Seraph Studios logo
Seraph Studios logo

Six more months and it will be the year 2020, a year of vision for Malaysia that has been promoted decades ago. Technology has advanced so much that the world is a much smaller place today, with the Internet almost everyone is connected in some way online.

Seeing all the advancement in technology, with modern businesses all going the digital route with their online presence and digital marketing campaigns, and yet some businesses are still resistant to change. Often giving reasons such as not having the budget or that they are unsure of the ROI should do invest in this virtual channel.

These businesses, for lack of a better description, are destined to slowly fade out of existence. Unknowingly they will see their sales drop, their customer base stops growing, and eventually they come to the conclusion to shutdown their business entirely as it is no longer sustainable.

Are you one of those business owners, who resist change or are unwilling to invest in a new technology, a channel that is virtual, intangible?

I hope you are not one of the 'fade outs', and if I are, we hope you finish reading this article, for it may very well change your perception towards digital marketing and save your business.

In this article I will discuss what you will need in order to build yourself an evergreen digital marketing funnel with minimum cost.

The five major components you will need to build this evergreen digital marketing funnel are:

Let's take a closer look at each component below.

Seraph Studios - Evergreen Digital Marketing Funnel

Website

Digital Marketing is the future of marketing. However many rely on third party platforms to build their marketing funnel. Often times businesses rely on Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups, Instagram, Pinterest and other social platforms as their main online presence.

While having a presence on social media is great, it is definitely not ideal. It is never a good idea to build your main web presence on a third party platform where you have no control of it's development, direction and policies.

Seraph Studios - Dead social networks

Look at the past greats in social media, Friendster, MySpace, which were once high performing social networks that brought much success to those who managed to leverage the platform.

However, years of effort building up traffic and audience has gone up in flames and if your business was relying 100% on those networks, then your business is as good as toast once the platform loses popularity or shuts down.

Many argue that Facebook is not going anywhere anytime soon, yes we would agree with that statement as well. However we are unable to predict how much longer it will stay relevant. There are tons of newer social platforms being introduced, and while one platform may appeal to a specific generation, the next generation may shun it.

Did you know that Facebook is now considered a social network for old folks? Namely those who are 30 years old and above, Gen Z are not into Facebook, but rather they prefer platforms like Snapchat, Instagram.

So unless you are prepared to put in 10 times the effort to build your audience and following on 10 different social networks, you're better off leveraging these 10 different networks and converge all the traffic into a business website.

A business website is a virtual asset which you own and have full control of, Mark Zuckerberg will not be able to one day come up to you and cut half of your traffic or views just because he introduced a new algorithm.

Look at the changes on Facebook over the past few years and you know what I'm talking about, post views on Facebook Pages have dramatically dropped. The reason? Facebook wants to show more relevant content that are related to your friends and family to it's audience instead of business posts.

This is understandable, as Facebook is looking after their users who are on the platform to socialize and interact with their friends and family, not being bombarded with sales messages. From another perspective, Facebook is also trying to encourage more businesses to use their Ads platform, which is their main income.

Now think about it this way, had you been spending the past 5 years channeling traffic from your Facebook Page over to your business website, guess what, you own that traffic today, and are not at the mercy of Facebook.

All is not lost yet, as it is still possible to to leverage social media to build your site traffic, but you'll have to start now. Get your business website built as soon as possible and start leveraging social media to drive traffic over to your website.

Doing so, you would have built up some significant traffic before any of the current social platforms start to lose its relevance. Once that happens, move on to the next big social platform and leverage its popularity and drive even more traffic to your business site, you only stand to gain more in the long run if you do so.

Relevant and Useful Content

Now that we've understood the importance of having your own business website, you'll need to know how to keep your audience on your site and make them come back for more.

Let's take a step back and look at the reasons why we would visit any website. Is it cause of the design? Or is it cause of the content? Now design does play an important role in instilling confidence and professionalism, but the main reason people visit websites is for the content.

You may have a favorite blog which you visit often, you're most likely not there just to look at the site's pretty layout over and over again. No! You're there for the content because it is relevant and useful to you.

