SEO Audit Sample - Shipaa

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I. SEO Strategy

This is an actual SEO Audit, developed for a US-based logistics company, Shipaa, that was struggling due to the lack of in-house SEO experts. The objective was to guide Shipaa through the steps they needed to get a higher ranking on SERPs and drive organic traffic.

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Structure

We structured this report in the following way to provide a comprehensive review of each SEO aspect that needed to be worked on:

Technical SEO: Assessment of their website's infrastructure for speed, mobile-friendliness, usability, etc. We found multile technical SEO & design errors that had to be fixed.

Content Overview: Evaluation of their content's quality, relevance, and organization to meet user and search engine expectations.

Link Building: Analysis of their backlink profile for quantity, quality, and relevance, compared to the primary competitors.

Custom Link-Building Strategy: Tailored strategy plan for acquiring valuable backlinks to improve their site's authority and ranking.

Technical SEO

1️⃣ Image Compression

Start by compressing the overly large images. For example,

this image⁠

weighs 3.3 MB.

⁠

Favicon ⁠

should be compressed as well - 180 KB is too much.

An entire list of images that would benefit from compression can be found in

Appendix A.⁠

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2️⃣ Robots.txt

Next, fix your robots.txt - paths were set incorrectly, which is why the pages that you were trying to exclude got indexed.

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3️⃣ Microdata markup issues:

You also have incorrect microdata markup, which can harm your website by leading to misleading information in search results, reducing click-through rates, and negatively impacting user trust.

For example, there is a section defined as FAQ through microdata markup on the main page, but it's not filled in and is out of place. Use microdata markup only where its use is justified.

Here’s the complete
list of pages with incorrect microdata markup⁠
.

4️⃣ Non-Mobile-Friendly Pages

Last but not least, you have non-mobile-friendly pages that need to be optimized. They harm user experience by making it difficult for mobile users to navigate and interact with your site, leading to higher bounce rates and potentially lower search engine rankings.

Take a look at an example below. A video that you tried to embed from YouTube doesn’t properly fit on a page - this is an example of a poor mobile usability.

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Let’s review one more example. The button overlaps with the text if it's displayed in 3 lines:

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The list of pages that don't pass the Mobile-Friendly Test and the reasons for it can be found in
Appendix B⁠
.

Key Takeaways

Overall, if you compress images and don’t load unneccesry scripts - there shouldn’t be any page speed issues.

Content & on-page SEO

1️⃣ Content Creation

Upon resolving mobile optimization shortcomings, you can move on to content creation and optimization. In this regard, creating content on related topics can be beneficial for your site. Here’s a

good example⁠

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A relatively recent page attracts traffic because it latches onto a near-target topic.

In their case, this page and the calculator collect the lion's share of traffic despite the mediocre link popularity of these pages.

⁠

Therefore, it's worth creating an automatic calculator or

quota generator⁠

to compete for a lot of useful search terms.

2️⃣ Adding credibility & authenticity

Consider placing the information about the author at the bottom of each article to add authenticity.

Apart from that, you can try to find and integrate more statistical data into your articles - it will boost their credibility. Alternatively, you can create additional articles for this data. Take a look at the example below:

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3️⃣ Regular content updates

Remember that content which moves in the search results has to be regularly updated. It also needs new (more up-to-date) information, charts, tables, infographics, price dynamics by year, etc. It includes everything that will expand the semantic core and cover the visitor's need in full for requests like "How much does it cost to ship a car," "cost to ship a car." The best bet is to start optimizing your content by targeting the top. How it might look like:

For starters, pick several pages competing with you and parse their text component and yours. Here is an
example of your page. ⁠
⁠

The image above offers a comparison of the metrics from the page to the ones on the right. The indicators examined:

The number of main keywords and the frequency of their occurrence (Min., Max., Average);

The number of words per page;

TF-IDF indicators.

⁠

TF-IDF (term frequency and inverse document frequency) - is an index used to evaluate a certain word's importance in a document.

ТF (term frequency) characterizes the ratio of the number of occurrences of a specific word to the entire set of words in the document. The higher the TF, the more important the specific word in the document.

IDF (inverse document frequency) characterizes the frequency inversion of a particular word's usage in the text. This metric allows for reducing the importance of words - for example, conjunctions or prepositions.

Where is the TF-IDF used?

