Diagnostic SEO is problem solving, typically engaged by a business that already has an SEO strategy and encounters a problem such as a penalty or crawling issue.

ciml Training provides diagnostic SEO services at competitive hourly rates and offers packages for bite-size chunks of time, suitable for diagnosing immediate issues or a longer term malaise.

A quick diagnositc check takes one or two billable hours. You state your problem and then the Diagnostic SEO team will check your site and report any findings. This is suitable only for simple, technical SEO issues. If the problem is complex or unusual, then the diagnositc quick check is unlikely to identify the cause or propose solutions.

A diagnostic review takes three or more hours of time for investigation and to report findings. Where there are complex or long-term problems the diagnostic process may continue for longer, with multiple efforts being made to get the Web site back in favour.

Diagnostic SEO Packages

Diagnosic Quick Check

• One hour investigation
• Thirty minute telephone call to discuss findings
• Email summary of findings and/or areas to investigate further

In the Diagnostic Quick Check, you state your problem and then the Diagnostic SEO team will conduct a brief, one hour investigation into your problem. This is suitable only for simple, technical SEO issues. If the problem is complex or unusual, then the diagnositc quick check is unlikely to identify the cause or propose solutions.

Scope of Issue Consult

• One hour telephone call

This is a one hour conference call to discuss possible issues and identify areas to investigate and/or work on. This package is suitable where the client has several ideas about an issue and seeks help with deciding on the focus of investigation or actions.

Diagnostic Review

• One hour investigation
• Thirty minute telephone call to discuss problems
• Four hours further investigation
• One hour telephone call to discuss findings
• Email summary of findings and/or areas to investigate further

The diagnostic review provides a quick site check followed by call to discuss the current problems. Then, a longer and more specific investigation is conducted, followed by a longer call and brief email report. If the problem is highly complex or very unusual, the diagnostic review may result in multiple possible findings rather than a single solution.

Diagnostic SEO Areas

Keyword Competition Research

• Link power
• Topic
• Geolocation
• Personalisation
• Trust metrics
• Brand and engagement

There can only be one top result for a keyword and generally only ten on the first page of results, so any apparent SEO problem must be assessed in the context of the competition for that keyword. ciml Training reviews competitor sites and deploys proprietory competiton link research tools.

Geolocation Issues

• Server IP address
• Domain name
• Google Webmaster Tools settings
• Server headers
• META tags

Other Domain and Hosting Issues

• Server speed
• Server reliability
• IDN, International domain names

Language Issues

• Content language
• Server headers
• META tags

Other Multiple Domain Issues

• Duplicate content
• Inappropriate canonicalisation
• rel=canonical

Site Structure and Robot Accessibility

• Site crawlability
• URLs ("?", "&", "id=")
• XML sitemap
• Redirects
• rel=canonical
• /robots.txt
• Robots META tag
• Webmaster tools removal
• Webmaster tools crawl information

On-Page Problems

• HTML Errors
• Flash
• JavaScript
• AJAX
• HTML5

Problem Content

• Lack of grammar (accoding to the language of the page)
• Duplicate content
• Bad words
• Affiliate or advertising content

Problem Links

• Lack of diversity (IP addresses, domain owner, etc.)
• Problem content on the linking pages
• Lack of content on the linking pages
• Links from 'thin' affiliate pages
• Links from known link sellers
• Similar Anchor Text
• Heavy Cross Linking
• Bad Neighbourhoods
• Links from 'thin affiliate' pages
• rel=canonical, rel=nofollow, meta robots and /robots.txt

Other Penalties

• Cloaking
• Hidden Text
  As search engines focus more on links and content quality, these older search engine penalties are less common.

Google Panda Update

• Thin affiliate pages
• Shallow content
• Duplicate content

Engagement

• Click through rate
• Bounce rate
• Bounce and re-click rate
• Time on site
• Re visits
• Social media, Facebook and Twitter mentions
• Google +1

Engagement signals are likely to become a bigger factor in search engine results. The lack of these signals may be hard to distinguish from another problem or penalty.