What can you expect when you request “A Free Website Audit” for SEO from a professional Internet marketing consultant?
That’s easy, you’ll get a list of problems with your website that are costing you business and that you have to fix or update to turn that around.
What are the chances that the audit will come back saying: “Your Onsite SEO has no problems. It is perfect”?
Pretty slim.
The good news is that the onsite SEO audit will probably show you how you can increase your bottom line by fixing some or all of the following common but serious problems. It will show you how you can increase traffic to your site and how you can get more conversions (read ‘leads’) in the future.
Cross out any of the following items that you know don’t apply to your website. What is left are the most important items you should fix.
ITEMS THAT ARE INVISIBLE TO YOU:
- Page titles do not correspond to the subject of the page content on several of your pages.
(Unless you correct this, good ranking is almost impossible) - Descriptions that your prospective visitor sees in their search results are either missing, duplicated, too long, or improperly constructed.
(The description is 80% of what convinces a user to visit your site instead of the next one on their list of search results) - Images are not compressed and are delaying page download time.
(Slow loading pages either don’t make it to the search results, or a majority of potential prospects ‘bounce’ off the page after a few seconds of waiting) - Your webpage code and scripts are not ‘minified’.
(This is nerdspeak to say your code is bloated and causing unnecessary delay in rendering the page.) - Image descriptions (‘alt’ tags) are missing or not descriptive. (Search engines can’t see images so they rely on the alt tag descriptions to rank their content.)
ITEMS THAT ARE VISIBLE TO YOU:
- There is no motivation for visitors to your site to take action.
(If visitors do not leave you contact information, you cannot follow up to ‘nurture’ them and convert them to leads and customers or clients) - The pages are not ‘responsive’. They don’t reformat when viewed on a mobile device like a smartphone.
(Meaning your site is invisible to 80% to 90% of users.) - If your site is responsive, the content it shows on mobile devices is not appropriate for that screen size.
- You do not have the ‘secure’ icon,
, that assures your site visitors that they are safe from being diverted to a malware fraudulent site.
(This is a feature that Google has made clear is a ranking factor for all websites.)
Correcting these factors, known as ‘onsite SEO’, is prerequisite to moving you up the ranking ladder and ahead of your immediate competition. There are many other steps to achieve your Internet marketing goals, but without the above work being done first, subsequent ones will be ineffective.
Without these basics being covered you simply won’t get your share of Internet-generated leads.