Search Engine Optimization is a fast-changing field that is constantly moving and shifting as Google keeps changing the rules about how they operate. Part of the problem is that Google doesn’t tell us exactly what those changes are as they protect their algorithms are top secret.
Because of this, there is a lot of misinformation surrounding SEO and how to best make it on the first page of Google. Here are a 4 of the most common myths that we’d like to dispel.
In this blog post, we’re going to show you how to do an SEO audit.
If you’re like a lot of businesses out there, you’re probably not getting the traction to your website that you want. You have a great-looking website, you have a great product or service yet you aren’t getting enough sales. What went wrong?
Well the first thing you need to do perform an SEO audit to see where you stand and what improvements need to be made.
As a business owner, you should know what a SEO Audit is, and why it is crucial for your online presence. You need to identify issues that could and would prevent your website from being ranked on any search engines.
SEO Audits gives you a precise and detailed perception that gives you an overview of your site’s online presence. Ignoring these identifying issues, and your efforts will be in vain.
In other words, your hard work will be paid off once you regularly audit your site. Also, this will make sure it’s properly crawled and indexed.
Pro tip: To make your content stand out, discerning content-related issues, indexing, proper use of backlink analysis, learning site architecture, and social media engagement are important factors to use in your internet marketing.
These components when understood and practiced will be important in helping you to identify strengths, weaknesses, and your website’s potential in gaining traction online.
Keep in mind that when you lose out all on the traffic, your possible sales will go down the drain. Quite the opposite when you regularly audit your website.
So how does SEO Audit procedure go? Here are tools you need to know:
The Crawl: This procedure is so important that you need to run it first before you do the other steps. Why is this important? Because this is where you identify your website’s problems, i.e., duplicate contents, low word count, unlinked pagination pages, excess redirects.
With the exception of the limited checked pages, there is no need to edit any settings. However, if the need arises, remove URL parameters, bypass restrictions, or allow or disallow some URLs.
As you scroll down the page, ‘Top SEO Issues’ will appear. Click on any of the URL for more information on your website’s issues. This way, you can review the pages; decide whether you need additional content. It’s crucial that you’ll have an insight on how Googlebot is crawling your site. You’ll know when your site is ranking well by manually searching your site.
When looking for relevant search results, how many of your pages pop up after? Do they come up first in the list when searching your site? Do you see your site in the list of end results when giving assessments?
Keep in mind though that despite your page’s not being at the top rank, it doesn’t mean that your page is uncrawlable, it only suggests that you need to realize the problem and what needs to be done.
You need to do this procedure in order to know if your page’s variation is in the right arrangement, in combination with duplicates. How do you do this? Go to Google and run a “site:domain.com.”
This will list indexed URLs for your domain. If you have mix site versions, then you potentially need to addressed to it. It’s important to run site search in order to have a preview of any used subdomains.
Checking your site’s indexed URLs is another procedure, it’s like running the same procedure as the above. You’ll be surprised to see a few pages Google has indexed after doing this.
Are these the results that you expect after a search? Then if not, there’s an issue that needs to be fixed. (The main culprit is usually the faceted navigation needs to be indexed). However, if it’s less than what you expected, your site then is being crawled or indexed.
Seeing a drop in your site’s ranking or failing to rank high as it should be is anticipated once your site has violated Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines; this is where Manual Penalty comes in. If your brand does not rank then your site will be deindexed.
You can avoid this by checking in to see whether a manual action has been issued against your site by using the Search Console; look for:
You can relax if you see the result with a green check. On the other hand, if an issue appears in a list, then you need a Manual Actions Report.
It has been an important factor for Mobile Ranking for a long time. Remember that User Experience is prevalent in SEO success so site speed is important.
In fact, data shows that if there’s a significant bouncing from a user, this increases a slower page load. The faster the page loads, the better result from SEO and UX perspectives. Use SEMrush Site Audit report to see load time statistics and list of highlighted errors.
Implementing an SSL certificate is important if your site runs on HTTP. Once you run https://www.domain.com in your browser and see that your site remains on the HTTP protocol you can relax and head on to the next step. On the other hand, you need to address this issue if you are redirected to an HTTP version.
Make sure to keep up with the trend of having a mobile-friendly site. UX is a must if you expect to reach the top. You can check this on Search Console, look for Enhancements tab in the Mobile Usability section for any issues.
How to analyze and resolve indexation issues? You will see valid pages or ones that have warning, plus, excluded pages as well as coverage errors, if you go to the index tab of the Coverage page in Google Search Console.
