Did you ever wish you could understand how an expert looks at a problem before developing a strategy to solve it? Alan Bleiweiss is an expert who specializes in forensic site audits, and his recent Moz Case Study: One Site's Recovery from an Ugly SEO Mess takes us into his thought process and the steps used to analyze what is happening.
This is an invaluable post, because he does give valuable insight and helpful advice. The comments are always good, too, because they further the discussion. I hope you take a look at it after you are done here.
I want to take a closer look at Alan's QUART mindset.
The QUART Mindset
There are many signals in SEO, but these are what he calls the five super-signals:
- Quality
- Uniqueness
- Authority
- Relevance
- Trust
He uses these super-signals to score the various factors, or signals, that make up the SEO of a site. To quote:
Whether it's a speed issue, a crawl efficiency issue, topical focus, supporting signals on-site or off-site, whatever it is, if that signal does not score well with quality, uniqueness or relevance, it leaves that page, that section of a site, or that site as a whole vulnerable to algorithmic hits.
So you could be strong in some things and still see problems cropping up that you need to track down and solve. It's not always clear what the problem is though - and that's why I like this QUART idea. It makes a simple acronym that is easy to remember without being irrelevant.
Tracking and analytics are challenging because they involve so much more than just collecting the data. You have to look at that data and understand what to do with it. When you have an ugly SEO mess on your site, you may have to call in the experts, but this simple acronym is a good way to start evaluating what needs to be done.
Photo Credit: SEO Expert/shutterstock