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Call us Today
(888) 846-4937
Email us Today
info@destinymarketingsolutions.com
Written by: Leonard Parker | Climate Tech | April 15, 2024
Today’s markets are seeing a steady shift toward ethical consumerism, with people actively looking for greener businesses. For sustainability companies, merely having an established brand and a decent ad budget isn't enough anymore—your brand needs to appear organically in searches to establish itself as an industry leader. For that, you must understand your climate tech brand’s SEO standing so you can devise the right optimization strategy and stay ahead of your competitors. This is where an SEO audit comes in.
In this guide, we’ll aim to decode the components of an SEO audit for climate tech brands so you can devise a strategy to increase your organic ranking accordingly.
Your website’s health is crucial for search engine visibility and user retention alike, and the process of improving it falls under technical SEO.
Slow, unresponsive websites can increase abandonment rates and deter users from revisiting. Technical errors also obstruct Google and other search engine crawlers from finding, understanding, and storing your content, leading to lower ranks. In the worst-case scenario, you may also get Google penalties.
Let’s review the main angles through which an audit assesses your technical SEO and site health:
As per Google, as loading times go from one to six seconds, the probability of users abandoning your page increases by a whopping 106%. This can even negate all your digital marketing and pay-per-click efforts—prospects may click your ads but switch tabs if the website takes forever to load.
Websites with large loading times also rank lower, making site speed one of the core aspects of technical SEO. An audit will reveal your site speed data and break it down to identify the causes of slow site speed. Some of these may include:
Your website must be encrypted through an HTTPS protocol to protect sensitive customer and business information. This is essential for user trust. A confirmed ranking factor is also essential, as sites with HTTP protocols rank lower than HTTPS sites.
An in-depth SEO audit will reveal all HTTPS and security errors that are preventing your website from ranking well. Some of these include:
Search engines have “spiders” crawling throughout the web space to discover, index, store, and rank content. Links pointing to and from pages act as bridges that guide crawlers from one page to another, so a good linking structure and strategy is crucial.
However, certain web pages can have issues that prevent these crawlers from discovering them.
For example, developers often add a no-index tag to web pages during the creation phase to tell bots not to include the page in search engine results. If the tag isn’t removed after the site is complete, users will not discover that page organically.
An SEO audit will reveal all such issues that are causing crawling and indexing problems and affecting your search engine rankings. These may include:
Did you know that more than one-fifth of the top million websites aren’t optimized for phones? The reason behind the disparity is often simple: Developers code websites on desktops, and business owners and teams often operate on said website through PCs, often leaving mobile performance and issues overlooked.
More than 90% of users browse the internet using their mobile phones, making it incredibly crucial for you to make sure your climate tech brand’s website is functionally and visually optimized for phones. Remember that mobile responsiveness is also a key factor that search engine algorithms use to rank your content.
An SEO audit reveals all the flaws in a website’s mobile performance, from layout errors to speed statistics, enabling you to rectify mistakes that are preventing your website from ranking well.
As time progresses and environmental challenges exacerbate, people are increasingly choosing to support companies with values, ethics, and sustainable solutions. Relevant, in-depth, valuable content is key to establishing your business as a subject authority and showcasing your commitment and credibility.
An SEO audit analyzes if content is valuable to users and easily discoverable by search engines, pinpointing areas for improvement. The main components it will assess include:
The climate tech industry has audiences ranging from homeowners to multinational corporations, and you must ensure your effort is focused on creating content for all your audience’s demographics. An audit will thoroughly analyze your topic selection and the readability and complexity of content to ensure you are answering your particular audience’s queries and ranking for the right keywords.
The right formatting, titles, use of meta and title tags, and incorporation of target keywords in these tags ensures the content is easy for users to read and search engines to find.
Plagiarism makes search engine results page (SERP) ranks drop.
An audit also identifies whether you have enough original long-form content to rank well and details how existing content can be improved further. It then evaluates the credibility of your content.
Optimization often boils down to a solid keyword strategy, making its analysis a core component of an SEO audit. We assess this strategy for our climate tech businesses through multiple angles:
An audit reveals which keywords your website currently ranks or almost ranks for. This will let you know what segments you already cater to and where your content marketing is lacking. Digging a little deeper, an audit will show you what keywords are bringing traffic that’s converting people to customers.
