Just like any other aspect of your business, your website has to keep up with the times in order to make efficient use of your online marketing dollars. If you’ve noticed a huge drop in traffic, your blogs are no longer hitting home or your social simply stinks, it may be time for an SEO audit to determine where you’re going wrong. Whether you’re a small local business or have an international audience, it’s important to keep up with the newest and greatest algorithms coming from top search engines like Google and Bing.
What Can an SEO Audit Do For My Website?
The beautiful and frustrating thing about doing business on the web is that the environment is always changing. Global search results are an amazing tool to expand business, but if you’re committing egregious sins against Google’s idea of SEO Best Practices you’ll never rank. I’m sorry if your slick-haired, sports coat-wearing fly-by-night SEO consultant told you that you were good to go five years ago and therefore are still set — the Internet is constantly evolving and he is clearly not.
The idea of what is considered high quality (or even acceptable quality) web content has changed considerably as the Internet has matured. Now, we recognize a few dozen specific criteria to earn page rankings. What worked a decade ago isn’t working anymore,what works internationally may not work locally because Google is smarter than it has ever been. By having a qualified SEO professional (I stress that last word) perform a comprehensive SEO audit, you’ll know exactly where your website is failing, uncover any search engine penalties and have a plan of action for making your way back onto the first page of Google’s search results.
A better page ranking equals better traffic and, ultimately, more sales. There’s nothing else to it. Without a decent page ranking, you might as well shut down your website because it’s just taking up space on a server somewhere and costing you hundreds or thousands of dollars a year for absolutely nothing. You didn’t get into business to lose money, did you?
The World’s Greatest SEO Audit Starts Today
Sure, everybody claims they have the best of this or that, but unlike the World’s Best Dad or the World’s Tastiest Popcorn, the World’s Greatest SEO Audit means something more than a mere accolade. We’ve taken our years of experience and built a checklist that covers every aspect of your website and its interactions with search engine technology to help you learn what problems are causing your website’s low or non-existent ranking. Our process ensures that your links are linking into good neighbourhoods, your website is being crawled correctly, your site is built as optimally as it can be and even investigates the reasons you were penalized.
Although the technicalities can get pretty dicey, here are some of the things the World’s Greatest SEO Audit will examine, broken down into plain English:
Search Engine Accessibility. Before we get too deeply into your audit, we like to know how well popular search engines can access your pages (when dealing in international SEO, your best local search engines may vary). We check that all the pages are getting examined by the search engine, that all URLs are functional, that your sitemap follows Sitemap Protocol and that no part of your site is obscured by the use of Javascript or Flash navigation.
Site Performance. Your site’s performance is crucial to efficient search engine examinations. The faster your site runs and loads, the more quickly the search engine crawlers can gather information from you. This is a great thing, it means more of your pages are indexed and your site’s entries stay more up to date than your competition’s.
Indexability. Indexability is all about how many of your pages that the search engine can actually include in search results once it has examined your site. The more pages that are indexed, the better a result you’ll get — to a point. Some search engines, Google included, will penalize you for having too many links pointing to the same page, so it’s a delicate line to walk.
Search Engine Penalty Identification. Not everybody gets a glowing hot email that tells them that their site has been penalized by a search engine when it happens. If there’s no way to reach you or you’re not checking your email, you’re kind of left twisting in the wind. You’ll know if you’ve been penalized more often than not, though — if your site is completely de-indexed, for example, there will be no signs that your website was ever known by the search engine. Still, this sort of thing sometimes happens because of a change in the search engine’s algorithm, which is no fault of yours. We can figure out which problem is plaguing your site so we can get it resolved quickly.
Ranking Optimization. There are certain things search engines and customers alike look for on a high quality website. Properly formed URLs that are short and easy to remember, the use of subfolders instead of subdomains and a lack of URLs that lead to the same content are just a few of the things we consider.
Content Evaluation. Maybe you’ve heard the old expression, “Content is king.” Well, it has never been as true as it is today. Google has implemented a brand new, intelligent algorithm that can tell if your English language site’s content is poorly written, contains lots of spelling errors or even poor grammar. Even if you were never concerned about these problems before for your customers’ sakes, it’s imperative now. Significant Google penalties apply when poor quality content is present, which includes anything from just plain old bad copy to keyword-stuffed pages.
Site Architecture Functionality. Your website isn’t just made of the things you see there — the words, the pages, the little applets that run in the background — it’s also made of a lot of stuff that you don’t see. Just like a house has to have a solid foundation to stay up, your website’s architecture must be sound for it to function properly. Certain HTML elements, including titles, metadata, alternative text for images and outgoing links can influence your site rankings in ways you’d never believe.
External Page Ranking Factors. There’s a lot within your control that influences your page ranking, but a few ranking factors are totally outside of your site’s direct reach. The popularity of your site, how often other quality sites link back to you and the number of mentions of your site on social media are just a few of these external ranking factors.
When you’re ready to get your site out of search engine limbo, give us a call or drop us an email. We’ll perform the World’s Greatest SEO Audit on your site and identify the problems that are keeping you from ranking, customers from clicking and your sales from going straight through the roof.
