SOCIAL SENTIMENT AND CRYPTOCURRENCY: A LOVE/HATE RELATIONSHIP

mintdice.com

From a bird’s eye view, cryptocurrency market commentary hubs like Twitter seem like squabble boxes of shilling, whirly-dirly technical analysis charts, and the occasional well-founded prediction. 

Speculators are seemingly everywhere, and rapid account growth is rewarded to those able to correctly call some of cryptocurrency’s volatile movements. 

Social sentiment analysis is a valuable tool to add to your understanding of cryptocurrency, however, it’s worth exploring the unique slice of history cryptocurrency has offered us in studying how people’s thoughts (and commentaries) affect market movements. 

DOES SENTIMENT ANALYSIS YIELD DIVIDENDS?

One of the first things many savvy traders ended up doing is trying to build actionable correlations between social sentiment and certain digital assets. 

For example, if an algorithm can predict that when tweets about keyword “TRON” hit a certain volume and display a generally positive sentiment, the price of TRON will increase, it would allow those traders to reap some serious profits. 

There are even plenty of 3rd party Google Sheets plug-ins and add-ons that help users calculate their own correlation between social sentiment, social mentions, and the prices of particular digital assets. 

So, can you use social sentiment analysis to make better trades? Humphrey B. Neill, the author of The Art of Contrary Thinking, spent much of his professional life studying group thinking. ”A ‘crowd’ thinks with its heart,” Neill writes. “While an individual thinks with his brain.”

However, it’s worth thinking of the subject from a different angle. The vast majority of professional traders, some of the biggest market movers, aren’t only aware of sentiment analysis and technical analysis, they’re capable of using them to lure retail investors into traps. There was a time where cryptocurrency markets were almost predictable for retail investors with a pulse on movements, but with the injection of large amounts of capital and more experienced traders, rogue price swings based on sentiments and rumors became much harder to predict.  

A 2018 study by social listening platform Pulsar decided to find out whether people are actually talking about cryptocurrency, paving the foundation to explore whether predictive algorithms that study sentiment analysis could actually lead to consistent profits. Some of the key takeaways from the report include:

• Bitcoin sits at the throne of conversation. With 52% of all conversation (the other 48% being spread around every other token), Bitcoin was the most talked about. 
• Despite rapid price growth, many people still don’t really understand what cryptocurrency is. 
• People have started to see cryptocurrency as more legitimate and less shady. 

The study also found that, in the time period of September 2017 and January 2018, for every 10 percent of social media buzz registered, there was roughly a 5 percent rise in Bitcoin’s price within three days.

However, it’s worth noting that this study was during an intense bull run, and it was extremely difficult to lose money in most digital asset investments. This begs the question – does sentiment analysis function as well during a bear market?

Another study was conducted by Feng Mai at the Stevens School of Business that collected two years of data from Bitcointalk and two months of data from Twitter. The team put together a script that collected comment data and put it into sentiment categories. Then, it used a statistical method known as vector error correction, or VECM, to compare the price of Bitcoin with their findings. Mai noted that: "It's not a one-way relationship, any changes in Bitcoin's price are obviously going to affect the sentiment around it, so we needed to factor in those influences as well."

The study affirmed that social media influence did affect Bitcoin’s price. 

DOES SENTIMENT ANALYSIS HAVE A FUTURE?

Social sentiment and cryptocurrency markets have a weird love fling going on that has largely been out of the purview of regulatory authorities until the last year or so. In November 2018, the SEC clamped down on two mainstream figures, boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. and music producer DJ Khaled for failing to disclose payments they received for promoting Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). 

Even then as cryptocurrency stands today, it’s not very easy to regulate or control price manipulation by influencers and social media commentary floods. 

At the end of the day, what moves markets is capital. The birds will chirp all day long, but if they don’t have the money to put where their mouth is, there won’t really be a sizeable effect on price (unless people with capital do act on that sentiment). 