Now that you have your business website setup, to attract and retain people's interest in your site, you will have to put out relevant and useful content. Think about what your audience, leads, and customers might be interested in, each segment will have different interests and will be looking for different types of content depending on which stage of the funnel they're currently at.

There are various versions of the marketing funnel, but the core is always the same, as such we'll be using a simplified version here for easier understanding.

Seraph Studios - Digital Marketing Funnel

Awareness

The awareness stage is when a prospect discovers your brand or business. They are not familiar with your business, and probably found you through word of mouth or search engine. They're exploring, trying their luck to see what they find.

Your content at this stage should not be sales oriented, instead it should match what your target audience will search online. You will need to match your content with their search intent and create buzz and authority in your niche.

The types of content you could use for this stage of the funnel are:

Consideration

Now that you have your audience's attention, and they're considering your brand, you will need to engage with them and provide more value to them. Don't expect a high level of commitment yet from this stage of the funnel, instead use content like

The key here is to engage with prospects more closely and try to get their contact information. This will enable you to follow up with them later and finally convert them into paying customers.

Intent

In this stage of the funnel, the intent of the prospect will be made much clearer. If they are genuinely interested in your offer then a little nudge may be all it takes to convert them into paying customers.

As such you need to make a strong case for why your product or service is the best choice for the prospect. Reiterate and reinforce their intent with:

Conversion

Seraph Studios - Gary Vaynerchuk
Gary Vaynerchuk

This is a crucial and exciting stage in the funnel. Here the prospect is ready to make the purchase and convert, it's time for you to make the right hook (as Gary Vee would say).

Persuasive content is needed in this crucial stage, content which can speak directly about your offer to the prospect about the benefits of owning your product/service.

For this purpose you may incorporate the following content:

Loyalty

The battle is over, you have converted your prospect into a customer, everyone lives happily ever after. But wait, there's always the next product or service you would like to sell them, Your business still needs continuous income right?

As such you would need to nurture loyalty in your customers. You can do this by providing continuous support, keep them informed about your new offerings, latest promotions and of course a knowledge-base of how to use, troubleshoot and maintain their product/service.

You may nurture customer loyalty by using the following content:

Advocacy

What's next after you've nurtured a loyal following of customers? They'll become your most powerful marketing tool, for happy customers will become advocates for your brand and business.

Transform these loyal customers into evangelists, ask them for a review, a testimonial, you would be surprised at the power of influence a testimonial has when it come to purchase decisions.

What you can offer at this stage are:

Now that you know what types of content your should put out for what type of audience, let's look at how you can optimize the content for search engines.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO has been preached by digital marketers for decades, does it work? Or is it myth? You can be sure that it works, however it doesn't bring you instant results. Usually requiring anywhere from 3 - 6 months or more for actual results to start showing, this is the most crucial component if your end goal is to have an evergreen digital marketing funnel.

Search Engine Optimization is basically optimizing your written content to search engines. Making sure you have a nice spread of keywords, proper use of header tags and as of today, making sure that your content is relevant to your title and chosen keywords.

Gone are the days where you could just keyword stuff your content and rank high in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

There are various areas to SEO, which we will cover in another article, but for now you need to make sure your content is:

If you get it right and coupled with some evergreen content and you can be sure traffic will keep flowing to your site in the long term.

Content Promotion

Seraph Studios - Neil Patel
Neil Patel

Lately Neil Patel has changed his stance on content, instead of saying content is King, he now advocates content promotion over putting out tons of content.

However it all depends on the stage you are in with your business, if you have just started and barely have any content on your website, then what content are you going to promote? You very well can't be posting the same article daily for the next three months.

Once you have reached the level that Neil is at, with thousands of content on his site, then it would make sense to shift gears and concentrate more on content promotion.

That's not to say you should ignore content promotion altogether, in fact, do them simultaneously. Continue to put out good, relevant and useful content and promote them as you publish. Keep the momentum up, build up your library of content, once you have enough, you can ramp up your promotional efforts.

Social Media Promotion

Go where the people are, that's the standard mantra of marketers. Guess what, social networks are where the people are at currently. Pick the networks that most suit your purpose, and target audience and start promoting your content, products and services.

Be sure to engage with your followers and provide a good experience to them, continue to post good, relevant and useful content to the community, and they will come back with their friends.

