As a business owner, if you want to improve your ranking in local searches, you need to conduct a local SEO audit.
To beat your competition, figure out where you stand in relation to them, what needs to be improved, and come up with a plan to surpass them.
An audit is simply a way for someone to check up on your work to ensure that everything is being done correctly. An audit is nothing to be afraid of – it’s just someone checking to make sure you’re doing everything right. This guide will help you audit your local area in less than 30 minutes by using our checklist.
Quick Audit #1: Updating Google My Business Listings
Local SEO relies heavily on Google My Business listings. Here are some tips for auditing your GMB listings:
1. Do You Have Any Duplicate Listings?
Find and destroy any duplicate Google My Business pages. One of the greatest threats to your local SEO is duplicate listings.
2. Check Whether Your Listings Have Received A Penalty.
A manual penalty is a penalty that is levied by a human employee, whereas an algorithm penalty is a penalty that is levied by a search engine. Since Google does not notify about penalties, it is difficult to find them. These penalties will be listed under “Manual Actions” in your Google Search Console account.
3. Is Your Business Listing Verified And Claimed?
Make sure your business is listed on GMB and claim your listing to get the most out of the service.
4. Are You Using Proper Categories?
Google states that you should use all categories that describe your business and not what it does.
5. Do Your Listings Have Images And Videos Of Your Business?
It is important to have photos that accurately represent your business and are high quality. If not, change them immediately.
Quick Audit #2: Managing Reviews
There is no denying that online reviews are important, whether you are a local or national business. Reviews are a pain for local businesses and are often ignored. They are not easy to obtain or control.
If you are auditing reviews for your local business, consider these factors:
1. Do They Have A Positive Sentiment?
Your ranking on the first result will not generate any business for you if all the reviews are one-star. Develop a strategy to get at least four-star ratings for top-ranking pages that do not have positive reviews.
2. Is There Any Spam Or Fake Reviews?
If your company has fake reviews, it will lose the trust of its audience. Look for fake or spammy reviews. Report them to Google.
Spam reviews usually take three days to be removed. If you don’t receive a response from Google within three days, you can try contacting them through Twitter or through their online chat service.
3. Are There Negative Reviews On Third-Party Sites?
Many industry-specific third-party sites accept business reviews from users. If there are negative reviews about your local business, this could be an indication that something is wrong. Investigate the problem before it explodes.
Quick Audit #3: Citations
Citation is how frequently your site gets mentioned online. NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone number. Having your NAP information listed correctly across major citation sources is important.
Regularly checking your business’s citations will clue you in on how often you’re being talked about online. Now, there are two citations: structured and unstructured.
- For structured citations, you will need to check local listings across the web, looking at the social media platforms and business directories like Yelp, Yellow Pages, Facebook, MapQuest, etc.
- Meanwhile, you can find unstructured citations on any website. They are unstructured because they can be as simple as your business name.
Here’s How To Conduct A Citation Audit:
1. Is Your NAP Consistent Across Major Citation Sources?
NAP is an acronym for your business’s name, address, and phone number. Make sure that your name, address, and phone number (NAP) are all the same across all of your online platforms. Having different NAP information on different websites can make it difficult for customers to find your business, and also confuses search engines trying to direct people to your site.
2. Has Your Business Moved Locations Or Changed Telephone Numbers Recently?
Have you updated the information on all the citation sites if the answer is yes?
3. Are Any Of The Citations Incomplete, Unverified, Or Unclaimed?
If yes, complete the 100%.
Quick Audit #4: Audit Your Rankings
Tracking your ranking is an essential part of SEO. The best way to track your progress is by keeping track of your keywords. During this audit, you will be checking where your site ranks for certain keywords.
- Use the local keyword tracker Local Search Grid tool to investigate how your business performs in local search. It will help you see clearly, who is winning and who is losing rankings for specific keywords in your local area.
Quick Audit #5: Content Audit
The content on your website needs to be authentic and relevant to your business and industry in order for any kind of SEO to be effective. In addition to national content, businesses should also consider adding local content to their marketing mix.
Many local businesses overlook the issue of duplicate content. Duplicate content can hinder your site’s visibility in local searches and lead to several problems, such as:
- Search engines may get confused about prioritization and show unexpected results.
- Content will not perform well on SERPs or may face problems with indexing.
Follow The Steps Below To Audit Your Local SEO Content:
1. Do You Have Local Content On Your Site?
If you are a yoga studio in the Bay Area, you could write a post titled “Top 10 natural food stores to stay healthy in the Bay Area”. This would be an example of how you could use your location to write relevant content for your audience. If you don’t have local content on your website, create a content strategy to add it.
2. Do You Have Duplicate Content?
If yes, delete all unnecessary duplicate content. If you want your original content to be given priority in search results, you can add canonical tags.
Quick Audit #6: Website And Landing Pages
A website is a necessary part of any SEO campaign. It is important to check your website regularly to make sure there are no issues that could be hurting your local search ranking.
Here Is How To Conduct Website Audits:
1. Is Your Website Mobile-Friendly?
Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites. The Mobile-Friendly Test tool checks to see if your website is configured properly for viewing on mobile devices. You should make your website mobile responsive if it is not already.
2. Do You Have Any Orphaned Pages?
Pages on a website that cannot be accessed from other pages on the same site. This means that even though a page is listed in a website’s sitemap, there is no guarantee that it will be indexed by a search engine. In order for these pages to be visible, they need to be linked to indexed pages.
