Why You Need A Website Audit

Website Audit western mass

Your website should have all the information on your company so that potential customers can make educated decisions before purchasing your product or service. Just like a car, your website should be inspected and tuned up on a regular basis. Whether it’s not showing up in search engines or having a high bounce rate, optimizing your website will help with the success of your business. Search engine optimization can improve your search engine results and create higher sales conversions.

Before you begin optimizing your website, whether new or it has been live for some time, you should run a website audit. An audit outlines the strengths and weaknesses of the website, helps inspect the technical backend of the website, on-page and off-page elements to optimize result positioning, increase conversions, and more. The website audit must be performed on a regular basis to ensure the long-term success of the website’s performance. The audits are really important as it helps keep the SEO strategy updated at all time.

Why Have An Audit

So, why do it? It outlines the technical performance and health of the website, so you can create practical tasks to enhance the online visibility. The results of the audit also helps create an ongoing SEO plan for improving lead generation and sales conversions. The audit helps identify possible errors in the website, such as broken links, duplicate content, or negative backlinks that might be damaging the website’s performance. Once these errors are identified by the audit, your SEO experts can create strategies to recover the traffic that the website lost.

Website audits also help identify the algorithm changes to the search engines. This is because all search engines tend to update the algorithms from time to time and SEO audits help outline what adjustments can be made to cater to these algorithmic changes. While running a full website audit is recommended, there are variations and parts of the website audit you can do separately.

Types of Website Audits

A website audit is a full analysis of factors that impact a websites visibility for search engines and ease of use for users. But a full website audit is not always necessary, below are some of the most common types of audits you can run on your website:

Technical Audit

While good quality content and backlinks will help get your site ranked, if there is a technical issue on your website, all your efforts could be a waste of time. Technical audits focus on best practice for site visibility and ensuring that all website meets all search engine requirements for crawling and indexing.

SEO Audit

An SEO audit measures how well your website is optimized for search engines. It includes analyzing of keywords, website links, traffic behavior, goal conversions, meta descriptions and data, and image and optimization.

Content Audit

Content is often reviewed as part of an SEO audit, a stand alone content audit can also be helpful, delivering strong insights into what messaging and tone of voice is converting and what isn’t.

Signs Your Website Needs An Audit

There are many reasons why your website may need an audit. Here are just a few:

  • Users can’t navigate your website properly
  • Images are not properly tagged
  • Your website is not mobile friendly or mobile optimized
  • Your website takes too long to load
  • Customers have a hard time contacting you
  • Your competitors are outperforming you in search engine results
  • Certain pages on your website are not getting indexed in search results

The overall purpose of a website audit is to give webmasters a complete and detailed analysis into their sites health, performance and speed. So, when are you performing an audit on your website? If you are looking to have an audit done to your website, or have questions about doing an audit, contact us today.

5 SEO Mistakes To Avoid in 2022

SEO Tips 2022

Just like social media, search engine practices tend to change over time. If you’ve been struggling with search engine results, or you are planning on launching a new website, there may be some common mistakes you may be forgetting about. Here are the top 5 SEO mistakes to avoid in the new year:

Not writing enough quality content

The length of content is an important factor when it comes to optimization and has been correlated with SERP rankings. Search Engine Results Pages (or “SERP”) are Google’s response to a user’s search query. SERPs tend to include organic search results, paid Google Ads results, Featured Snippets, Knowledge Graphs and video results. More words equals more results. So if your content is too short (less than 300 words), then you may need to revisit those pages.

You don’t have an optimized image on each page

One of the biggest items people forget to optimize on their website are their images. Image optimization is the process of creating and delivering high-quality images in the ideal format, size, and resolution to increase user engagement. First, they give search engines important contextual information. Second, optimized images speed up page loading, which increases user engagement and search engine rankings. When design elements are common somewhere else, don’t reinvent them by creating new UI patterns. UI (User interface) design is the process designers use to build interfaces in software or computerized devices, focusing on looks or style. Designers aim to create interfaces which users find easy to use and pleasurable. Making users think hard to learn how to navigate through each page is not what you want.