Concentrate on one or two social networks that you think are most relevant for your business, and slowly go from there, build up your community and be attentive to new upcoming social networks. Be ready to move when your audience moves, if you've grown over time and have more resources and bandwidth then be sure to open up another new network, the key is to be in as many places as you possibly can.

I hope that you found this strategy useful, I find it the best bet you can have if you're short on budget and still wish to get your feet wet in digital marketing. In fact you should just jump on the digital marketing bandwagon right now, it will definitely take time and effort, but that's in exchange of the tons of money you will be saving.

Finally, reading and watching videos alone will not bring you results, take action today. Start building your website and implementing your marketing funnel. Start writing content, register for social media accounts for your business. If you need help for any step of this funnel, be sure to hit us up and schedule a FREE consultation session with our expert team, we are ready to help you achieve success.

SEO Tester Online video review
Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Review - Homepage

Living in the Digital Age is a blessing for most of us, especially the small businesses as it gives the little guy a fighting chance against the Goliaths in the industry. Every business needs a website today, but sadly not every business has one yet, those who resist the digital wave are destined to slowly fade into obscurity.

The digital savvy businesses with a proper website have another challenge - bringing traffic to said site. You see, a website is like a brick and mortar store, and to much popularity, no, the old adage of build it and they will come sadly does not apply to websites as much as physical shops.

Websites are virtual entities, existing in digital space, unseen by the naked eye as you stroll the streets or shop in a mall. As such, if you build it and leave it, then most certainly your website will not have much traffic.

How does one bring traffic to their website then? The fastest and easiest would be to put out ads, there are plenty of options today, ranging from search engine ads such as Google Ads to ads on social media such as Facebook Ads. You see instant results, but they disappear as soon as you stop pumping money into your ad campaign.

Budgets are always limited for any business, what more if you're a small business thriving in today's economy. As such paid ads are definitely not a long term solution.

Fret not, there's a long term and dare I say Evergreen method which is much more economical and will continue to bring results for you long after your ad budget runs out. What's this magical solution you ask? SEO and Content Marketing, but that is better left for another article, as today we will be introducing you to an SEO Tool which is able to help you achieve Evergreen success.

This tool is SEO Tester Online (STO). Now let's dive into how this tool can help you achieve success in the long term.

SEO Tester Online Functions and Features

Dashboard

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Review - Dashboard

After logging in to SEO Tester Online, you are greeted with the Dashboard. This page summarizes the tools available to you as well as the number of credits you have left for the month.

As SEO Tester Online runs on a credit system, every SEO Spider deployed will deplete the number of pages and exports you have in total. A popular item in SEO Tester Online is the White Label reports (coming soon in June) where you can provide SEO Audit Reports to clients and prospects using your own branding.

At the bottom of the page are four boxes which describes the functions for each tool in the SEO Tester Online toolset.

That's all for the Dashboard, it's clean, and simple to understand, use of colors are pleasant and makes the UI look stylish.

Let's move on to the next tool - SEO Checker.

SEO Checker

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Review - SEO Checker

The SEO Checker as described on the dashboard is as below:

The online SEO analysis tool for a web page.

Find the SEO errors and solve them to improve your positiong.

As in the description, this tool allows you to analyse the SEO of a single webpage. You can analyse your own page, or a competitor page and find out what they're doing right and improve your own SEO.

Overview

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Review - SEO Checker Results

Next we look at the results pages for the SEO Checker tool. Here we have the Overview page which shows an overall SEO score as how STO sees it. The SEO score comprises of 5 main areas, namely Basic, Content, Web Performance, Mobile Performance and Social.

There's also a rendering of the checked page in both desktop and mobile views to make sure you have the correct page checked. You may also opt to download the report as a PDF document.

Basic

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Review - SEO Checker Results

In the next page, we have the Basic area of the analysis. The major items analysed here are:

There are tips for each item which explains in detail what they are their purpose, best practices and how to improve and add any missing item to your web page. Scores are given based on a total of 100 points.

Content

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Review - SEO Checker Results

Next we have Content, which basically analyses the content on your page. The analysed items are as below:

This section even shows you the number of words you have on the page. Again there are detailed explanations and tips on how you can fix the issues reported in this area of the SEO analysis.