The TF-IDF metric is used in search engine algorithms for checking texts. This index is a part of the algorithm for checking the content relevance to the user's search query. This parameter is also used to determine the degree of similarity of several documents.

An example of a pivot table with all the metrics can be found in Appendix F.

The pages are compared by the types of media content, technical tasks are drawn up for the copywriter and designer, the current ranking indicators are recorded, and the dynamics are observed. Looking at the numbers, it seems that the page is not bad, but this page has problems - it's losing ranking.

Granted, it's low search volume for the most part, but the trend is evident. If we look at the Google Analytics data - the average time spent on the page is 39 seconds, while the reading time for the entire article is about 12 minutes.

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It may be caused by the page's irrelevance to the user's expectations. Let's take the query "how much does it cost to ship a car?" and examine it. It's an information request that the user makes, hoping to receive data on how much transportation can cost. It's not a transaction request where the user would be looking for a company offering transportation services. The user merely wants an estimate. Now, let's take a look at the top pages for this query:

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https://www.move.org/vehicle-transport-costs/⁠

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https://nexusautotransport.com/how-much-is-it-to-ship-a-car-this-is-how-to-calculate-cost/⁠

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https://www.consumeraffairs.com/auto/cost-to-ship-a-car.html⁠

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https://www.uship.com/vehicles/⁠

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https://www.jandstransport.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-ship-a-car/⁠

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https://www.amerifreight.net/car-shipping-auto-transport-quotes-rates-cost-calculator/⁠

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What makes these articles different from yours? The narrative style. Your article reads like a life story of the author you follow that would look perfect on some blog, but the user's expectations are different.

By entering this keyword, the user expects to find useful tips, tables, comparisons, recommendations, and specific numbers - everything that can help grasp the issue. In other words, the user needs cold, hard facts, not a well-written life story.

Therefore, we should look at the top and note which companies are there now, how they got there, what kind of content they offer, and how extensive it is. Only after examining all of it should we work on our content, improve it, and start promoting the page.

The list of new content ideas with examples can be found in

Appendix E⁠

Link Building

After fixing technical and mobile optimization issues and creating valuable content, your site will be ready for link-building. Since the average age of your top competitors is around 13 years old, it's not easy for newer websites to get to the top. Nevertheless, it’s doable.

Links can be obtained from almost all car-related websites. Lifestyle-oriented websites are also suitable, as they can organically write that they have bought a new car, which was smoothly delivered.

You should consider creating yourself on the dropped domains. It's worth creating a couple of near-topic blogs and gradually boosting them. Regarding the techniques - use them at your discretion. You can improve dropped domains or reanimate deleted accounts from tumblr.com. We wouldn't recommend using direct redirects from dropped domains yet (except for a very targeted hit - if the dropped domain was a transportation site as well).

1️⃣ Sources of Links

Your website needs a decent number of good links, and there are sources that can provide them, ultimately allowing you to catch up to competitors who mostly have a lot of legitimate historical links.

Links are usually obtained from:

Backlink source

Note

Links from niches

For example, links from websites that are directly involved in car sales.

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Example

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Links from directories

List your website in reputable, industry-specific directories to enhance visibility and credibility.

⁠

Example.

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Topic blogs

Topic-related blogs allow building valuable backlinks and establish authority in your field.

Example.

⁠

Excellent entry through wikiHow

However, in this case, it's not link building but rather the initiative of the wikiHow team. Nevertheless, the number of views and click-through rates are impressive.

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Example.

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Business Review Websites

Have your software developer create a simple shipping rate calculator that can be embedded on third-party websites through an iframe with a backlink to your website.

Next, reach out to car dealers and offer them to place your calculator on their website. You’ll get a free backlink with every embed.

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Example.

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Company listings

Registering on company listing sites allows you to secure authoritative backlinks:

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https://www.superpages.com

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https://www.yellowpages.com

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Broken links of competitors

Find broken links on competitor sites and suggest your content as a replacement using targeted outreach to get quality backlinks.

Buying .edu links or sponsorship

These links boost your site's credibility thanks to their high trust and authority.

