Calibre9 Processes

Summary

The document contains documentation, guides, examples and points of contact for all currently used tools at Calibre9.

Drive

We use Google Drive as the focal point for housing all of the client work and internal documentation. All client work is housed under the Client Projects Shared Drive and is sorted alphabetically. Any documentation and resources that are used company wide including this document are housed in the Shared Resources Shared Drive.

There should already be a folder with the correct year in your client project.

If there is not please download the folder of the correct year and upload it to your client project.

contains more detail and video documentation.

Email

Booking Rooms

1Password

Slack

Asana

Tracking Setup

The purpose of this task is to set up user tracking of a client’s website and SEO performance. This should be done as early as possible during a campaign, so that we can demonstrate SEO gains and improvements from our process to the client. We usually set up:

Keyword Research

Lewis Pola

Grant Ferguson

Lachlan Cowie (Tool)

Tech Audit

The purpose of the Tech Audit is to discover any technical issues with the client’s website that may affect their SEO performance. The audit covers a range of on-page, off-page and technical factors.

Whilst investigating the site, you are likely to discover other non-SEO issues. We are not the client’s web developer and should always prioritise SEO performance and results over other issues.

Template:Please make a copy from the Tech Section from the Template Gallery.

Also see the Screaming Frog Guide.

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Lachlan Cowie

Chris Pride

Jai Tagle

Market Analysis

The Market Analysis is one of three key research pieces that we use to inform strategy early in a campaign. It serves to benchmark our clients' site against competitors (the market) on a range of simple metrics like share of voice, organic traffic, referring domain count and ranking distribution.

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Carl Forrester

Keyword Cannibalisation Audit

The purpose of this process is to discover keyword cannibalisation. Keyword cannibalisation occurs because two pages are too close in both topic and intent. Google (and other search engines) will not be sure which page to serve to users with that intent, and will alternate serving both pages based on arbitrary factors (Location, time of day, day of the week etc.). This causes the two pages to “cannibalise” ranking authority and user data from each other. Both pages will rank worse than a single page would have.

This process attempts to discover cannibalisation by looking at which pages are competing for the same keywords. Cannibalising pages should have their content altered to address a different topic or search intent. If this is not possible, the lower-performing page should be removed and redirected or canonicalised (based on context).

Carl Forrester

Chris Pride (Tool)

UX Audit

User experience (UX) is incredibly important for SEO – Google places a high importance on user data and behaviour whenever they have enough data. Because of this, UX audits will be most effective for sites that have already reached high positions on some of their keywords. For sites and pages that do not yet have much traffic, tech fixes, backlinks, and adjustments to category/service page targeting will be much more effective. On the other hand, if the pages are already ranking quite well, then positive user data and behaviour is what will give them their final push into the top position.

When doing UX work, consider that the examples of completed work are quite time-consuming to produce. They will be most effective for larger high-spend clients where our contact needs to present the suggestions to their leadership and web development team. For lower spend owner/operator clients, consider just showing them the data in Clarity and providing recommendations.

UX Audits usually use data and insights from Microsoft Clarity.

(Slides from Jai’s UX presentation)

Jai Tagle

Lachlan Cowie

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Carl Forrester

Content Performance Review

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Carl Forrester

Competitor Analysis

Carl Forrester

Internal Linking Audit

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Carl Forrester

Seasonal SEO

Seasonal SEO is not so much a process as a strategy. It is attempting to make a particular product, category or service perform well at a specific time of year.

Successful seasonal SEO utilises most of the exact same tools and processes as regular SEO, but requires careful foresight and planning. Seasonal SEO work often needs to be planned almost six months ahead of time. The effort will pay off – Clients will appreciate you taking the needs of their business into consideration and working collaboratively with their other seasonal marketing efforts.

Lachlan Cowie

Tech Fixes

The purpose of tech fixes is to address any issues discovered during the tech audit that are impacting SEO performance.

WordPress Fixes:

Shopify Fixes:

Lachlan Cowie

Chris Pride

Aldhi Noerman

Chilmi Furoidah

On-Page (Metadata) Fixes

Metadata has a large impact on how our clients’ pages are listed on search engine results pages (SERPs). It is also one of the most common things to be missed/neglected by clients who have not worked with an SEO agency before.

Whilst metadata mostly affects the appearance and click-through-rate of our SERP listings, the page title is also used by Google’s ranking algorithm to understand the main topic and purpose of a page.

Keep in mind when communicating with clients that pages often don’t appear in SERPs exactly as their metadata is written. Nearly two-thirds of pages have their metadata altered by Google (although frequently it’s a small change like truncating the site title). It is still very important to make sure that every landing page has accurate and high-quality metadata or they will struggle to compete with more enticing pages.