Speed

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Review - SEO Checker Results

The next area in the report is Speed. How fast is your website? Why is it slow? What's the cause? You can find out from this section of the report where a number of speed hogs are listed as below:

As we can see, some usual suspects such as minification and compression are present. If you are running a WordPress website then most of these items can be fixed by installing a caching plugin. There are many FREE caching plugins for WordPress, take your pick, we're personally tried WP Fastest Cache, Cache Enabler and Autoptimize.

Social

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Review - SEO Checker Results

The last section in the report is Social. We all know the importance of social media in marketing today, as such you would want to make sure pages shared on social media are represented correctly. You can do that by entering the information and image you want to appear when someone shares your link on social media.

There are essentially two items you need to take note of here:

The report also checks if you have a social plugin installed, possibly to make it easier for visitors to share your pages and also a Facebook popularity score.

Those are all 4 areas in the report, go through each item thoroughly and very soon your website will start ranking for your targeted keywords.

SEO Spider

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Review - SEO Spider

The next tool in STO is SEO Spider. Similar as the SEO Checker tool, but the SEO Spider will crawl your entire website and provide you with an overview report much the same as what SEO Checker provided.

The areas in the report are the same, as such we will not mention them again here. You can also enter your competitor's website and analyze their SEO. Who knows, you could learn a thing or two from your competitors.

Keyword Explorer

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Review - Keyword Explorer

The next tool we're going to look at is the Keyword Explorer. A powerful tool which you can use to check the relevance of your intended keyword. You can also compare a few keywords against each other. The number of keywords you can compare simultaneously depends on the plan you have, which ranges from 3 to 5.

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Review - Keyword Explorer Results

As seen in the above screenshot, we are comparing three keywords whereby a slew of information is presented. You can see at one glance the Search Volume for each keyword, the Difficulty to rank for, Cost per Click (CPC) for each keyword and the Competition for each keyword.

The graph below shows us the interest over time for each keyword, which can show us the trends for whatever keyword we are exploring for. We can also change the country, which is good for local SEO, as we will get the exact stats for the country selected.

There's a nifty feature where we can get Suggestions for other long tail keywords for the keywords we're exploring for now. This is a powerful tool in the hands of an experienced search engine optimizer.

SEO Editor

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Review - SEO Editor

An interesting addition to the toolset of STO is the SEO Editor. It's much like a souped up word processor which tracks SEO related elements such as your Title tags, frequency of keywords used in the copy.

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Review - SEO Editor

As you can see in the above screenshot, it has all the basic word processing functions as well as a right panel which displays the number of words, keywords, secondary keywords etc. This will aid you when you are writing content for your website or blog.

The downside of this tool is that it doesn't allow you to save multiple articles, and you can only save the latest copy you are working on. Once it's done you can choose to export it as a Word or PDF document. You can also import documents to the tool or use the Wizard which will guide you through.

Though not as advanced as a dedicated SEO Editing software such as WebTextTool, but it sure is a nice addition for beginners in SEO.

Copy Metrics

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Review - Copy Metrics

The final tool on the list is Copy Metrics. A relatively new tool to the STO suite, you can analyze any webpage's content. It's fairly simple to use, just key in the page which you want to analyze it's copy or if you have the text you can opt to directly paste the text in the Text tab. Choose the country you want the tool to analyze for, click Analyze and the results will be shown in a while.

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Review - Copy Metrics Results

Here's an example of how the results look like. The Metrics tab shows you overview information such as Text Difficulty, which is a measurement weighted with the importance of keywords used. Views Monthly, Buy Intent and some Stats which includes Reading Time, Average CPC and Total Words.

The tool also lists out the Main Topic, which essentially tells you what topic this article is most likely going to be related to by search engines based on the keywords used.

The Topic tab shows a list of Keywords, Search Volume, CPC, Keyword Density in the article and Keyword Difficulty scores. There are also quick links you can use to analyze any keyword with the Keyword Explorer and open a search page in Google.

The third tab is the Keywords tab, which also shows the list of keywords used in the article. The only difference here is that it shows how frequent each keyword appears in the article and how many words it is comprised of.

Lastly, you have the option to change the language of the UI between English and Italian.