3. Check If You Have A Proper Protocol? HTTP Or HTTPS?
Data transferred over the HTTP version is not secured. If you only have the HTTP version, you should switch to HTTPS to improve security. google.com/a/yourdomain.com to your domain. To secure your domain, add an SSL certificate from sites.google.com/a/yourdomain.com.
5 easy SEO quick wins you should implement immediately
Optimize title tags
When it comes to optimizing your titles for SEO, it is a no-brainer.
Good title tags not only improve the relevance of your pages for certain keywords, but they can also increase the click-through rate (CTR) of your pages in Google Search results.
Unless your website contains thousands of pages, optimization of title tags is a pretty fast and straightforward process – just keep in mind a few important practices when writing your title texts:
a) Include a focus keyword
To rank for a specific search query, you must put that keyword in your title tag.
When creating a title for your blog post, it is a good idea to place the focus keyword at the beginning. This will help to catch the reader’s attention more quickly.
b) Keep an optimal length
Titles should be no more than 50-60 characters to avoid being cut off by Google.
Use concise and accurate title tags so they can be displayed in full in the search engine results pages.
c) Be unique
It can be difficult to come up with an original title, but try to make your title stand out from the other search results.
Here are a few tips that you can use to write more eye-catching titles that might attract more users:
- Write questions – titles in a form of a question can usually catch the reader’s attention quicker (especially if it is the exact question they typed as a search query).
- Include numbers – titles like “10 useful tips for … ” or “7 types of …” simply never get old and are still popular on the internet.
- Use special symbols and characters – brackets, dashes, pipes, or any other peculiar characters can act as visual elements that break the boring and uniform title text.
- Include your brand – writing the brand name at the end of the title tag is a common practice that provides an opportunity to present your website (or company) right in the SERP.
Add structured data markup (for rich results)
Adding structured data to your website can increase your click-through rate on the search engine results page, and make your page more relevant to the search engine.
Structured data are most useful when there are not many competing websites using them.
If you use structured data, you will not go wrong, even though it doesn’t always trigger a rich result.
There are also a few quick tips that you should keep in mind:
Do not add unnecessary schema markup just for the sake of it. Always try to choose relevant and useful markups for users.
When adding structured data to your website, prioritize the pages that are already performing well in search results. These are the most likely to be displayed as rich results.
Optimize your images
The size of an image can have a big impact on how fast a page loads.
Images take up, on average, half the size of an entire web page.
Google ranks pages based on their speed, so it’s always a good idea to reduce the size of your images to improve your page ranking.
Here are a few tips on how:
a) Resize large images
The therapist suggested that I try to use dimensions that would fit my page width, with a few pixels to spare.
It is usually best to use images that are only slightly bigger than the width of your page.
You should use images that are appropriate for the width of your page. For example, if your page on the blog has a width of about 1000px, you should use images that are also about 1000px wide.
b) Use proper file formats
The format of your images is important for their file size.
The three most popular file formats are JPEG, PNG, and GIF.
In general, you should convert most of your PNG images into JPEGs (which will decrease the file size of your images significantly) – on the other hand, there is a number of exceptions that dictate which image format should be used over the other:
- JPEG – the most common file format with the smallest file size, it is usually recommended for classic photos.
- PNG – the file format is usually recommended for illustrations, screenshots, or images with sharp text
- GIF – very limited format that is recommended for simple short image animations
c) Compress your images
When you compress an image, you decrease the file size without losing much of its quality.
The amount of compression you can use on an image depends on the quality of the original image. Use less compression if you want a higher quality image, or more compression if you want a smaller file size.
In addition to the technical side of images, you should also be sure to pay attention to their alt text descriptions. These descriptions can have an impact on how your page performs in Google search results.
Optimize pages for featured snippets
If you want to outrank your competition and appear at the top of the search engine results page, a good strategy is to optimize your content for featured snippets.
Featured Snippets may not get as many clicks as the #1 search result, but they can still significantly increase the click-through rate (CTR) for pages that are ranking lower in the search engine results page (SERP), such as on the 5th or 8th position.
If you want an easy win that will improve your ranking positions, Featured Snippet is a good option – even if there are stronger competitors than you.
There is no surefire way to win a featured snippet, but you can improve your content and increase your chances of appearing at the top of SERPs.
a) Aim for question-type search queries
Tools like KWFinder can help you figure out what questions people are typing into Google, and then you can provide a brief, clear answer to those queries.
b) Answer in the “inverted pyramid” style
What is the best way to phrased questions? The best way to phrased questions is to answer the question query with the most important information first, followed by additional details and context.
If you want your content to be used for a featured snippet, you should use the “inverted pyramid” style.
c) Format your content
Featured snippets pull information from a webpage to display in a special featured section of the search results. The webpage must be formatted in a certain way for the snippet to appear.
The most commons ones that can be used by Google are:
- simple paragraph
- bullet-pointed list
- numbered list
- tables
- graphs
When optimizing your content, it is best to stick to specific formats. This will increase your chances of your page appearing as a featured snippet at the top of the SERP.
Add the “About us” page & author bio
According to Google Quality Guidelines, pages like “About us”, “Customer service” or even pages with contact information improve the website’s rating. Google quality raters should evaluate who created and is responsible for the website, according to the document.
