SEO Audit with SEO Dashboard (1500 words)

STRATEGIC MARKETING & DIGITAL MEDIA

Individual SEO Audit Report

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Table of Contents 2 1.0 Initial Impressions [ALTERED] 3 2.0 SEO Dashboard 4 3.0 Findings and Recommendations [ALTERED] 5 3.1 SEO Site Evaluation 5 3.2 General Site Evaluation 6 3.3 Links – Internal, Inbound, Outbound 7 3.4 Metatags 8 3.5 Content 9 3.6 Visual Extras 9 3.7 Domains, URLs, Web Mastery 10 4.0 Conclusion [ALTERED] 11 Reference 12

As our Eat in Paris has not yet established an official website, we will learn from the experience got from conducting SEO Analysis on EatWith's official website which is the largest competitor website of our project.

EatWith was built by Guy Michlin and Shemer Schwarzwants in 2012 in USA. Its aim is to build a connection between hosts and guests to let them experience the locals together. With EatWith, hosts are not only share their living rooms and cooking skills to guests but also create a unique environment to have the social experience. Today, the company has built its business in over 50 countries not only in Paris (Barcelona Home Guide, 2019). Our project is also about the local food and the aim is to let guests experience the local food in Paris that we only focus on the Paris in France.

As an Internet user, once I opened the website, EatWith successfully caught my eyes. The pages are very colourful and informative. The page divides all content into several sections such as Explore Eatwith and Discover delicious food experiences with hand-selected hosts. These pages are very colourful and informative. The page divides everything into sections, each of which matches words and photos. These photos are very beautiful, very attractive and make people feel very esthetical and refreshing. The webpage also links to its pages on the Instagram and blog, and displays some content in both words and photos. It let the visitors know how to communicate with the company through the social medias. By visiting the accounts of these social platforms, the content of each update of EatWith will be seen by them. This is a very good way of publicity without waiting for the visitor to open the official website. Most people today have social media accounts and browse often. At the bottom of the page, EatWith showcases the praises of many well-known organizations around the world included VOGUE, Forbes, Lonely Planet and TRAVEL WEEKLY. The good views from these famous organization which makes people feel very persuasive and can lift EatWith's status.

Although our opponent EatWith is very powerful, it does not mean that it is perfect. There are still many shortcomings or areas for improvement in its official website. For example, the dynamic background behind the title is a bit dizzy. The entire page was filled with text and pictures, which seemed overcrowded. The two points mentioned above confuse viewers. They let viewers cannot concentrate, and do not know which section to click on firstly. Another weakness of the webpage is the page load time. It needs the viewers spend more times to waiting for the loading of the page and it let the viewers have an unsatisfied experience of using.

In general, the evaluation is based on a series of real data analysis, some are positive, some are negative. But these findings also have their own limitations. In the process of data analysis, there may be some deviations, which will lead to biased and inaccurate results. The purpose of analyzing this competitor is to know oneself and know the other, win the battle in the future in Paris.

The result to analyze the site evaluation is totally 24 percentage. This result is relatively terrible which means that the website has a lot of space to change and improve in many aspects. General site evaluation reaches the highest percentage of 72. It is followed by contents (70%) and domains, URLs, web mastery (32%). The result of links, metatags and visual extras all are 0%. This shows there is a huge unbalance among the 6 element and it has many shortages. It is recommended to make some changes and improvement in maintain and develop the website.

The result of general site evaluation is good. EatWith has an excellent performance in in this area regarding keywords. The top keyword is ‘experiences’ which is followed by ‘eatwith’. The key word density is very high that the average density of the top 5 suggested keywords reaches 1.96%. The anchor text is also very keyword rich that the average density of the top 5 suggested keywords in links reaches 2.08%. key words in alt tag are 9 out of 70 that its performance is perfect. The keywords include stemming such as ‘locals’ and ‘local’. The keywords also include synonyms such as ‘tours’, ‘travel’, ‘eatwith’ and ‘dining’. There are no mistypes in the keywords that it is not diluted. All of the above are EatWith’s perfect performance. However, the result of general site evaluation could be better. According to the result got by the different weightings of different items, the website needs to focus on making some improvements on the keywords follow the size of space to improve in the several items in Table 1.

Table 1: The improvement for keywords to follow the size of space to improve

The following areas can be improved:

1. The page title of the www.eatwith.com is Food Experiences With Locals Around The World | Eatwith | Eatwith. The webpage is lack of keywords that there are only 2 key words in the page title. The webpage can use more keywords in the title such as “visitor”, “traditional”, “lifestyle” and “cuisine”. For example, the keyword-rich title could be ‘Most traditional cuisine for visitors to experience local food’.

2. The average of keywords density in headings should between 2% and 5%. However, EatWith reached 5.65%. This result is caused by excessive use of the keyword “experiences”. For a better SEO result, the headings should use more other keywords instead of the “experiences”. For example, the heading title “Book unforgettable culinary experiences” can be changed to “Book unforgettable local cuisine”.

3. it is very poor in key phrases and secondary keywords. The average density of top 5 suggested (2+3) is only 2.61. It is so low. It is better to use much more 2-word phrases and 3-word phrases such as “food experiences”, “cooking classes”, “eating local food”, “experience with locals”, and “cuisine to visitors”.