This concludes our review of the SEO Tester Online SAAS (Software as a Service), the founders of SEO Tester Online have some new features lined-up and will be releasing new tools later down their roadmap. Checkout the SEO Tester Online roadmap.

Previously we did a comparison between the PDF report generated by SEO Tester Online and SERanking which you can checkout as well to find out how the generated report looks like.

If you'd like to get SEO Tester Online for yourself, there's an awesome Lifetime deal on Pitchground at the moment

This is a great tool if you're in the market for an SEO tool, we highly recommend you sign up for SEO Tester Online, they do offer a trial account if you would like to test it out first.

If you'd like to get SEO Tester Online for yourself, there's an awesome Lifetime deal on Pitchground at the moment, be sure to grab it as soon as possible as it is a limited time deal.

You can also learn more about SEO Copywriting to better understand the importance of SEO in Digital Marketing today.

Do share the article if you found it to be useful, until the next one.

SERanking and SEO Tester Online SEO Audit Report comparison video

Search Engine Optimization or better known as SEO is a vital and essential step for any website if you intend to rank high in search engines, not just Google, but any available search engine out there.

The task of optimizing one's site is daunting and strikes fear to many website owners. Many people don't even know where to begin. Question such as what keywords do I optimize for, are meta tags still important, how do I know my ranking and many more come to mind when SEO is mentioned.

As with any craft, you need proper tools in order to build something, a chef needs his cooking utensils to slice, dice and finally cook up a great meal, a plumber can't fix your leaky pipes without his trusty toolbox, and of course a Search Engine Optimizer/Webmaster/Digital Marketer or whatever you call us can't optimize your website without the proper digital tools.

Today we will be looking at two SEO audit reports generated by two noteworthy SAAS SEO Tools. The contenders are SERanking and SEO Tester Online (STO), both are great tools with their fair share of strengths and weaknesses.

The intention of this comparison is not to put one down while raising the other, it is merely to provide you with the knowledge to make a choice if you are considering either tool. We also hope that this comparison serves to inform the founders of both tools and hopefully the feedback given here will be taken positively and improvements be made to their existing tool.

Quick links

SERanking SEO Audit Report

SEO Tester Online SEO Audit Report

SERanking SEO Audit Report

Now without going-on and on for too long, let's dive into the first SEO audit report by SERanking. We'll start with the cover page:

Seraph Studios - SERanking SEO Audit Report

Summary

SERanking gets started straightaway on the get-go by providing an overview of the number of Important Fixes, Semi-Important Fixes, number of Crawled Pages, and number of Passed Checks. Date of creation of the report is also visible on the front page.

The bottom of the page shows you some ranking information for your domain such as the MOZ DA (Domain Authority), Alexa Ranking, number of Backlinks. There's also information on the number of pages indexed by the top three search engines - Google, Bing and Yahoo!. Finally there's some information on your domain expiration date, Web Archive Age and Server Location.

Also note that the report is white labeled to show the name of your agency/company, making this report branded. This is important for Digital Marketing Agencies as they can offer their clients the reports in their own brand.

Seraph Studios - SERanking SEO Audit Report

Health Check

Moving on we have a website Health Check. The areas checked in this area are as below:

WWW Redirect checks whether your website runs with www or without www in order to avoid duplicate content. There's also some instructions on how you can fix this issue.

URL Rewrite makes sure your website URLs are rewritten to be SEO friendly which is clean and descriptive of the contents on the page.

HTTPS is important for Google rankings now and as such it is important to check if your site Redirects HTTP traffic to HTTPS or not. If you get a green tick then there's nothing more you need to do.

Robots.txt is a file in the root of your website that gives instructions to search engine robots, directing them to index or not index specified pages or preventing certain pages from getting indexed. It also contains links to the XML sitemap file that will help search engine crawlers to discover and index the maximum number of the website's pages.

XML Sitemaps are important for getting your web pages indexed on search engines. It helps search engines crawl your site easily and intelligently. It is highly recommended that you submit your sitemaps to major search engines as soon as possible to quickly get your pages indexed.

