An end-of-year SEO audit project

So, quite a while ago, years in fact, I had written a custom WordPress theme for Big Black Pencil, a Chicago marketing agency. The theme was based on one I had been using personally for awhile, and I had always had pretty good results in Google. Since then, our blogs have developed in different directions – we write about different things and with different frequency, etc. We also have different strategies for cultivating inbound linking. To make a long story short, the net effect of these things has been some discrepancies between the PRs of the bigblackpencil.com pages and those of ardamis.com.

I’ve been asked to take another look at the structure of the site, which includes a handful of pages that reside outside of WordPress, and make some recommendations for improving the PR in 2009. This should be an interesting project, and it’ll give me a chance to apply some SEO techniques that have gained attention since I last touched the theme.

Big Black Pencil provides marketing solutions for small and medium sized businesses in Chicago, including advertising and competitive marketing intelligence. The principal focus of the company has been on web site development, Internet marketing, e-commerce, and usability consulting. As such, the owner has some expectations for the site and I’ve been tasked to meet them. The site has a page for each of 10 distinct marketing services: Advertising, Naming, Intelligence, Strategy, Design, Websites, Integrated Marketing, Website Usability, Social Media, and Findability. These pages reside outside of WordPress, so they rarely change, and they don’t contain much copy – maybe 100 words total, including link text. But it’s these pages that are supposed to drive the leads, that contain the call to action and the link to the contact page. The blog is supposed to assist these pages, but that doesn’t seem to be happening. The blog pages actually do really well in the SERPs, are quickly indexed, and appear to help external pages to which they link, they just don’t have a satisfying PR.

The project goals are to identify why so many of the pages on the site are registering a toolbar PR of 0, fix any on-page factors that may be contributing to that, make recommendations on the direction of future posts and revisit old posts, shape the passing of PR to the pages where the conversions take place, and finally, push up the PR of the site’s index page to a 3 or 4.