Unless whales and the massive movers of markets are tweeting their moves, which they likely won’t, no amount of sentiment analysis will provide any substantial evidence for price predictions. 

Original Post: https://www.mintdice.com/blog/social-sentiment-and-cryptocurrency-a-lovehate-relationship?page=1

THE SCOOP ON FACEBOOK LIBRA: INNOVATIVE AND CONTROVERSIAL

mintdice.com/

Unless you’ve been without Internet or news access for the past month, you’ve likely heard of Facebook’s Libra. Even if you have, worry not – we’ve got you covered. 

Libra is a stablecoin by Facebook backed by a combination of bank deposits and short-term government securities. The project is slated to launch in 2020, but it has already received its fair share of criticisms from the press, regulators, and the general public. 

HOW DOES LIBRA FUNCTION?

Libra is on a mission to be  “A simple global currency and financial infrastructure that empowers billions of people.”

Few projects are actually as positioned to do this as Facebook, a platform with over 2.38 billion monthly active users. Facebook aims to connect the world via its Libra on a stable-value, global, digital currency. 

THE LIBRA RESERVE: 

All of Libra’s assets are stored in the Libra Reserve, which contains enough capital to fully back every Libra at all times.

Facebook plans to fill the Libra Reserve with funds from Founding Members, who will receive an Investment Token for their contributions. These Investment Token entitle the Founding members to a percentage of the interest payments the Reserve earns from its assets. However, if you want to be a Founding Member, it’s going to cost you a pretty penny; it costs $10 million to be a Founding Member and you also need substantial technological infrastructure 

Facebook also plans to fill the Reserve through direct consumer Libra purchases. The only time more Libra enters circulation is when a user exchanges their fiat (USD) for Libra. When that user exchanges their Libra back to fiat, the Libra is destroyed by Facebook, decreasing the circulating supply and keeping the price stable. 

Reserve assets are distributed among the custodians. Facebook plans to invest Reserve Funds into low-risk, low-interest bearing assets in order to fund its ecosystem development, engineering research, non-profits, and compensating Founding Members. 

THE LIBRA BLOCKCHAIN:

The Libra Blockchain uses its own specific programming language called Move, similar to how Ethereum uses Solidity. Move enables developers to create and execute smart contracts right on the Libra Blockchain, utilizing Libra’s virtual machine called MoveVM to facilitate. Moving Libra from one user to another requires a small gas fee, similar to Ethereum.  

The Libra Blockchain uses a Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) approach called HotStuff. The Blockchain uses a group of validators to operate and maintain it. The network requires ⅔ of the validators to remain honest. Libra plans to eventually switch to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm, where users receive one vote for every coin they own and stake. 

THE CALIBRA WALLET:

Facebook plans to launch its digital wallet Calibra alongside Libra. Calibra will exist within Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, and as a standalone application. Recently, the head of the Calibra wallet David Marcus at a hearing with the Senate Banking Committee and touched base on a few critical components of the project’s goals. 

It’s expected that Calibra will require Know-Your-Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) verification and financial tracking. 

LIBRA TEAM & PROGRESS

Facebook has been able to attract some high-profile companies from the tech, financial, and cryptocurrency sectors.  

LIBRA ASSOCIATION

The Libra Association is the decentralized entity working to bring the project to fruition. The Switzerland-based Association currently consists of Paypal, Mastercard, Visa, Facebook, Uber, Spotify, Coinbase, Lyft, and Andreessen Horowitz, among a few others as Founding Members.

The Association is responsible for making governance decisions for the ecosystem and mainting the blockchain network. When it comes to governance decisions, each critical decision is voted on by the Association Council Members. Each validator on the network receives on the representative spot on the Council. All major technical and policy rulings require a two-third majority, just like the BFT consensus. Each Association member is limited to either one percent of the total vote or one vote, whichever is larger. 

The Association also contains a Social Impact Advisory Board (SIAB), a group that recommends social impact and grant investments. 

