 4 or 5 pages per run. Most local business sites will not have more than 3 or 4 pages that act as landing pages though this will depend on the number of products or services offered.
Tip.
Under the “Site Structure” menu there is an option called ”Visualization”. Clicking this option will display a node and branch representation of the site similar to the one shown on the right
In most cases, when doing content analysis, it is these hubs that are the best URLs to analyse with the Website Auditor content analysis tool.
Understanding the Website Auditor User Interface
The image below shows the layout website. Typically in a node and spoke format. The centre of each cluster represents a likely key page which should be added to your content audit. This might be considered an example of a good website design.
The left hand side of this shows the body text of content as Website Auditor sees it. Green ticks mean the element passes audit and there are no issues with that elements.
An orange triangle denotes an issue which might impact usability or performance. Typically, these will be to do with the length of a title (Titles that are too long cannot be displayed in Google correctly) whether the keywords the site is being optimised for appear in header tags.
A red circle with a cross in it means that the content audit discovered a serious issue with the site which is very likely to impact its commercial performance. This can be pages or images that do not load, Java or other code within a page that is corrupt. These should be corrected as a priority
In terms of actually carrying out remedial work on the website, if you select any element on the left of the screen, a detail of the issue along with recommended solutions will appear in the larger area to the right of the screen (as shown in the image above)
This detailed portion of the screen consists of two tabs “Details” and “Competitors” for now ensure that details is highlighted in green. The reports that Website Auditor create can be printed off (with Enterprise version of the software) or exported (with all paid versions of the software). This will give you a “work to“ list for repairing all issues the website has.
A summary of the overall performance is at the top of the screen showing the number of errors, warnings and pass scores along with a percentage rating for the site overall.
Website Auditor Tutorial
Each page of content analysed will be returned with a report similar to the one in the image below. On the left of the main report screen is an overview of the issues found. Ranging from use of HTML tags to missing ALT tags and written content issues such as over or under used keywords. Clicking on any element will give you a detailed explanation of the exact problem or problems as they relate to the URL in question with detailed instructions on how to fix any issues.
Competition Analysis
Within the content analysis screen, the second option at the top of the main right-hand portion of the page is labelled” Competitors”. Clicking on this shows an image similar to the one below;
Here is some great information regarding he keywords and their current competition in Google.
The top of the screen is sorted by default by keyword – followed by a column giving the number of competitors in the search engines that are currently active and optimised for that keyword.
The TF-IDF factor columns that follows stands for “term frequency–inverse document frequency” and is an important factor in establishing how well optimized these competitors are and can be used in direct comparison to your own website. This is followed by the number of keywords that are optimized on this site that are in common with your own site. In general, the more there are, the closer this competitor is to being a direct commercial competitor in your market place.
Tip
It’s hard to stress enough how important knowing the online competition is, and having a very good understanding of where their strengths and weaknesses lie. Over years of analysing sites for clients and competitors we have come to understand that, many business owners are largely unaware of how their online competition differs from their high street competition. In the example in the image above, it is unlikely that any site owner selling the product type displayed here would be aware that, for example, Ebay and Amazon represented such strong online competition.
Clicking on the keywords in the “Keyword” columns will change the histogram displayed at the bottom of the screen to show the specific competition for that keyword. Using the tick boxes to the lower right of the screen it is possible to format the graph to display whichever competitors you would like to compare against from a single one, to all of them overlaid.
The selection tabs on the left of the bottom third of this screen allow you to switch between a view of your own website’s strengths in terms of TF-IDF for each keyword – or a Competitors overview. Therefore allowing you to make direct comparisons.
Website Auditor White Label Reporting
The last two menu options on the left of the main screen are “Domain Strength” and “Reports”. These are where an overview of the website under analysis are displayed.
- Domain strength gives a handy 2 page overview and includes some factors not seen as yet
- Site front page image (the featured image)
- Inlink Rank. A vitally important metric for offline SEO (link building) We will cover more of that aspect when we look at other tools in the SEO Powersuite in the coming weeks
- Alexa Rank. Alexa is set up to measure a sites popularity by measuring the traffic flow to that site. It is somewhat limited by only measuring visits by those people who have the “Alexa Toolbar” installed into their browser. At one point this was a popular addon for many browsers, now it is fair to say that only a small number of people use it and these tend to be tech savvy web designers and digital marketers.
Downloads as PDF file format.
- The IP address (internet protocol) address of the website. The technical term for where it is hosted
- Country. This is the country where the servers that host the site are based. It is not reflective of the language or any other site settings that a website builder can control. It is only a reflection of where the site is hosted.