Seraph Studios - SERanking SEO Audit Report

Pages Analysis

The next section of the report is on Page Analysis. Every page of your website will be scanned and you will get to know about pages with too long URLs, blocked robots.txt, oversized text size , Noindex meta tags, rel="canonical", rel="alternate", meta refresh redirect etc.

What we like about this report is that it lists out every single page that has an issue. This makes it easy to identify the pages that need fixing.

Seraph Studios - SERanking SEO Audit Report

Next up with have Meta Analysis. Meta tags may not be as important as they used to be but they are still essential and play a role in ranking your web pages high in search engines.

Here you'll get to know whether your titles, descriptions are too long, too short, or whether they're outright missing. Meta titles should be between 10 - 70 characters while Meta Descriptions should be between 50 - 320 characters. Be sure to add in important keywords in both the title and description. You should also avoid using the same title and description for multiple pages or you will get a warning here.

Seraph Studios - SERanking SEO Audit Report

Content Analysis

Moving on we have Content Analysis. Content is King and we should make sure our King has all the important keywords, heading tags and most important of all that it is not duplicate content.

In this section you will see which pages with a low word count of below 250 words, pages without H1 tag, duplicate H1 tag, duplicate H2 tag, empty H2 tag or are any of the H1 and H2 tags too long.

The issues here should be fairly easy to fix without additional instructions.

Seraph Studios - SERanking SEO Audit Report

Link Analysis is up next. Here you will learn of issues about your internal and external links. Some issues such as having more than 100 outgoing links, excessive number of redirects, internal and external links with missing anchor text, number of links with 'nofollow', 'dofollow' and more.

Seraph Studios - SERanking SEO Audit Report
Seraph Studios - SERanking SEO Audit Report

Images Analysis

The next section of the report talks about Image Analysis. Here you can find out which pages have images which are missing ALT Text. Image ALT Text is important to describe the image in no more than 7 words and also raise SEO rankings.

Seraph Studios - SERanking SEO Audit Report

There's a section on Mobile-Friendliness of your website where a list of essential requirements are shown. You can find issues like Minify CSS, Minify Javascript among the essentials for having a mobile-friendly site. The downside, there's no guide or instructions on how do we actually fix these issues.

Seraph Studios - SERanking SEO Audit Report
Seraph Studios - SERanking SEO Audit Report
Seraph Studios - SERanking SEO Audit Report

Usability and Technologies

The last section of the report talks about Usability and Technologies and lists items such as Favicon, Custom 404 Page, W3C Validation, Safe Browsing as well as Website Speed. There are some explanations for each item and links to external resources related to each item, but again there are no instructions on how to say achieve a good website speed or how to add a Favicon.

Next we will take a look at the generated report by SEO Tester Online, another great SEO Tool with an Italian background.

SEO Tester Online SEO Audit Report

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Audit Report

The SEO Audit Report generated by STO at first glance looks more professional with a nicely designed cover page listing the URL of the website the report is for as well as the date of the report. As of this writing there is no Whitelabel option yet, but word is you will be able to customize the generated reports and include your own company name and logo in June 2019. We are certainly looking forward to that feature.

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Audit Report

Summary

We start off with a summary page with an overall SEO score and the types of tests or Exams as is used in this report that are Optimized, To Improve and Check Again. One look and you know how many issues are there which you need to work on. The issues are further broken down into five main areas, namely Base, Structure, Content, Duplicated and Social. This let's you know the major area which your website is lacking in.

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Audit Report

Base

The first area of the report is the Base, and it covers mainly the meta tags, meta descriptions with the addition of Google Snippets thrown in the mix. Clear tips and what you need to do to solve the issue is given in the What to Solve section of the page. This is a plus for the STO report, however the downside is that it doesn't list out the pages which are having said issues.

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Audit Report

The report continues with the other meta tags, on this page it tells you whether your meta title tag is missing and how you can add it, as well as best practices for writing a meta title for your page.

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Audit Report

Next we have more information on whether the meta titles are too long and truncated (>70 characters), are the meta descriptions too long and truncated (>300 characters). It tells us the number of pages with said issues, and would be even better if the pages affected were listed out as well.

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Audit Report

Moving on the report continues with more meta tag checks. On this page it tells you if your meta descriptions are too short (<70 characters) and also checks for the Hreflang tag. Hreflang tag is important for multi-language sites where it serves translated content to targeted users in certain regions, if your site is primarily in English then it would be of little consequence.