LIBRA ROADMAP

Libra released its whitepaper on June 18, 2019, and simultaneously launched the network’s testnet, making the code open-source. Facebook currently plans the public launch of Libra for the first half of 2020, which will include all the APIs, libraries, and developer tools to build on the Libra Blockchain. 

In the meantime, the Association is seeking to expand its membership base to include roughly 100 global organizations from a wide diversity of industries. 

FINAL THOUGHTS

Facebook’s Libra has made some serious waves and it hasn’t even been released yet. Many are looking at the project as a leading frontrunner not only for stablecoins, but for a global decentralized currency. 

However, the project is not without its antagonists. Facebook is already in hot water for data privacy issues, and adding in a global payments coin isn’t helping take some of the pressure off this company regulators and media have started to view as monopolistic and too-powerful. Many cryptocurrency aficionados are also split on Libra entering the cryptocurrency industry. The massive attention the behemoth social media platform brings to the digital asset conversation could be very important for maturing the industry, if not at least accelerating regulatory guidance. Libra, however, could also be poised to undermine Bitcoin. 

Negatives aside, Libra could serve a powerful purpose in uniting millions (or billions) of unbanked peoples and people living in rapidly inflated economies with a modern economic system, paving the way for global financial freedom. 

Original Post: https://www.mintdice.com/blog/the-scoop-on-facebook-libra-innovative-and-controversial?page=1

Informed Consent for Identity Verification is Changing The Face of Privacy

civic.com

Identity is what makes us human. It’s how we shop, travel, and vote. It allows us to recognize one another and navigate both the physical and digital worlds.

Today, both of those worlds are simultaneously expanding and contracting. We used to be confined to a 10-mile radius, then it grew to 100 miles, then 1,000 miles. Now, we have easy and immediate access to any place (or person) on the planet. We’re all venturing further from our immediate surroundings, and every interaction we have with others makes the world a little bit smaller, and it opens us to a wider variety of experiences. Today, we’re all connected in ways that our grandparents never could have imagined.

However, this interconnectivity comes with its own set of challenges and perils.

Individuals no longer have control over their personal information. 

The more information we share, the less we control it. Once we release our data out onto the Wild West of the World Wide Web, we no longer decide (or even know) who sees, distributes, or profits from it. This can lead to enraging situations where companies sell user data for their own benefit, or incidents that expose our data in ways that are downright dangerous, given the way we use that data to prove who we are.

Fraudsters need only a bit of personal information to impersonate victims. 

Signing into important online accounts requires but a small amount of personal data, be it a pet’s name, maiden name, address, or anything else. Currently, when users use this information to access an account, the company stores the data, taking it out of the hands of those users and leaving it vulnerable to attacks and mismanagement.

This kind of loss of control over identity spells a loss of access to the world, both online and in person.

But as the Internet matures, consent laws are finally finding ways to cover consumers in a meaningful way. In light of recent events — data hacks at large companies like Facebook, Marriott, Quora or Google — regulation is expanding. The EU’s General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) went into effect last May, protecting European users’ data, and California’s AB 375 allows users to know who has access to their information. With these new consumer protections, companies are required to obtain explicit consent before distributing data.

At Civic, we strive to give every person on the planet greater control over his or her digital identity. Each user’s data is stored on that user’s device and only on that user’s device, keeping third-parties out of the equation and thus ensuring that they never mishandle data. This way, you can be 100 percent sure that your data never falls into the wrong hands.

Original Post: https://www.civic.com/blog/informed-consent-for-identity-verification/

WHAT'S BEHIND RECENT GAINS FOR BITCOIN, ETHEREUM, RIPPLE'S XRP AND LITECOIN?

mintdice.com

The year 2019 has been slow for most digital currencies. At the beginning of the year, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Ripple (XRP) maintained the same low price points as the end of the previous year. This was largely owing to a long-running market correction following the post-2017 crypto boom. 

However, things seemed to pick up in the past few weeks, starting with predictions from industry experts in early June that Bitcoin would hit the 5-figure mark again. In the third week of June, there were signs that the currency might actually scale that point. These signs were confirmed when Bitcoin surpassed $10,000 on June 22nd.