- Age. How long ago the domain was registered. The site may have been built at some point after the domain was registered. It may have had several complete overhauls in the intervening years and possible even changed hands. This might more correctly be labelled “Domain Age”
- Indexing in Search Engines. This is the number of pages that Google, Yahoo and Bing have indexed for this site. Ideally this should reflect the number of active content pages the site has as closely as possible.
Backlinks
Backlinks are still one of the most important ranking factors for commercial sites. The number of links from third party sites that direct to your own site. This is a measure of link popularity. Each link is an opportunity for a web user to discover and then browse to your site. In a commercial market a site with a solid, contextual and relevant link profile is highly likely to beat a site with a weaker link profile in search engine position for their commercial keywords.
- Backlinks – Total number of Backlinks discovered from third party sites pointing to the site being audited.
- Linking Domains. How many separate domains these links are from
- IP’s How many different IP’s these links are from. Often 2 sites can share an IP and if this number is lower than the Linking Domains number it is likely that several sites from the same commercial group have linked to the audited site.
- “C” Blocks. IP addresses are split into different block groups separated by colons or periods (full stops) The third of thee groups is known as the ”C” block. These are a strong indicator of the range of sites that are lining. A good analogy might be the year or country of manufacturer identifier on a car registration plate. This “C” block gives important information and in general a high number and mix of these ids better than a small number of similar “C” blocks
Below this is the social media popularity overview. Website Auditor has scanned several popular social media platforms for mentions of the website under review and reports back on the number of times it has found the site either mentioned directly (full site name) or links from social media sites back to the site under review.
Printable and Exportable Reports
Printing Own Branded Reports
One of the most important functions of the reports created by Website Auditor and the other tools in SEO Powersuite is the ability to offer them to clients either as part of new client acquisition – as a tool to position your own competence and have a baseline for any improvement to website design, layout or Digital marketing efforts. Or to keep existing clients updated with monthly reports showing the work you have done on their behalf.
Th that end the Enterprise level of all tools within the SEO Powersuite comes with the ability to add your own company’s logos and contact details and export or print these reports “White Label” style.
As standard the reports are quite stunning. Being similar to the popular “Material Design” and coming with several options.
Site Audit Summary. Gives a cover sheet style report of the technical and layout factors of the site. A good general overview for comparison. A great tool to sell your own website skills to fix any issues highlighted or perhaps propose that a client invest in a new website.
Site Audit Details. Beginning with the same overview sheet, this extremely comprehensive report goes into every issue. For instance, if the overview report states that there are 10 resources with 4XX status. This report will give the URL of every one of them listed. As a too, this report serves to excellent functions.
Firstly, to present to tech savvy clients who ask for specific details of the work. This option should be used with some care. In our experience most business owners that are not themselves web savvy can be overwhelmed with the detail. But, should a client or potential client ask for this detail, it is nice to have it by simply printing off the report
Secondly this report is an ideal “work to” list. Giving you the opportunity to work down the issues it presents, locate precisely the cause of each problem, then tick them off as you fix them.
Domain Strength. This report is an amalgam or overview report giving the current domain strength,. A mark between 1 and 10 showing the sites progress towards its highest achievable strength.
It should be noted here that in our experience we have never seen a site with a domain strength of 10, and very few above 8.5. There are often practical reasons why certain issues remain and might not be corrected. A score of 8.5 can be viewed as an excellent overall result for a site as long as the reasons for the remaining issues are understood and acknowledged.
Exporting Data
Even the none Enterprise versions of the tools within SEO Powersuite have the option to export the entire data set from the reports.
Once a site has been audited, go to the top menu and then select
File > Export
- Choose the format. If you have designed your own report format in a tool such as Excel or Word then the Text, CSV (comma separated values) option might be the best as these can be imported into these other tools very easily/
- Otherwise HTML. SQL and XML options exist. Publishing to the web with HTML or SQL is a possibility and formatting your own reports using XML (extended mark-up language) can be done in a similar manner to the CSV file for those with the skills to do so.
- Using this export option it is possible to create your own re-usable reports templates and then – perhaps using a macro – import this data into it to be printed and sent to your clients.
The reports can be built with whatever header fields you like from those available.
The image below shows an example of the selection screen showing the flexibility of the export function.
Summary
Website Auditor – one of the tools from the SEO Powersuite represents a powerful and versatile application for those looking to optimize their own website, reach out to potential clients with professional crafted proposal documents, work to repair existing clients site issues or report to existing digital marketing clients on the progress made towards your mutually agreed goals.
Bought alone, Website Auditor is a best in class tool for appraising the structure and performance of a website and giving a good overview of its competitor’s strengths and weaknesses.