You may currently be creating content for shorter, generic keywords that have high competition and keyword difficulty scores, preventing you from ranking high. An audit will identify such strategy errors, and the right SEO team will identify long-tail keywords with low competition that are more relevant to your business and target audience.
Some keywords may also trend seasonally, and generic digital marketing firms may not be able to anticipate and cater to such trends. This is a core reason why you must partner up with a specialized climate tech content marketing agency that has firsthand industry insights and successful case studies of having helped similar sustainability businesses.
Climate tech businesses often have values higher than merely attracting consumers. They have to attract thought leaders, innovators, and community support. So, their content and keyword strategy should be optimized for different audience segments, containing differently written posts for scientific and tech concepts for experts and more simplified versions for the general citizen.
Auditors also take ease of reading and niche-specific depth into account, later guiding you on how to choose keywords to strike a balance between general consumer-related terms and industry-specific jargon. This ensures your brand is not only discoverable by a broader audience but also resonates with those deeply engaged in the field.
When other websites link to your domain, it signifies your website’s credibility to search engines. However, not all backlinks are created equal, and an SEO audit for your green business can reveal where your website lies in terms of backlink strength.
Relevance, distance, and prominence of the linking domains are what matter to search engines.
Good backlinks must come from topically relevant domains. For example, if you have a renewable-energy-based business, backlinks from a website in the sustainability ecosystem will help you more than, say, a link from a shoe blog. Backlinks pointing to your site must also majorly be from geographically relevant areas, especially if you only operate locally.
Similarly, the domains linking to you must have low spam toxicity scores, high domain authority, and good backlink profiles (usually measured by Moz DA and Ahrefs DR scores). Toxic and spammy links can decrease your rank and lead to penalties.
An audit uses tools like SEMRush to break down your backlink into a report like this one, telling you where to focus your efforts and where you lie in comparison with your competitors.
Your website may have the perfect load speed and a lot of decent content, but if it’s not catering to user queries and intentions, your SEO and marketing efforts can go to waste.
Not only are UX metrics essential for tracking user satisfaction, but they are critical for good rankings, too. If users find your site through a SERP, like a Google search, and bounce back fast, it indicates to the said search engine that your content must not be valuable, decreasing your rank for the said keyword.
An SEO audit can also reveal how users interact with your website, giving you insight into whether you’re engaging them sufficiently or not. Key areas and metrics it’ll consider include:
If your business only caters to people in your state or a few cities, your current SEO stats can be misleading. Your visitors may be from areas in which you have no business interest. You may be ranking for keywords that are more popular in other areas, resulting in unqualified traffic that won’t convert.
Your priority must be connecting with your target audience demographic so you can increase your brand awareness among your top-of-the-funnel audience to generate leads and attract customers eventually.
Local SEO ensures your business appears for regional and local searches. For instance, when people enter queries like “waste management companies near me” or “solar panels in Austin,” Google should automatically fetch your website and display it on that search page.
For local SEO, auditors will assess components like:
A solid SEO strategy can’t be developed in a vacuum—it must take into account competitor analysis, strengths, and weaknesses and leverage them. This is why audits often assess competitor ranking and strategies as well, developing benchmarks for performance and gauging the general market environment.
This usually includes:
Leveraged correctly, an SEO audit can lay out a roadmap to show how climate tech companies can enhance their digital presence. Analyzing content from the lens of search engine algorithms and user expectations can help you boost your brand awareness and generate qualified leads and traffic.
However, we understand business owners and teams know their own niches best. Why not outsource the peripheral operations? Let us give you an in-depth SEO audit report and develop your content marketing strategy.
Elevate your climate tech brand with a comprehensive SEO audit from Destiny Marketing Solutions. Discover how to enhance your digital footprint and propel your mission forward. Contact us today to begin your journey toward SEO excellence.
Generally, a technical SEO audit includes the following:
In essence, the key pillars of technical SEO boil down to a website’s:
The length of an SEO audit depends majorly on the complexity and current state of your website. For smaller, newer websites, it can take up to two weeks and can range up to six weeks for medium and large ones.
In general, an SEO audit report includes the following sections:
The frequency of audits usually depends on a website’s complexity, SEO efforts, and the competitiveness of the markets. If your website is new and small, you may only need an audit once every six months. For larger, more complex, dynamic websites, auditing every two to three months is recommended.
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