SEO & WEBSITE RESEARCH

Research Approach

Every client is different and as a result, every research project we undertake is different too. We keep our research scope flexible in nature so that we can explore the aspects of your website and SEO that matter most given your situation. This also allows us to adjust our research projects to fit your budget and schedule.

Throughout our research, we collaborate with you and your team. We always schedule in multiple check points to review and discuss our findings. We'll work with you to figure out the next steps within the research project based on those findings. In addition, don't be surprised if we give you assignments during the research project to collect data on your end as well.

Our research projects can be conducted as a one-time project, on a retainer basis, or as part of our ongoing consultation services. We can also adjust our final research presentation to be more formal or informal, depending on the nature of why you need this research conducted.

SEO Penalty, Manual Action & Traffic Loss Research

Why isn't your website getting as much traffic or ranking as highly as it should? Is it due to a technical snag that prevents Google from crawling your site? An issue with schema, mobile friendliness, speed, or other tech factors? A mismatch in content to potential keywords? A competitive disadvantage? Spammy backlinks? A change in your site's authority?

Of course, sometimes it isn't a question of why you aren't ranking, but why we aren't ranking any longer. If you recently experienced a sudden decrease in traffic or rankings, we can help you explore this as well to identify the issue and help you plan out your recovery from a manual action, algorithmic penalty, or algorithm update.

As we conduct our research, we’ll go through all of our data and findings with you to answer your questions. From this, we'll put together an action plan of things that need to be addressed. We can also help you figure out who needs to address these action items. Some of these items Elementive can address directly, but we also rely on a network of subcontractors who specialize in various aspects of website development, design, and marketing who can help given your specific needs.

Pre-Redesign/Redevelopment Research

Thinking about a redesign or redevelopment? Great! Have you thought about how to manage the risks to traffic and rankings that come with a redesign or redevelopment? Far too often, we see clients lose significant amounts of traffic or rankings as a result of a flawed redesign. We want to help you avoid that.

In our pre-redesign/pre-redevelopment research projects, we help you evaluate your current website's performance. This offers a comprehensive review of everything happening with the design, technical structure, content architecture, conversion pathways, and SEO performance on your current website. An in-depth review of these areas will help us understand the content and information being highly sought out by website visitors, how visitors are current finding the information, what barriers they may run into in navigating the website, and more.

At the end of this research project, you'll understand what problems exist that should be addressed and what opportunities exist to improve your website's performance in the redesign. You'll also know what areas to leave unchanged, or to change minimally, in the redevelopment of your website to reduce any negative effects that can come from such a major overhaul.

From this research, we can help you write an RFP to find designers and developers if you don't already have designers or developers to assist in your project. If you already have designers and developers to work with, we can help you share our key findings with them before they begin their work.

Web Accessibility Audit

Accessibility refers to the practice of making a website work for everybody, including making websites work for people with disabilities. Making your website accessible can also indirectly help your SEO performance. Despite the benefits, the process of making your website accessible is involved and isn’t as simple as adding a plugin to WordPress or clearing an automated accessibility scanner.

To begin making your website accessible, we'll conduct a manual audit of your website to find what areas of your website don't currently conform with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Level AA criteria. As needed, we’ll recommend where you may want to comply with the stricter Level AAA given the nature of your content and your business.

Accessibility, though, isn’t just about a checklist and, because of that, we also review your website to make sure it complies with the basic WCAG principles of perceivability, operability, understandability, and providing robust support for future technologies.

Following our audit, we'll provide detailed recommendations on what actions you need to take to make your website accessible and keep your website accessible moving forward. We will work with your team, including your designers and developers, as they implement those changes to ensure the changes conform with the specific guidelines and to ensure your team understands the reasons why those changes are needed.