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Example

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There are no rows in this table

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2️⃣ Link Profile Dynamic

Your safe average median of link building is about 140 links per month from 25 domains, with do-follow links making up about 40% -50%. It's important to keep a positive dynamic every month, even if it's insignificant. The monthly increase in links should be about 10-20%. It's possible to increase the dynamic if there is a newsworthy event, such as the introduction of a quota calculator on the website. Increased links to useful tools will not appear suspicious to the search engines. If implemented, it shouldn't be displayed on a new page - integrate it into the main page or add it to

this page⁠

If you notice a positive dynamic, move on to the next landing page. If that doesn't work, there are several options you can proceed with. Rebuild the commercial queries of this page under the main page (to send all commercial requests to the main page). Certain competitors concentrate almost all requests on the main page, and it works.

Alternatively, re-create the page with the same queries but with new content. It can help.

It's important to avoid making numerous changes right away (even if you want to achieve the result faster) because this will blur the picture as a whole and make it difficult to determine which one of the changes worked.

Work with each page separately because each page has its own queries, search visibility, and competitors. You are not competing with domains but with pages. Stay tuned, as we developed a 3-month link building plan specifically for your website (

see page 2⁠

of this report).

Wrap-up

To summarize, the top of the niche is occupied by old domains with a fairly legit link profile. You can compete for the top by increasing the mass of natural-looking links - there are many ways to get them. The website is also not bad, but you need to work on content and backlinks to get to the top.

Out of all competitors,

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www.shipacarinc.com⁠

and

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https://nexusautotransport.com⁠

are worth monitoring because they are more recent and show excellent dynamic.

Additional Remarks

1️⃣ New Pages

Note that at the moment, active link building is dangerous because the past performance has been very weak. A reason for attracting links has to be created, namely new pages. Here’s an

example of a page⁠

that needs to be created to attract traffic and backlinks.

2️⃣ Behavioral Factors Stimulation

Boosting pages by stimulation of behavioral factors provided that the page is in the top 20 or, better yet, in the top 10. Any microtask service (microworkers.com) will work for this purpose. Stimulated traffic shouldn't exceed 10% of the current organic one.

3️⃣ Weak Websites Acquisition

A good option you should look into is buying weak sites from the top 100. For example, the current performance of

this website⁠

is far from good.

Nevertheless, it ranks for some good keywords.

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Granted, their keywords are below the top 50, BUT they are still in the search results and being ranked. The mechanic here is simple - you need to collect a list of similar websites and reach out to their owners, pointing out the lack of traffic and poor quality of the website and offering to buy it. Some of them will agree to sell for a reasonable price (around 50-100 bucks). And just like that, it becomes a dropped domain (without its main features like domain expiration, etc.). After boosting its SEO potential and improving its ranking, embed the necessary links in the top pages.

It will give you many advantages, for instance:

1. A topic-related domain

2. Ready-made content

3. Domain history

4. A domain that has always been available

5. A spare domain that you can always move to if some kind of problems with the main one arise

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4️⃣ Writing Guest Posts of True Story-type

Another valuable source of quality backlinks that is within your reach are blogs suitable for guest-posting. For example, you should definitely try to place an article on https://www.autotempest.com - an excellent resource. However, keep in mind that the article should be informative with no hint of commercial intent. Ideally, it should be some kind of research so they can mention you as a source of that useful material. Another way of getting a backlink from them is sponsored links if they offer this option, but in any case, a backlink from their website is an absolute must.

Blog Topics:

Best Websites to Sell a Car to Maximize Your Profit

The X Best Websites to Buy a Car

The 5 Most Famous Car Auctions in the USA

5️⃣ Reference Point and Projections

Overall, looking at the website in its current state, we see the general semantics for 300 keywords with a relatively modest traffic potential. The question is whether there is traffic in the niche in general. The answer is Yes, there is, and we can see a vivid example of it in nexusautotrasport:

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Ideally, it would be best to expand the semantics with content and new pages, but even the current semantics have potential. We will proceed with the concept that only the keys ranked in the top 10 have value. At the moment, there are none, but most of the semantics cоnsists of low-competitive queries that can be taken as a base for quick movement to the top. If you build a traffic forecasting model, it might look like this:

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If, based on the current semantics, most of the requests can get into the top 5-10, the number of visitors will reach 805 -1610 per month. If the same semantics get into the top 1-3, then the range can vary from 8048 to 12072 visitors per month.

Thelist of pages and anchors to start with is included in
Appendix D⁠
.

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Your custom link-building strategy

We have developed a robust backlink strategy specifically tailored to your website that offers a complete suite of services organized into a three-stage plan.

⁠

Check it out

⁠

support@crowdo.net⁠

⁠

https://www.linkedin.com/company/crowdo-net/⁠

⁠

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