How to Audit & Update your Website’s Internal Linking
November 2, 2020
It’s time we had an important discussion about how to audit & improve your internal linking for better user experience.
It’s time we had an important discussion about how to audit & improve your internal linking for better user experience.
Google now uses user engagement metrics to determine the quality of content and webpages it’s ranking on its search results pages. Considering customers from SEO convert 14x higher than almost any other marketing channel, it’s time for SEOs and UX specialists to work closer together.
Long story short, it’s a high-value channel. In fact, customers convert 14x higher when coming from SEO than any other marketing channel. For comparison, traditional strategies like print ads and direct mail have a 1.7% average conversion rate.
57% of B2B marketers stated that SEO generates more leads than any other marketing initiative. As a CEO, it’s important to make sure your organization is investing in SEO.
There’s no gaming the system. Don’t try to add a ton of keywords and hide them with white text. Also, don’t use the same keyword a million times on your website. No user is going to like that. Remember, search engines are trying to help people, so if your website doesn’t do that, they won’t show it. It’s always best to ask “What does my searcher really need?” and provide that.
The whole goal of search engine optimization is to get people what they want. The best way to get started is to dive in. Here you’ll learn the basics of SEO, how to run an audit, and how to come up with strategies that will help you look like a superstar.
Ultimately SEO is all about getting your content in front of the user. Because there are complexities in any major code changes (such as trying to shift from client-side to server-side), it’s important to keep a creative and open mind.
These are some terms we’ve used throughout the SEO guides that we thought could use a little bit more explaining. You’ll also hear all these terms frequently as you get started in SEO. Huge credit to Moz.com for the great definitions!
Rule #1: Write for customers and people, not search engines and bots.
Rule #2: Know where search engines look to get good info.
Rule #3: Keywords and related topics matter, but see rule #1
SEO can be a tricky beast full of explanations like “it depends” and “well actually”. Even worse? It can be difficult to prove impact. Which makes budgeting for it even harder. What we’re going to do is break down what SEO costs and what you can expect to get depending on what you want to pay.
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization.” This basically means all you’ll be doing is getting your website set up so whenever someone asks Google (or Yelp, Siri, Bing, you name it) for a mechanic, your shop pops up among the top players.
To do that, there’s a few steps you need to take.
There are three tools that offer free service for finding links that link to your website. Using these tools is definitely the fastest way to find links. Each tool has a free and a paid version, and obviously you get way cooler stuff with the paid versions – but the free tools are still super useful for our purposes.