Carrying out a website audit is imperative when trying to achieve a successful optimisation campaign and will identify the quality of your SEO service provider.
A review of your site will enable you to find out if there are any issues with the layout and which areas of the website need addressing first in order to improve your results. For example, updating your meta data would be prioritised over any plans you have for long-term link building.
Image Credit
To carry out a full audit can take as little as thirty minutes, including both on-site and off-site analysis. Off-site checks are just as important, as they can reveal any penalties you might be vulnerable to.
Auditing Your On-page Optimisation
Relevant Keywords: Check that the meta data of your website has relevant keywords. The title should be 55 characters, with the description being 155 characters. The title tag must contain keywords that are relevant to your site and geo-modified ones for your local SEO, such as web design in Taunton.
Duplicate Content: There are several tools available to check your website for duplicate content, and you should find that no more than 20-30% of your site has this.
Contact Information: This is a crucial piece of information for local businesses – make sure your telephone number and address are clearly on view in both your header and footer if possible.
Off-Page Optimisation
Google+ Verified Business: Having a verified Google+ account will help your ranking in local searches immensely. You can set this up here: https://www.google.com/business/.
Citation Audit: The more of these you have, the better you will rank locally, as this is an integral part of your SEO. Companies such as www.somersetwebservices.co.uk will be able to help improve this for you.
Backlinks: Using a tool to analyse your backlinks, you’ll need to determine if they are good ones or whether some of them could result in penalties. Check that they use branded keywords – if there’s a lot of keyword-rich anchor text, this may need investigating further, as it could be detrimental to the website.
This is a quick and easy way to do an audit, but it is recommended to invest in full website reviews before embarking on any future campaigns. This will uncover any other things that might not have been revealed in this quick analysis.