You have duplicate content

Duplicate content is a big red flag when it comes to search engine optimization and can result in a penalty from Google. Duplicate content confuses Google and forces the search engine to choose which of the identical pages it should rank in the top results, regardless of who produced the content. There is a high possibility that the original page will not be the one chosen for the top search results. All of the content on your content should be completely original.

Your content is not optimized for your target keywords

Keywords are are important to show search engines that they content you created is relevant to the search query. Targeted keywords are the phrases that your target audience and visitors use in search engines when they are searching for a solution or information related to your business. Targeted keywords are usually phrases, not individual words. Including your keyword in your title and in the first 100 words of the page are ways you can start utilizing your target keywords.

Your page load speed is too slow

Page speed has been a ranking factor for a couple of years now. What’s more, each year, its importance to your site’s SERP positions is only growing. Whether it’s desktop or mobile, many users leave websites if the it takes too long for the pages to load. The average page load time is 8.66 seconds, although the recommended speed time is 3 seconds. In the summer of 2021, Google rolled out the Page Experience update to enhance its algorithm. Pages that load faster deliver content quicker, and in that, satisfy the user’s needs quicker. If a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, over a quarter of users will click away and choose a different search result. Increasing bounce rate is not what SEOs are looking to do!

Search Engine Optimization should be a focal point in your 2022 marketing strategy. Have questions on the article or interested in learning more about our Website Audits? Contact us today.

3 Easy Tips for Better SEO

Search engine marketing Springfield ma

Running a small business is no easy feat. With endless lists of responsibilities and duties, it can be easy to let some things fall to the wayside. Unfortunately, it is all too common for SEO to fall under the “I’ll eventually get to it” category. This can be a huge detriment to a small business. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) lets your online content work to increase traffic to your pages. It’s an important facet to the online success of your business. Here are some simple ways you can get started.

Work on Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the process of optimizing the structure of your website pages so that the crawlers can properly “read” and index your site. Even if your content is amazing, problems with technical SEO will hinder your website’s ability to rank highly in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Even if you don’t have that technical background, give these simple SEO tactics a try.

Create a sitemap and submit it to Google. Depending on what platform you used to build your site, there are plugins and extensions you can use to create a sitemap. Once you do, you can submit your sitemap to Google via Google Search Console, a free service Google offers to help you manage your presence in Google Search Results. The same can be done with Bing via their Webmaster Tools.

Update/Remove old pages that don’t perform. If your website has a lot of pages that don’t get traffic, your rankings will be negatively affected. If you don’t have a need for that specific page, it may be best to remove the page, even if temporarily. If the page is important, look at why visitors are not visiting that page. Is it not easy to get to? Is it taking a long time to load?

Another easy way for you to work on your SEO is to fix broken and old links. The SERP robots will downgrade your content if you consistently send your reader to outdated or broken links on your website.

Do Your (Keyword) Research

Keyword research is very important to many facets of your marketing plan. It doesn’t just help with your website rankings, but overall content and advertising strategies. Local search results often rely on quality, relevant, industry-specific keywords to draw traffic and local presence. The importance of keyword research stretches to all SEO however, not just local.

It’s important to know keywords are not static but are constantly changing due to shifts in trends, changes in social standards or practices, events, and even pop culture relevance. This means your keyword and phrases are constantly evolving. By doing keyword research regularly, you can understand keyword trends and be able to develop strategies in predicting what will come next.

Focus on Local SEO

Did you know nearly one-third of all mobile searches are location-based queries, for example, “brunch near me.” And even if the “near me” is not added, Google’s algorithm now automatically prioritizes local options if you just search “brunch. The most important part of local SEO is setting up a Google My Business Profile. These are free and easy to maintain. It is also where your business would manage their Google Reviews. The other critical feature of Google My Business is the question and answer section. You can proactively answer questions that you think might come up so that potential customers have as frictionless an experience as possible.

With these easy steps, you’ll be on your way to getting your website in better rankings. Whether it’s with a website audit, or keyword research, contact us if you’re looking to step up your SEO game.