Other currencies like Ethereum were not left out, and the bulk of the positive reactions were borne by those who had bought these assets at low prices when a good portion of the community had lost interest in them.

So now that prices have skyrocketed, what next? 

Let’s run through the reasons for this sudden climb in the prices of the top digital currencies and how they may affect the future of cryptocurrency. 

Before finding out why the top four digital currencies skyrocketed within the last week of June, we’ll look at just how significant these recent gains were. 

BITCOIN

At the beginning of the year, Bitcoin opened with a price point of $3,782.44. This wasn't surprising since it hovered around this figure for most of 2018. The first major peak came on February 23rd when Bitcoin surpassed $4,000. However, this didn't seem significant compared to the prices that BTC has recorded in the past. By April, BTC began its climb to $5,000, reaching new levels of support and resistance.

May brought significant gains as well, seeing the asset climb from just over $5,000 to more than $8,000. June brought the mother of bull runs this year, sending Bitcoin well over $10,000 and reaching its yearly peak of $12,722 on June 27th. In total, Bitcoin saw a gain of 236% since January 1st and is currently trading at $10,687 per Bitcoin. 

ETHEREUM

Just like Bitcoin, Ethereum started out slow, opening at $136.24 on January 1st. Its first major peak came on February 24th at $165 and held up until another major rise to $175 in April and $235 in May. By the 31st of May, ETH closed at $255.65. 

In June, during Bitcoin’s massive bull run, the price of Ethereum rose to its yearly peak of $344.55. ETH has recorded a total gain of 152% on the year so far. At press time, ETH is trading at $288.52.

RIPPLE (XRP)

Ripple has been fairly consistent for the past year. Unlike the other coins, it hasn’t recorded any major losses and has managed to stay in the news more than any other digital asset due to product testing and new partnerships. 

The currency itself had a better year than most currencies in 2018, peaking in October and November at $0.579136, and $0.536674 respectively. After opening at a price of $0.357749 on January 1st, 2019, XRP saw mild gains in February and April, followed by a climb to $0.419987 in May, and a yearly peak of $0.484355 on June 26th. XRP has gained 35.3% so far and is currently trading at $0.399436. 

LITECOIN 

On January 1st, Litecoin opened with a price point of $31.18. It crossed the $40 mark on February 9th and exceeded the $50 mark on March 5th. Its first major peak came on April 7th when its price rose to $93.15. After exceeding $100 for the first time on May 25th, Litecoin hit its yearly peak of $140.01 on June 12th.

The recent upward price movement can be attributed to three major factors:

THE INVOLVEMENT OF INSTITUTIONAL INVESTORS

The trade war with China has led to spikes in the prices of gold and Bitcoin. With trade uncertainty, investors are parking their assets in Bitcoin, the least volatile cryptocurrency. This influx of big players into the market has led to a significant shift in the BTC price movement.

THE IMPENDING HALVING OF THE BITCOIN BLOCK REWARD

The Bitcoin network runs on blockchain technology and requires miners to handle the validation of transactions. For this service, they are rewarded with a set number of BTC. This block reward is halved every 210,000 blocks and is currently set at 12.5 BTC. However, each miner is paid about 10.4 BTC. 

Block rewards are intended to cover a miner’s costs and usually, the expectation is that miners will choose to sell off their earned Bitcoins to cover these costs. This process releases new Bitcoins into circulation. 

Since there will only ever be 21 million BTC in existence, halving the block reward as the demand for Bitcoin increases, ensures that its value is never driven down due to inflation. This also means that there may be a decrease in supply and an increase in demand and ultimately, its price. The next halving has been predicted to happen in May 2020, in about 320 days. 

This could signal a huge payday for investors and as a result, they are preparing for it by buying up available Bitcoins, inadvertently driving up the price.