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Audit Report

The next meta tag on the report is X-Default, which is used to signal search engines that the specified page doesn't target any specific language or locale and is the default page when no other page is better suited.

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Audit Report

Next up with Canonical, which was also present in the SERanking report above. Now the fact that this attribute is mentioned in both reports means that it is an important attribute you should take note of.

Now what this tag does is to tell search engines that your content is the original and that you'd prefer your page URL to be displayed in search results. Of course this only applies if there are duplicate publications of your content, in which case you would get the ranking, leads and traffic instead of the copycat.

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Audit Report

Structure

We move on to the next section of the report, the Structure section. The first item in this section is Compression, if you have compression enabled on your website you're all good. If you're on WordPress you can turn on compressions using caching plugins such as WP Fastest Cache.

Alternatively, gzip compression can be enabled on your webserver as mentioned in the report under recommendations.

The next item is Robots.txt, which is also present in the SERanking SEO audit report above. A robots.txt file is a text file in the root of your site which instructs search engine crawler bots on what to do when they reach your website. You can instruct them to index the whole site, exclude certain pages, or just index specific pages.

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Audit Report

We move on to the next item in this section - Sitemaps. A sitemap file is a file that lists all the web pages in a structured manner and guides search engine's crawlers to index your site content in a more intelligent way.

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Audit Report

Coming up with have Text/Code Ratio, which is kind of new to us. Basically what it's checking is the amount of text content you have on your page relative to the amount of code.

Seeing that content is King, it is advised that you have more long form content to allow search engines to index your pages as it deems it interesting compared to a page full of just code and little content.

The next item on this page is HTTPS migration. Following the recent Google update, HTTPS has been made an essential requirement to get your site indexed and listed on it's results pages. As Google looks to serve websites that are secure to their users, if you do not have an SSL certificate to secure your site today, you could be losing out on those rankings.

You can easily get free SSL certificates from majority of webhosts today, so this shouldn't be a cause for concern.

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Audit Report

Next we look at Image Optimization, well basically in this report it's checking to see if you have alt tags for all your images. An alt tag is an attribute used to describe the contents of an image, a short description of what your image depicts.

If for any reason your image does not load on your site, the text in your alt attribute will be displayed on the page instead, giving context to your content.

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Audit Report

The following page continues with the at attribute, checking to see if it's too long (>100 characters).

The next item is 404 errors or pages which are not found, possibly cause you deleted them or totally revamped your website.

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Audit Report

Content

Moving on to the next section, the Content section, where the report talks all about your content as did the SERAnking SEO audit report above.

First up is Content Level, which again looks at the length of content of each of your pages. Content below 400 words are considered too short, so you'd be wise to add-on to those pages with short content.

The report also looks at H1 and H2 tags, whether they are too long or oversized (>70 characters), are they missing, and are there multiple H1 tags. Take note that there should ever only be ONE H1 tag on each page. You can have multiple H2 tags, but there can only be one H1 tag.

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Audit Report
Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Audit Report

Duplicated

Next up is the Duplicated section. We start off with Duplicated Pages, which checks to see if you have duplicated content across your site. Unless you're the type who copies and pastes your own content across multiple pages, you should pass this test easily.

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Audit Report

Social

Since it is the Duplicated section of the report, the rest of the items are checking for Duplicated Titles, Meta Descriptions, H1, H2. Again if you write original content for each page, these checks should be a breeze to pass.

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Audit Report

The final section of the report is the most interesting, the Social section. We've all shared links to our blog posts on social media before, now sometimes the preview image pulled into the post is fine, but other times it's just not what we wanted to use for our post. Ever wondered how that works and whether you could control it?

The answer is yes, and you need to ensure your Open Graph protocol is enabled. Open Graph is used on Facebook, and what it does is it makes any web page into a rich object in a social graph. Basically you get to determine what preview image shows up, what text appears, you have full control over your post in other words.

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Audit Report

There are various attributes in the Open Graph and each test will check if you have it all covered. Go back in to fix it if there's something missing.

