It is recommended to create a strong base before starting a new endeavor. This post covers the steps you need to take to perform an SEO review for your small business.
Gaining the majority of the advantages can be accomplished with minimal effort when a reliable SEO approach is implemented. Doing an SEO review can help elevate your company, draw in more visitors, and stay in front of your rivals.
Small Business SEO Audit
Approximately two-thirds of promoters consider SEO as the most vital element when thinking about their sites. They take great care to do frequent checkups of their SEO performance to ensure their sites are performing to the highest standards.
SEO audits determine your site’s current situation. An audit is useful for determining any technical SEO problems, areas for improvement, and how your website fares on search engine rankings.
Hiring an SEO expert, SEO firm, or digital advertising firm is a possible solution for small businesses to get auditing and optimization services.
Nonetheless, if you have a basic understanding of how SEO works, then you can do an SEO analysis by yourself. Just carry out the 10 steps for SEO auditing for small enterprises below.
Step 1: Check Google Search Status
Utilize Google’s free SEO tool to review the wellness of your website and its visibility in Google Search. Go to Google Search Console (previously Google Webmaster Tools). Ensure that you have a real estate linked to your website. If not, adhere to the directions in order to include a tag and validate your website. Next, select the website you’re auditing. Then, select “Manual actions” in the left-hand sidebar.
If you notice a green tick with the statement “No issues detected,” then there are no outstanding issues that would stop your website from appearing in Google Search.
If not, you should offer some explanations why your website was penalized. Tweak the SEO tactics of the webpage in order to repair it and get rid of any retaliations.
Afterwards, have a look at the “Coverage” and “Sitemaps” subsections from the left toolbar to make sure the website pages you desire to be seen by Google are able to be crawled and stored by Google.
Additional sections to audit in Google Search Console include:
- Performance – Check this section to see clicks, impressions, and average ranking position of your site pages over time.
- URL Inspection – You can optionally inspect a page of your site to check its Google status.
- Mobile Usability – Verify your pages are detected as being mobile-friendly in this section.
- Page Experience – Discover potential issues with page experience in this section.
- Core Web Vitals – Additional user experience data may appear here over time.
Step 2: Do an Online Search
Checking your business’s present search visibility would be beneficial.
Enter the name of your business into the Google Search engine to see what results appear. At the beginning of June 2021, Google had an overwhelming 92.47 percent of the worldwide search engine market. So, it makes sense to prioritize Google. It can be beneficial to examine your presence in lesser-known but increasing search engines such as Bing and DuckDuckGo afterwards.
Check out the following when searching your business name:
- Does your Google Business Profile information appear? If not, you might need to create and verify a new business profile or update its information.
- Does your homepage appear as one of the top results? This might not be the case if your site is brand new. Otherwise, there could be some potential SEO issues at play.
- Do your site title and description make sense for someone who would search your business name? If not, adjust the site title and meta description of your homepage to align better with the search.
- Ensure any local business listings that appear for your business include updated information, including accurate NAP data (name, address, phone).
- To maintain a good online reputation, check and potentially respond to online reviews about your business.
Once you have gone through the search results for your business, you should also look at the rankings for relevant product and service keywords for your location. This will give you a better idea of the sort of content that performs well in those terms.
Step 3: Crawl Your Site
Using a computer tool similar to the way Googlebot does, you can ‘scour’ your website. The primary purpose of these robots is to go through and accumulate information about each website URL and the links between them.
Examples of what can be obtained by web crawlers include page titles, metadata, pictures, and other assets located on the page. Crawlers look at internal and external links, malfunctions in the links, the direction that links go, the amount of words in a page, and the data that is employed.
Recommendations for crawling a business site as part of an SEO audit:
- Some all-in-one SEO software tools, particularly Semrushor SE Ranking, include user-friendly auditing features with helpful how-to guides.
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider is an effective option for crawling a site to find potential optimization issues and opportunities, however, it can take some SEO understanding to use compared to the more user-friendly audit features included in all-in-one SEO software.
Step 4: Measure Site Speed
You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to determine the duration of time it takes for your website to load. You will be able to obtain the data you desire directly from the origin.
Look at this compilation of free SEO utilities for different useful page speed and website examination tools.
It’s not just about how fast you can go – this thing has something else to offer. Google will provide advice on how to get the page to load faster.
Loading pages at a quicker rate can boost user involvement with the page and enhance its ranking. Slow pages, however, can result in the opposite effect.
Step 5: Do a Keyword Analysis
Keywords are still significant for giving Google and other search engines an idea of what your page and site are about, which can help enhance your page’s ranking if you boost the keywords.
If your content is using a lot of words and phrases that get searched in Google, like locations you serve for local SEO, it is likely that the page content will move up the SERP rankings in the long run.
Making sure the topics of your content match up with the keywords people are actively searching for will help you get higher rankings on the first page of search results. Check out these strategies for identifying pertinent keywords for your webpages and material based on your website.
Step 6: Evaluate Your Competitors’ Keyword Success
You will judge the material that outranked yours in Google’s rankings. Employ the “Find in Page” feature to track down the term you were searching for. This will assist you in determining which SEO strategy your competitors have been employing.