FACEBOOK’S LIBRA COIN

As far as tech is concerned, Facebook is one of the world's leading powers so it has a huge influence on how technology is used and perceived. With the tech giant's plans to launch Libra, its own cryptocurrency product, investors are beginning to see digital currency as a serious investment. This endorsement by Facebook not only has the power to sway the average tech user, but it also has the power to sway governments. 
For example, India is working towards a ban on cryptocurrency. But with Facebook entering the domain, this may motivate other smaller tech companies to follow suit. Placing a ban on cryptocurrencies at a time like this could lead to India missing out on what could be one of the greatest technological advancements of the century. Companies like Visa and PayPal have also shown interest in Facebook’s coin, making it seem even more credible. As a result, institutional investors are taking digital assets more seriously.

The recent price movement of Bitcoin and other top cryptocurrencies may lead to a massive rally that could send the top asset over $20,000 if it breaks its resistance at $13,000. This price behavior may mirror December 2017, when FOMO drove Bitcoin into the hands of the average first-time crypto user. 

That boom saw a combination of numerous new entrants into the market and frequent Bitcoin-related search terms to create an ecosystem that is gradually approaching mainstream status. Although the Bitcoin Google searches haven't started piling up and there isn’t a buying frenzy yet or proof that first-time buyers are jumping into the market, the signs are clear. 

There have been tons of Bitcoin predictions as well as Ripple, Ethereum, and Litecoin predictions by industry figures. These predictions put the future prices of these assets anywhere from $0 to $100,000 and are not a great indicator of what their future prices will actually be. 

The 5-figure value of Bitcoin due to recent gains is every bit as exciting as it was when these gains first happened in 2017. Mainly due to institutional investors, the upward price movements are indicative of a bright future for Bitcoin. It also proves that Bitcoin isn’t a dying asset as many may have thought throughout its market correction in 2018.

Facebook moving into the cryptocurrency and blockchain space may also act as a catalyst for a massive bull run and better performance for the prices of Bitcoin and top altcoins. However, it's too early to say for sure. It’s exciting to see how the market unfolds and whether Bitcoin can top its 2017 high of $20,236. 

Original Post: https://www.mintdice.com/blog/whats-behind-recent-gains-for-bitcoin-ethereum-ripples-xrp-and-litecoin?page=1

Lessons from Crazy Startup Ideas

Even the so-called craziest, most out of left field startup ideas can end up being wildly successful businesses. It takes more than a little confidence, not being afraid to fail a few times, and being comfortably flexible enough to pivot to make a great idea become reality. 

SpaceX is one example of a company that was initially called crazy for its long term mission of making human life interplanetary, but it is now considered to be one of the most innovative (not to mention respected) companies there is. Aspiring entrepreneurs can take lessons from these unconventional ideas to inspire their own business ventures. 

See the infographic from Fundera below for inspiration from some of the world’s most successful “crazy” business ideas.

How To Audit SEO on Your Own in 8 Steps?

By Polaris Agency

In 2019 the impact high Google rankings can have on a B2B business should not be understated. Whether you want to take on some search engine optimisation yourself or keep your SEO agency on their toes - understanding the core elements of your website, what makes for positive or negative SEO results and where priorities should be placed is the basis of online success.

Step 1 - What Is an SEO Audit and Why Is It Important?

Simply, an SEO audit is looking at every single element of a website and its competitor sites to determine: 

Questions

1. Can the website be found when searching online?  
2. Is your website relevant to your product and customer base?  
3. Does the site work correctly from a technical perspective?  
4. Does the website engage your customers to buy from you? 

Now, these four questions may seem vague at first, but each step of an SEO audit process will give you the answers you need – these starting points will allow the focus of the work to remain targeted purely at business and online growth, as opposed to swaying into branding or other forms of marketing/advertising. An SEO audit should then be split into three areas – on site, off site and technical. 

Within the questions above you will need to determine some variables which are unique to your business: 

Variables

1. What do you want to be found for online?  
2. What pages (these are called landing pages) are relevant to your product/service?  
3. What platform is the website built on? 
4. How do customers by products online?  