Together with the rest of the SEO Powersuite, it is possible to cover every base in client handling for identifying and assisting in effective web design, creating professional outreach proposals, reporting on progress of digital marketing or remedial web design work, doing in depth competitor analysis, ensuring in bound link profiles are strong and risk free, analysing a competitor’s strengths and weaknesses.
The tool can be run as many times as is required at no extra cost. It is possible to deeply analyse each of your competitor’s sites as well as your own. SEO Powersuite also integrates with Google Webmaster tools to get an even more detailed insight into the search engines view of the website from within one simple to use interface.
Website Auditor, the first tool of the SEO Powersuite comes highly recommended as a best in class application offering substantial analytical power and untouchable cost for performance ratio.
We have an exclusive double offer for Website Auditor either on its own or with the full SEO Powersuite.
- Free 1 month trial of any or all tools in the SEO Powersuite including Website Auditor
- Exclusive 10% off the price of SEO Powersuite when you choose to buy
Just follow the links above. The 30 days free trial ensures that you know exactly what value you are getting before you commit. For agencies and individual marketers looking to expand their reach, acquire new clients and effectively service and report to existing clients, Website Auditor is a must have application that offers best in class performance and value.
Website Auditor Review
Website Auditor for Digital Marketing Professionals and Agencies
The fundamental building block of you digital marketing campaign is your own website. The main way of evaluating your competition in DM terms is to understand your competitions websites. Whether for yourself or for a client, understanding where you stand in relation to other businesses in your niche is the most important first step. It can also involve a great deal of work.
As part of the SEO Powersuite Website Auditor deals with the majority of the work for you. Giving you a deep understanding of your own (or your client’s) site and, in plain English, reporting on what can and should be done to improve your chances of ranking more highly. It can also analyse every competitors website in a matter of minutes producing stunning reports full of the sort of actionable detail that puts you in a great position to build the most effective digital marketing strategy.
Website Auditor is one of those digital marketing tools that you probably won’t run every day, but when you do use it, it will prove an invaluable asset in your arsenal.
With the ability to scan websites down to HTML level, extract the site map check for bad links analyze the social media status of the site, analyze the content checked the metadata as well as collate much of the server-side information such as page load speed and WHOIS information, Website Auditor is one of those tools that you use either alongside, or instead of Google Webmaster tools.
All it requires to get started is the URL of the site you are going to examine. Although if you want to dig deeper and understand the content and its structure, it has the option to dig down page by page and check these out as well.
Having used Website Auditor now for more than five years, I can give you three case use scenarios where it’s proved to be an invaluable tool.
Competition Analysis.
This is probably the biggest use area for Website Auditor. Checking out the competition against your site, or a clients site, for a particular set of keywords might mean running the tool many times over in a single day.
My record, as I think I mentioned in the video is running the process 50 times in a day. This is where Website Auditor really earns its stripes. Most of the time I do this on behalf of clients, to give them an idea of their ranking possibilities for their new site. It is also invaluable to check out competition.
If I’m planning to take on a digital marketing client. I want to keep their expectations realistic and understanding how strong the competition is will allow me to pitch both the price and time scale of any digital marketing project accurately. Without tools like this that can really analyze niche’s competition, the process of giving a reasonable expectation level to the client would either involve a lot more hard work or would just be not possible.
The fact that website auditor also collected information into very aesthetically pleasing reports also makes the process of creating a proposal for my client much easier.
For a one-off price and for a tool that requires only an Internet connection to run as many times per day and create as many projects as you want, website auditor has paid for itself more times over than I can probably calculate here.
Web design or redesign.
Often, I will take on a client with a pre-existing website and will need to show them the issues with that site and how they should be resolved. A simple way to do this is to hand them an overview report from Website Auditor as a “before” image of their website. Then, once the work is done, run the report again to report the improved state of the site.
Of course, it also is an invaluable checklist of things to do.
- Fix 404 errors,
- Improve metadata
- Increase page load speeds
- Check social media presence
- Reduce the size of images.
Website auditor will give you all the information you need to create a plan that allows you to improve the responsiveness and digital marketing potential of any website.
3) Client Proposals.
Client acquisition is one of the biggest activities that any individual or agency can undertake. In presenting accurate and professional reports to a potential client goes a long way to establishing your professional credentials as a professional or an agency.
Whether you intend to use a tool like website auditor to e-mail lists of potential clients with reports, or perhaps offer an analysis service from your own website for those that sign up to your mailing list, there are any number of ways of using website auditor as an outreach tool.
Website Auditor
Regularly updated, lightweight and relatively fast to run (the speed being dependent on the size of the site you’re analyzing of course) Website Auditor, part of the SEO PowerSuite is an agency level tool which can also be used by individual digital marketers to establish very strong professional presence.