(For finding target pages and keywords)

(Homepage)

(Bulk)

(Bulk)

Sangeeta Ayyalasomayajula

Dom Macinnes

Chris Pride

Merrick Allen (Sheet/template)

LSI

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Sangeeta Ayyalasomayajula

Dom Macinnes

Merrick Allen (Sheet/template)

Backlinks

The core of Google’s ranking algorithm is still PageRank – the system that measures how many other websites reference yours. In the modern era, there are a wide range of other ranking factors, but it will still be very difficult to outrank other similar sites/pages with no backlink profile. We have our own trusted network of internal and external backlink providers.

Backlinks are most important and effective for smaller clients and local businesses (like trades and hospitality) because the relative impact of the link will be much higher. For an international e-commerce business, they would likely already have so many backlinks that our own link building would contribute very little (content/UX work will be more effective).

Spammy backlink building is one of the only ways to have your site manually penalised by Google. As a result, we always carefully build natural-appearing profiles over time, starting with business directories and local listings (buffer links) before carefully adding some high-authority links that use target keywords as anchors.

Josh Thompson

Website Migration

Clients will often find that they need to migrate their website to a different domain, design or site structure. This is usually done for branding or user experience reasons, but can also be the result of a merger or acquisition. In these cases, we should perform a website migration.

Migrations usually involve a large amount of redirect mapping – diverting the old URLs to the closest match on the new site to ensure that we don’t lose historical user data or topical authority during the transition. It can also involve consulting or strategy around the restructuring of the client’s content to better meet user demand/intent. To properly do a site migration, it is imperative that we are notified ahead of time, so that we can store a crawl of the old website to assist with mapping.

Chris Pride

Lachlan Cowie

Authoritative Content Strategy (ACS)

An ACS is the process of coordinating multiple pieces of content into a topical cluster that aims to demonstrate authority, experience, trustworthiness and expertise for a particular topic. A cluster constructed in this way can boost the performance of an entire domain, even if the individual pages do not receive much traffic.

Authoritative Content Strategies are usually built around a large pillar page that broadly addresses the topic as a whole, and a series of branching sub-topic pages that answer specific intents/questions/needs around that topic. The pages are then carefully interlinked with each other and the rest of the site to boost the topical authority of the domain as a whole.

(Old)

(Old)

Sangeeta Ayyalasomayajula

Dom Macinnes

Merrick Allen

Content Writing

You cannot rank for any topic or intent that you do not have a page for. Whilst this may seem obvious, it means that careful examination of user search intent combined with content creation is one of the most effective SEO tactics. Content is more time-consuming to create and implement than many of the other processes that we perform, so the strategy and budget of the client should be considered carefully.

It is also worth knowing (particularly for blog content) that the keywords and internal linking on a page can contribute to the domain’s overall topical authority (and boost the ranking of target pages) even if the page itself is not receiving a high amount of traffic/engagement.

Sangeeta Ayyalasomayajula

Dom Macinnes

Client Calls

Organisation, preparation

Different kinds of calls and the objectives of each

Building rapport - when and how to build trust

Lewis Pola

Grant Ferguson

Client Reporting

Setting up AA (will also be in tools guide)

How we analyse reports before sending

Lewis Pola

Grant Ferguson

Client Retention

How to avoid cancellation

Signs of clients being at risk

Lewis Pola

Grant Ferguson

Merchant Audit

This is an audit of the client’s entire Product Catalog and Google Merchant Center configuration. It covers their data feeds, product diagnostics, product schemas, ads integration, managed programs, shipping and returns information and more.

This audit is the primary research piece for Google Shopping Campaigns, and informs all of the work that we do during the campaign.

Jai Tagle

Account Fixes

This process involves resolving account and/or feed issues preventing all products from being actively displayed or causing account suspension in Merchant Center. It also addresses product listing issues that can be directly/manually actioned via Merchant Center (not including issues that can be resolved in bulk via Mapping tasks).

Jai Tagle

Product Mapping

The purpose of this process is to improve the performance of the client’s products in both Google Shopping and on AI platforms by providing additional structured data. Our product information mapping tool sorts products into the correct taxonomy. It also provides additional relevant attributes for the product such as colour, pattern, size, materials, washing instructions, whether it’s safe for vegetarians etc. Providing this additional information allows the products to appear for a much wider range of much more specific search terms.

We usually add this additional structured data to the product schema on the page itself, and we also provide it to Google directly using Google Merchant Center.

Merrick Allen

Jai Tagle