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Audit Report

Twitter uses it's own protocol called the Twittercard, but it functions the same, allowing you to attach rich photos, videos, and media experiences to Tweets. Now every time you tweet a link back to your blog, the Twitter Card will show a nice preview of your content, driving more engagement and traffic back to your site.

Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Audit Report
Seraph Studios - SEO Tester Online Audit Report

Just as the Open Graph, Twitter Cards have various attributes you need to fill up. So get that done and you'll get a perfect score.

This brings us to the end of this SEO Audit Report comparison. I would say both reports were informative and had it's strengths and weaknesses.

The SERanking SEO Audit Report shined in the area where it specifically lists out each problematic page, making it easy for SEOs to quickly identify which pages they need to work on. However it did not have the level of tips and explanations that the SEO Tester Online SEO Audit Report provided.

On the flip side, the STO report could have done better if it included a list of the problematic pages, in which case it would have made the report perfect to work with. Perhaps in a future version, this could be added.

If you'd like to checkout each of the SEO tools mentioned above then follow the links below:

SERanking

SEO Tester Online PitchGround Offer

Learn more about SEO Copywriting

On a side note, there's a Life Time Deal for SEO Tester Online running on Pitchground at the moment. Grab it if you intend to do SEO on your own, if not you could contact us and we'd be happy to get on a call with you.

Do contact us directly if you have any questions about SEO, we would be happy to help out.

We hope you found this article useful, and we'll see you in the next one.

Web security is often overlooked by small business owners, bloggers and personal website owners. That is, until they find something wrong with their website, such as loading funny text, redirecting to other sites (usually porn sites), or the site just doesn't load anymore.

Sometimes it's more of a prank or just some random hacker trying to prove his skills, other times you could be held ransom to restore your website. When shit hits the fan, usually the website owners will be panicking and at a loss. Shocked and unable to restore their websites to their former glory, they may turn to their IT department, who usually specializes more in hardware than software and are unable to help.

Next they may turn to their web designer, who also usually does not focus much on web security and lack the necessary knowledge and skills to rectify the problem. They may also turn to their web-hosts to restore a previous backup (assuming there was one), this may be fine for brochure sites without frequent updates.

However, if it were an e-commerce site, or an active blog with multiple updates daily, think of the losses this could mean for you as a business or as an individual who may be relying on your website for income.

If all else fails, you may be forced to either pay a web security company to 'clean' and restore your site or if the damage was too significant, you may need to rebuild your website from the ground-up.

The first option could cost you thousands of ringgit, the latter would cost you even more as rebuilding your website from the ground-up means your business is going to have down-time. Add that to the cost of redevelopment and you are left with a huge hole in your bank account.

It is exactly this reason that has led Seraph Studios to be a web security conscious agency. As we have illustrated above, you may have a fantastic website, but if it's security is neglected, it very well could be gone in a flash.

Websites get hacked every day, it's very real, every day, we get numerous attempts by bots which try to log into the Seraph Studios back-end for God knows what reason.

Fortunately we have partnered with Astra Web Security to provide professional grade web security to your websites.

Astra Web Security has an intelligent firewall which makes sure websites are protected 24x7 throughout the year. There's also an on-demand Malware scanner which finds all malicious files in your website and clears them out.

Top Features of Astra Web Security

View a comprehensive list of Astra's features here.

The cost of Web Security

As we h ave an exclusive partnership with Astra, we are able to offer you professional grade website security at a discounted rate. We will take care of your website if anything happens to it, saving you the headache, heartache and possible financial pains as well.

If you currently have your website hosted elsewhere and are ready to make a change, just contact us and we'll do the rest.

If you don't have a website and are in the midst of setting up a new website, then it's best you get it right from the start and get the best in class security for your website.

Remember, it's not a matter of will your website get hacked, it's a matter of when.

Don't wait any longer, get in touch with us today to secure your website!

Seraph Studios is a trusted boutique web design and digital marketing agency based in Penang, Malaysia.
We specialise in building beautiful, functional websites for businesses with elegant design and data-driven search engine optimization (SEO) to significantly drive visibility on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Come with us on a digital marketing journey like you've never had before and achieve business success.
Seraph Studios bw Copyright © 2004 – 2024 All Rights Reserved Seraph Studios (002708832-T)