4. The number of locational keywords is only 12.82% of the total numbers of keywords. In both of these 2 fields, the space to improve with EatWith is very large. For example, keywords such as ‘food tours’ and ‘experiences with locals’ should be often used within the content of the site especially at the headings and links. The keywords of locations should be used much more such as “Paris”, “Dublin”, “Ireland” and “Italy”.

5. Increasing keywords usage in title and metatags can improve the keywords positioning and keywords proximity, especially the top five keywords: “experiences”, “eatwith”, “classes”, “cooking” and “food” (See picture 1).

5 most important keywords for Eatwith.com

It is poor that the average result received by links is 0%. Links are very important that the search engines explore and follow them. The links will be used by the search engines to rank the website. Links were found to affect search ranking more than other factors. Backlinks are one of the top 3 ranking signals of Google. It is found that Google looks at the links to the page, not just the content of the page (Virteom, 2019). The links whether it is internal, inbound or outbound, EatWith needs to take a lot of effort to select and build.

The following areas can be improved:

1. The internal links should use more keyword phrases. For example, it is better to use “experience with us” than “view more”.

2. The website also should add some inbound links from other sites such as the local restaurants, events, catering organizations and food review website.

3. Lack of link to the official websites of authoritative organizations. Normally, their addresses end with .edu and .gov. For example, the website can link the official websites of some local universities and tourism departments of the government.

4. It is better for the website to delete the outbound links that people cannot see which may have a negative effect on SEO and regularly check their nature.

Metatags are part of the HTML tags that introduce the page content to search engines and website visitors. Metatags can affect how users see the site in search results and if they actually click into the site (Mueller, 2017). We cannot find any words in the title, description or keywords while analyzing the metatags of EatWith. It is really a SEO unfriendly URL in this area. It is necessary for the organization to write a good Meta description tag, Meta title tag and Meta keywords tag. The best length of characters is within 200 words for the description tag which is considered as a search engine friendly description. The search engines might pull Meta description text from the content based on users’ query.

1. It is recommended to add description of metatags and it is better to use content around 120 characters which is effective. The description of EatWith can be “Eatwith is the biggest information share platform in the world for visitors from different places to experience local food.” (123 characters).

2. It is recommended to add keywords of metatags and it is better to not over 25 characters such as “eating with locals” (18 characters).

3. A language metatag must be used that EatWith is a global organization whose business in the whole world. The visitors from different countries speak different languages.

In order for search engines (they will give higher ranking rewards over time) as well as potential guests and repeat guests, you need to provide value beyond the scope of search engine optimization. Websites that promote "thin" low-value content face the risk of being punished by Google; their bounce rate and conversion rate are often high. The main focus should be on attractive, content-rich product pages optimized for search and conversion (Gabbert, 2019).

The result of content is 70.11%. This is a good grade that EatWith has the unique content. According to the analysis through Seomator, the unique of its content is 100%. The age of the site is more than 18 years. The content is separated and there is no invisible text and cloaking. The content is renewed monthly. It is better to improve the frequency into weekly renew. Even, the page content can be updated as often as once a day. This will be possible to attract much more visitors.

The following areas can be improved:

1. The page load time is not fast enough that it is 3.37 seconds within the 5 seconds. They should choose smaller files to reduce the loading time of the web page and enhance the experience of visitors.

2. In Coding and design, the improvement can be taken to narrow the page site of the website. Also, there are some doorway pages which cannot lead visitors back to the front pages. The visitors have a bad experience to click the back button to return.

Search engines cannot directly index images, sounds, Flash movies, JavaScript, and more. Instead, they rely on meaningful textual descriptions provided and can index these files based on this textual description. The result of technical aspects is 88% and it has some podcasts and videos. Also, the EatWith’s website includes frames, flash and a flash home page. There are a few images instead of text links. However, from a designer's point of view, they are valuable, but search engines don't like them. Because for search engines, every piece of information buried in images, flash and videos is lost. It is also difficult for a search engine to index a frame page because the URL of the page is the same no matter which single frame is opened.

The following areas can be improved:

1. EatWith should delete all the frames and flash on the home page which have the negative impact on the performance in SEO.

2. Eatworth should enrich the visual elements of web pages, add interesting and lively colors, so that the text is no longer monotonous, crowded and boring.

The following areas can be improved:

1. Adding more keyword in URLs and filenames such as “locals”, “eat with locals”, “local food experience”, and “eat in Paris”.

2. It is necessary for EatWith to build a complete and up-to-date site map.

3. Stronger site accessibility and theme.

4. Get more top-level domains by using more different domains such as com, ie, net, cn, jp and fr.

5. Increase the use of hyphens in filenames instead of “=” and “#”.

6. The EatWith’s site has session IDs which is even worse than dynamic URLs. These cannot be information indexed by spiders. And, its site also has some redirects that can cause lots of damage such as the target page may not open. It is necessary for EatWith to reduce the presence of redirects and links included session IDs.

In conclusion, the overall score of EatWith’s website is not enough good. There are many areas need to make improvement if it wants to attract much more visitors in the future. For example, the pages should load faster, title tag should start with a keyword, and description label requires exact keyword, and so on. This also provides our team with valuable experience in the production of web pages in the future. This will allow us to learn from EatWith's strengths and avoid weaknesses, and to better complete our web design. The SEO analysis of EatWith makes our group and each member clear about the upcoming tasks of the second stage. Obviously, this analysis is very valuable.