Its reports are well laid out, the options to brand these with your own logo to white label the results mean it can be entirely transparent. In terms of the value it offers and the problems it solves Website Auditor has the potential to pay for itself many times over.
- RUN A COMPLETE SEO-HEALTH CHECK AGAINST DOZENS OF STRUCTURE AND HTML CODING FLAWS
- BOOST YOUR SITE INDEXATION AND CRAWLING WITH QUALITY XML SITEMAPS/ROBOTS.TXT FILES
- OPTIMIZE PAGES’ CONTENT FOR YOUR IMPORTANT KEYWORDS AND LEARN HOW TO EASILY AVOID KEYWORD STUFFING
- CREATE PROFESSIONAL ON-SITE AUDIT REPORTS THAT ARE SURE TO IMPRESS YOUR SEO CLIENT
Website Auditor Free Trial and Discount
Here at Yourmetalife we have a great deal for you. Website Auditor free trial and discount. The best deal for this best in class onsite SEO analysis tool on the internet.
Why Website Auditor Free Trial?
The free trial allows you to gather the data on one website and check every aspect of this data. It is far more than a “hook”. For free, this trial offers immense value. For a single site owner, the ability to get under the hood and see everything that is good, and not so good about your site. The meta data, site speed, inbound link volume, social media presence, W3C and HTML conformance is incredibly valuable.
Add to that the content analysis. See how your site stacks up in terms of LSI potential (latent semantic indexing), how your images, videos and other none text elements add or detract from your SEO potential and it’s soon clear that this website auditor free trial offers tremendous value in actionable data to improve your website whether you choose to buy the full product or not.
Website Auditor Discount
For those of you who run many sites, are professional digital marketers or agencies servicing many clients, then the Website Auditor discount offers the most affordable way to get this best in class SEO tool. With set-and-forget functionality, this excellent digital marketing application allows serious professionals to gather and understand every aspect of a site’s set up and how it is viewed by both search engines and site visitors.
The ability to export data in the Professional version and customise and create stunning reports from directly within Website Auditor itself in the Enterprise version means there is a product available for either high end solo marketing professionals or agencies looking to scale up functionality without scaling up their costs.
With no limits on the sites or projects you run, excellent reporting options with the Enterprise version and the most comprehensive tool set you’ll find anywhere, Yourmetalife offers the best Website Auditor discount you’ll find anywhere on the internet via the links on this page.
This site is part of the Yourmetalife Group
The Yourmetalife Difference
Yourmetalife offers the best discount available anywhere on the internet for this and all other tools in SEO Powersuite.
We also offer superb 3rd party support. While the designers of this tool (part of SEO Powersuite) have been in the business for many years and have a great history of updating their tools regularly, adding new features and providing superb support, Yourmetalife take the position of end user advocates.
We have a history of working closely with digital marketing application developers and communicating with end users. We are happy to answer questions and pass on suggestions. If you know our history on demondemon and similar sites, you’ll appreciate how closely we work with our own community to ensure the best user experience.
A free trial, the best discount and unique level of third party support. That’s the difference Yourmetalife makes.
About
Paul Rone-Clarke is Digital Marking Director with Gambit Nash. A creative agency based in the stunning rural countryside of Worcestershire.
Starting in digital marketing (long before it was called digital marketing) in 1996 with small jobs for local companies. Promoting a local shoe shop, a large catalogue firm and several small businesses working alongside his time in education, as a very mature student and working as a Production Planner and Senior Manager with great companies such as Bosch and Superform Aluminium.
If you are interested, Superform make the super-heated aluminium body panels for cars such as Aston Martin and Morgan.
Deciding to start Yourmetalife in 2009 and creating a successful brand alongside the more important issue of happy and well serviced clients it became apparent after 5 good years of growth that without some level of automation, outsourcing or the introduction of complementary skill sets, further scaling up of the business was going to be a difficult process.
Gambit Nash
In 2015 Gambit Nash was formed as a creative agency bringing together graphic design, coding, net and server infrastructure, project management and print under one roof. This allowing collaboration between various members of the team, the capital to grow and the ability for each team member to concentrate on their core activities.
Gambit Nash, and Yourmetalife use the products featured on this page extensively for client acquisition, digital marketing and client communication via the excellent reporting and export options. The choice of SEO Powersuite was after several weeks of consultation and assessment of the cost benefits of a whole range of products.
As such SEO Powersuite – in particular the Enterprise versions of the tools – and each of the four applications that make up its total come highly recommended for professional and agency use. The Professional version is a product I have used myself with Yourmetalife for many years prior to that. The software is well supported, frequently updated with new features and by some way the best value of any other set of DM tools I have looked at.