Studying topics during SEO site audit, part 5

We indirectly touched on the subject of the site at the stage of assessing the potential of the site in terms of traffic, but in this part we will dig deeper, talk about the right choice of projects for competitive analysis, the implementation of content, functional and SEO modules.

Selecting projects for analysis

In order to analyze competitors in the subject, take not only your direct competitors, who were named to you by a regular marketer. See who your competitor is in the search engine results, as we did in the article “Assessing the site’s potential in terms of traffic.” It is more interesting to watch competitors who have chosen a certain narrow niche for themselves, as well as competitors who have a much larger assortment than you.

For example, if you have an online store for everything for the garden (http://dim-sad-gorod.com/). In addition to direct competitors, we are looking at a narrow niche – an online seed store (http://seed-shop.com.ua/) and a wider niche – an online supermarket, where Dacha, garden, vegetable garden is just one of the categories (http ://rozetka.com.ua). It is advisable for each competitor that you have selected to see the visibility and what keywords go to the site for it, while removing vital queries from the semantics (brand / site name).

Content modules for the site

Next, we compile a list of possible content modules for the site. In order to get traffic, you need content. This is an axiom, which means that we must meet the expectations of visitors / customers of the site and provide for all possible content modules. For example, let’s take the same theme Garden and vegetable garden, we will need:

• Catalog.
• Block with articles: product reviews, tips for gardeners / summer residents.
• Forum (maybe).
• Video.
• FAQ.
• News, promotions.
• Brands.
• Education.
• Reviews.
• Commercial information: payment and delivery, whether there are wholesales, about the company, contacts.

Next, we evaluate the potential of each content module in relation to the project. Those. ideally, of course, to realize everything at once 🙂 But this is usually very problematic due to lack or limitations in funding, time, resources.

For example, we analyze whether it is advisable to use a forum on the site. Here is a report on one of the projects:

We conducted an analysis of the competitors of the company XXX.

From which the following conclusions were drawn:

1. Companies practically do not support their forums, they are either old, the last message was left on 06/15/2015, or closed (that is, there was a forum, but it was later removed from the site), or there are very few users – min. 3.
2. There are specialized high-quality forums

It is planned to register for them from the company XXX, we will transfer the login and passwords to the direction manager. (Due date: 19.01)

The main conclusion: it is not advisable to make a forum on the site XXX.

Further, we coordinate with the Client a plan for the development of the project according to the previous analysis.

SEO modules

We do not stop there, but compile a list of possible SEO modules on the site. There are quite a lot of them and you can list them for a long time, but the main ones are:

• relinking for indexing new pages of the site;
• relinking to increase static weight;
• auto-generation of meta tags;
• creating an auto-generated sitemap.xml.

For example, setting a task for the latter might sound like this:

Use the auto-generation module http://site.ua/sitemap.xml. Once a day, the module bypasses the entire site, adds new URLs to the sitemap, removes old ones, correlating with robots.txt.

Function modules

Functional modules are primarily important for site visitors, their presence improves behavioral and commercial ranking factors.

Examples of functional modules that we implemented for the Yarko gold jewelry online store:

• the block “Included”, “Recently viewed” has been added to the product card;
• added labels to the products “Popular”, “New”;
• added the ability to sort goods by price;
• made a calculator for calculating the cost of goods, depending on the size and weight;
• Added the ability to pay for goods with electronic money.

It also does not hurt to analyze the dynamics of traffic in the subject. This is necessary in order to understand: was the growth over the past period an increase or a fall in relation to the growth dynamics in the market? It is convenient to view such statistics in Yandex.Verdstat in the Query History.