Most businesses thrive on traffic both online and in person from Google, Bing, Yelp and Facebook searches. In fact, with voice search becoming so important many businesses will only get visits if they appear in the top 3 local searches on Google, when someone searches for “keyword near me”. There are plenty of SEO company’s out there who for a fee will help you achieve better results. However, before you even get to that point, there is a lot you can do yourself to determine what problems may have and how to fix these on your own for better ranking in the search engine results page (SERP). Below is a checklist to help you audit your own website for SEO challenges.
- Does your website have any broken link;
- http://brokenlinkcheck.com/ If your site has broken links, then Google may penalize you for not being up to date.
- Does your website have Title Tags on every page
- http://www.seoreviewtools.com/bulk-title-tag-checker/ – One of the easiest ways to get listed for certain keywords is to include them in your title tags, which is what tells a searcher what your page is all about.
- Is your name, address and phone number listed on all major directories and is it listed properly
- Does your website load faster then other sites?
- https://tools.pingdom.com/ – Google has gone on record as saying that load speed in a factor in their ranking algorithm
- Does your site have any coding issues that Google may not like;
- https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ Google provides a free tool that determines what factors may slow down the load speed of your site and gives some examples of how to fix those problems.
- Has your content been duplicated anywhere else on the web;
- http://copyscape.com/ – If your content is used on multiple sites, then search engines try to determine who was the original author and give priority to that site.
- How many inbound links does your domain have?
- https://ahrefs.com/ is a website that allows you to see who is linking not only to you, but also to your competition. This is very important because links from other websites to yours is one of the biggest factors search engines use to decide how relevant you are for your key words.
- What are other people saying about your company with social media reviews.
- https://www.google.com/alerts – On of the most significant types of links is reviews on Google maps, Yelp, Facebook and others such sites. Google provides a free tool to track whenever your name is indexed on a new page or post.
[schema type=”book” axbaxa_name=”SEO Audit” axbaxa_author=”Michael Goldstein” axbaxa_published_date=”2017-09-15″ axbaxa_ebook=”yes” axbaxa_description=”A checklist of tasks and free online tools to perform an audit on your website’s search engine ranking potential” ]