Then, from here you can make a list of top-level actions - we would recommend using a table such as the below – filling out the actions as you move through your audit.

Questions	Variables	Actions
Can the website be found when searching online?	Keywords eg: HR systems
Is your website relevant to your product and customer base?	Landing pages: websitename.com/hr-systems
Does the site work correctly from a technical perspective?	Platforms: Wordpress
Does the website engage your customers to buy from you?	How to buy: Enquiries/Product purchases

Step 2 - Ranking Factors

Once you have the basis of your audit in terms of what you want to know and achieve with a website from a business perspective, the next stage is to understand what Google (and the other search engines) are looking for to rank a website. These are called search engine guidelines and adhering to them can aid ranking, adversely carrying our bad SEO tactics can impact your ranking and in some cases see a website removed from a search engine all together. 

Search engines use what are called ‘crawlers’ to go through your website and analyse and determine the following factors, again these can be attributed to the initial five points: 

1. What keywords should this website most likely be shown for in Google results?  
2. Does the content of the website meet the needs of a customer? 
3. Is the website fast and technically secure? 
4. Does the website meet the needs of customers? 
5. Is the website meeting search engine guidelines? 

Ranking factors include: 

Step 3 - Key Elements of Your SEO Audit and How to Carry Them Out

On-Page Content

On-page SEO is at the heart of your website and the content within each product or service landing page. Within On-page content there are some core areas to consider: 

Element to Optimise	Definition
Landing Page URL	URL of the landing page (after the website name)
Meta Title	This is the blue link that shows in Google
Meta Description	The text that shows under the blue link in search results – to draw a user to click
Heading 1 Tag	A title that shows at the top of a page
Heading 2 / 3 Tags	Additional titles which are placed within the content of a page
Content	The physical content on the page needs to meet particular criteria
Keyword Density	The percentage of keywords to total text ratio on a page
Images	The size, name and title of an image on the page
Internal Links	Links which point to other pages on the website

Keywords

Are keywords placed in your landing page URL, meta title and H1 Tag – these are core signs to
a search crawler about what is expected on a page. 

In H2 or H3 tags, are variations of a keyword used? For example, if your target keyword is B2B marketing, a H2 tag might be ‘Marketing Driving Exposure with the B2B sector’ – this shows a break in content, but also creates a greater level of natural conversion within content. 

Potential actions: Re-write meta data to include keywords, add heading tags to content.

Images

Keep images below 100kb and ensure they have alt text attached to them, as well as an image title that is associated with your keywords and phases. Google cannot see an image to relies on the data behind the image to help with accessibility and outline what should be seen on a page. 

Potential actions: Reduce sizes of images

Internal Links

Links within your text, to related products or services, to customer service pages or through to contact pages are known as internal links – as in they are internal to your website. 

Keep in mind these should be relevant to a customer and where possible be placed around your keywords – this creates a greater level of relevancy and trust within the page itself. 

Potential actions: Add more internal links to content

Overall, for the page itself, we’d recommend creating a table and auditing each of the points in our checklist one-by-one per page, using a simple traffic light system to determine where improvements can be made. 

Technical SEO

Technical SEO spans a wide range of areas and topics, but in terms of an audit on your website, we’d recommend sticking the core elements around how Google can access and interpret your website, considering the speed (and ultimately user experience) as well.

Element to Optimise	Definition
Web structure and URL Structure	Essentially the folders in use website is built
HTTPS/SSL	Security for customers or users visiting the site
HTML Build	Code behind core elements of a website
CSS / Javascript	Code behind the theme and functionality of a site
Schema / JSON	Code that allows websites to send additional information to search engines
Server Speed	The speed in which servers respond to requests from users
Sitemaps/Robots	Used by Google to crawl websites
Accessibility	Are all pages able to be found

Step 4 - Crawling and Indexing 

Crawling and indexing is a core element to consider in your SEO audit. As mentioned earlier, a search engine will crawl a website to determine what a website rank for in search results – if a website cannot be crawled properly, it will not rank. 