- Are keywords in the page and blog titles? Where in the titles do these appear?
- Are keywords in the subheadings used in the article?
- How many times are the keywords used?
- Is there a density level that is being maintained?
- Where in the body of the article are keywords used? Is one included in the first paragraph?
- Once you have completed this search, try to use the Find in Page function to search for one main word in the keyword, if it is a phrase. What, if any, stop words are used by the competitor?
Once you have finished inspecting this material, you should have an idea of the algorithm Google implements to deliver the most fitting answers to searches with given keywords. Use this information to adjust your own SEO tactics.
Step 7: Check Your Website for Duplicate Content
You have most likely encountered the problem of duplication before when dealing with a Public Relations or Advertising firm. It has been widely accepted for a long period of time that you will be adversely affected in terms of search engine rankings if you copy content. Despite this, Google is conscious that some copied material is not intended to do harm and will rank one page higher than the other.
This is a simple solution if both websites are under your control. In any case, if one of your web pages has been utilized on another website without your consent, then you have a concern. Use Copyscape to check your website for duplication.
Step 8: Check Your Social Media Pages
Considering the topic at hand is social media, it is advisable to take a look at the websites where your company is actively engaged. This could involve utilizing LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and perhaps Pinterest. If you are curious about the relation between social media and SEO, now is an opportune time to point out that social media can be a huge advantage for your SEO efforts.
When people show appreciation for your content by sharing it with others, who then spread it further by repeating your tweets or Facebook posts that have a link to your website, these are all considered to be inbound links to your website. If you need additional data concerning this topic, an excellent resource is The B2B Social Media Book: Becoming a Marketing Superstar authored by Kipp Bodnar and Jeffrey L. Cohen.
Once that is resolved, here are some of the elements you should consider when extending your SEO evaluation to your online media accounts. We will sort them out into the appropriate groups to limit any potential misunderstanding.
LinkedIn:
- Number of mutual connections
- Number of people who view your profile on a regular basis
- Number of views your posts receive
- Amount of searches your personal or business page appears in
Facebook:
- Number of likes and follows on your Facebook business page
- Business review rating
- Number of people who have recommended your business
- Level of engagement of your followers
- Click-through rate on your ads
Twitter:
- Number of followers on your page
- Number of tweet impressions
- Number of profile visits
- Number of mentions
- The kind of content that becomes your top tweets
Instagram:
- Number of followers
- Number of page visits in the past week
- Average number of likes per photo
- Number of accounts reached
- Number of impressions
- Photos people engage with most
Step 9: Check the Spam Score of Your Backlinks
Backlinks remain the most effective method to move up the search engine optimization rankings. Regardless of all the other available strategies, this is by far the best way to improve positioning in searches. Many SEO workers have falsely convinced clients that the more backlinks, the better it is. Nonetheless, the standard of connections to your website can be a worry for your business. If links are being sent from unprofessional websites, this could have a negative effect on your small business website. Here is a method to evaluate the quality of the links that direct to your website.
- Create an account with Open Site Explorer.
- Type in the URL of your business and click the search icon.
- Click Inbound links in the left-hand tab and scroll down to see the inbound links to your website.
- Check the spam score or spam percentage of the websites linking in.
Step 10: Resolve Search Engine Optimization Issues
At the beginning of this guide, we discussed the various advantages that you can gain when you have a successful SEO analysis. Nonetheless, it is unfeasible to take advantage of these gains without dealing with the difficulties and refining your SEO strategies. In conclusion, here are some recommendations and solutions for typical SEO issues you may come across in the course of your audit.
Enrich Thin Content
Google punishes websites for having too little content. Thin content is any website material or blog posts that fail to offer significant insight and don’t present any elements that Google can use in its search results. In order to avoid the punishment for weak content, you must either get rid of or make fuller and more detailed thin posts on your website.
Improve Your Page Titles
The best way to word your page titles should be to use the primary keyword that your business uses, the geographic location of your company, and the name of your enterprise. It can be attractive to include a lot of info in page titles, but it is best to aim for 60 characters or less.
Optimize Your Meta Description
When search engines such as Google include your website in their search results, the description they display will be taken from the meta description on your site. Utilize the meta description for the entire website, separate pages, and blog entries to improve your SEO. Do not excessively use keywords when you write, but don’t let it take over.
Revise Your URLs
It is not usual for individuals to take into consideration URLs in the normal operations of a business, even when talking about search engine optimization. The arrangement of your page links may be responsible for the low number of visitors to your small business website. Good URLs meet the following specifications.
- Are 244 characters or less, including the domain name
- Includes keywords, but is not packed with keywords
- Uses hyphens to separate the words, rather than jumble them all together
Conclusion
In order to improve your website, utilize the SEO audit procedures intended for small businesses highlighted above. The following steps can be taken to evaluate the current condition of your website, as well as your online visibility. This knowledge can be used to strengthen your SEO tactics, enhance search engine rankings and boost traffic, thus leading to more customers.