The core area to determine website crawling is within Google Search Console – this is a system used by SEO agencies and Webmasters provided by Google to aid in visibility on the health of a website. If you do not have Google Search Console setup, it can simply be added to your Google account and verified in a number of different ways. 

Within Google Search Console you will see the below Index section – this will tell you discovered URLs and the amount of URLs Google has indexed. Ideally, these should be the same number: 

If an SEO campaign is not working in the way you feel it should, then you can have a closer look at indexing and whether your target pages are being found by Google.

If you want to look at a page level, use the search bar at the top of your website: 

Identifying issues within crawling and indexing will help determine action points around on-page and technical performance. 

This would include: 

• Page missing from sitemap
• Page blocked by Robots.txt

Potential Actions: Add target page to sitemap, Request indexing from Google

Step 5 - Website structure 

Do the URLs make sense? Ideally you would have a top level category for core services/products, then sub-pages beyond this. 

Website Structure is the frame on which a website is built, and directly influences URL structure.
It should be clear and tidy. A URL structure should following the website structure, contain NO capital letters, underscores or characters (such as #,?: etc.) as these are not crawlable for
a crawler.

Potential action: Make URLs cleaner

Step 6 – Checking your accessibility 

Are all pages accessible from menus with no errors? You’ll find this information in the same index section, under Coverage. 

This will include any pages with 404 errors (not working) and any others which fire up warnings. 

404 Errors can be a problem if you do not want them, but do not necessarily mean there’s an issue with a website. For example, if you remove a service from a website it is natural this will create
a 404 page. To see in Google Search results a round-up of the pages indexed (and the latest versions saved by Google) you can do a Google Search for ‘site:websitename.com’ – this will provide a list of indexed pages:

Potential Actions: Redirect or add new pages to place 404 pages.

Step 7 - Loading Speed

Using tools such as Google Pagespeed Insights will give you data on areas within a website loading time that can be improved. Whether these elements are worked on with an SEO agency or a web developer will differ based on the business in question. PageSpeed insights will give you a score out of 100 for your website speed, with the ultimate goal of course to hit 100. 

Potential Actions: Update server for faster load speed

Step 8 - Off-Site Strength

The final area of note when auditing your website is the strength of your offsite profile and links or brand mentions being generated by an SEO agency. Now, unlike the other areas the value of these links are not as straightforward as technical / on-page SEO elements. For example, a link which may look like it has no brand value, may carry weight for rankings – whereas a brand mention might not have an SEO value. 

When auditing your SEO agency, take a measure of your domain authority – this domain authority is a score out of a hundred from a company called Moz. They have a free access account which allows you to do this. Then, set up a Google Alert for your brand name – this will then email you every time your brand name is crawled on another website. 

Finally, use Google Search Console – to determine which of your pages are being linked to and monitor changes here. This can be found using the Links section from the right-hand menu of the page: 

Over the course of your SEO campaign you should see vast improvements in each of these metrics – giving you a breakdown of the quality of links, link profile improvements and areas to work on. 

Potential Actions: Gain links from specific industry sites

Step 9 - Completing Your Audit 

Once all data is gathered on your audit, it is possible to then complete the top level audit table and send across to your SEO agency/partner: 

Questions	Variables	Actions
Can the website be found when searching online?	Keywords eg: HR systems	Add 200 words on HR systems to HR systems page Update Meta data to include HR systems Keyword
Is your website relevant to your product and customer base?	Landing pages: websitename.com/hr-systems	Change URL structure from Hr-Systems12324232132 to just hr-systems
Does the site work correctly from a technical perspective?	Platforms: Wordpress	Work with developers to improve pagespeed results
Does the website engage your customers to buy from you?	How to buy: Enquiries/Product purchases	Increase Calls to Actions on landing pages

Carry this out every three months and you’ll be continually closer to your search engine goals.

Keith Hodges is the Head of Search at POLARIS, an SEO agency specialising in campaigns which drive leads for the B2B sector.