Prevention of site from being crawled and indexed is expected if there are underlying issues. Address this ASAP! Underlying common errors include:
Excluded URLs are pages that are not currently in Google’s index. This includes:
Deeply analyze the report and only clean the areas of concern. Of course, these reports don’t need to always be cleaned up. Usually, there are specific reasons these exclusions happen, i.e., due to site migrations. Those are the best moment to clean those reports.
Page user experience is the main goal in Google’s future objectives. A combination of Core Web Vitals signals with Google’s for a better Search ranking which gives better metrics for page user experience is a feat.
Be a social media butterfly. Use social media as your tool for your SEO efforts. Let the dynamics of this platform be a conduit for consistent backlinks and engagement. It has the power to increase the number of your backlinks.
Those who follow your content might be more likely to link to it. This increases your brand awareness through queries about your brand. Also, let us not forget the “mentions” and “tags” that social media can offer to your brand.
As we take everything into account, we have touched on some techniques on how to do SEO Audit. We have given tools and procedures on how to fix issues and deal with it to keep your site up to its rank.
Always bear in mind that search engine algorithms, best practices, market trends, and most especially your competitors are always keeping track. So make it a habit to keep your site up to date; address issues immediately after audit. Eliminate duplicates. Monitor your site analytics, and make sure you’re engaging in any social media platforms.
The more your presence you have in social media, the further you’ll push your relevant search terms. Be consistent, and your SEO ranking will soon reach the peak of success.
An SEO audit may not ring a bell for someone who does not consider himself a web design expert, but it is a task that anyone with basic SEO knowledge can perform. Ask anyone who knows a thing or two about how business websites should perform to succeed, and you will realize how critical a regular audit is.
A business or brand that is trying to achieve relevance through digital marketing must learn to embrace the competition. The only way to keep up is to create and run a website that brings in traffic and conversions. This is where the concept of search engine optimization comes in.
You may be able to build a website and apply an SEO strategy for it, but you do not expect your site to run on autopilot. In other words, you must have a clear understanding of how your website is performing based on the SEO strategies you are using. Hence, the sole purpose of an SEO audit is to figure out how well is your business website performing.
The audit will check the health of your website with an emphasis on the presence of spam. Doing SEO audits regularly makes sense because Google has this habit of altering its algorithms in ranking websites. Simply put, you are doing it to keep up with what is new.
An SEO audit is likened to that of multiple-point car inspection. It examines your website to see how it functions and performs compared to the rest of the market. The audit essentially covers the following:
Enough of the introduction, here are the components of a comprehensive SEO audit:
1 – Site Crawl
A site crawl is the most efficient method of assessing the state of your website in its current form. It also gives you a preview of the issues that may need to be resolved sooner than later. Site crawling essentially creates an outline for the entire SEO audit.
The site crawl will cover areas like the structure of your URL, content, meta descriptions, images, links, and the structure of your website. You ask questions like how well your content is formatted and if it is fresh. Do you have a unique meta description per page? Does your website have enough links per page and do all of them work?
Furthermore, site crawling should also include the analysis of your landing page and its relationship with the inner pages. The landing page is where your site builds an initial impression, so it needs to be user-friendly and intuitive.
2 – Page Speed Analysis
Page load speed plays a critical role in keeping your site visitors motivated in browsing your site further. 60% of users will find their way out of a website when it takes more than three seconds to load. So, if your website takes too long to load pages, it will have a negative impact on conversions and will increase bounce rates. In performing an SEO audit with an emphasis on page speed, you can use a handful of free tools, including Google’s Page Speed Insights and YSlow. It is crucial to learn about your page load speed since that is the only way to figure out if there is a need to fix some elements in the design.
3 – Site Architecture Assessment
Your website needs a solid structure for it to rank high in Google. It is merely about using the right keywords and relevant content. One aspect that you should focus on is user experience, and for you to ensure that prospective clients end up liking your site, you must improve its architecture.
So, how do you improve site architecture? As you have guessed it already, you must perform an SEO audit. The audit examines things like the sitemap and URL structure. The result of the audit will also tell you if your main webpages are listed and positioned correctly and if site visitors will not have a hard time navigating through the inner pages and links.
4 – Content
Content plays an indispensable role in the effectiveness and success of your website. The failure to refresh or update content will hurt your site’s rank, so it is not merely about inserting unique and relevant information. Even if on-page content is unique and relevant, it still needs to be updated regularly since Google looks at it with a critical eye. Hence, your SEO audit should include an examination of your content.
See to it that you are using the keywords in your content naturally. It also must be consistent since the objective is to prevent being labeled as spam.
Part of examining your content is taking a closer look at the tags. Check if title tags have two salient qualities – concise and descriptive. Be reminded that extra-long titles are never a good thing for search engines.
5 – Checking the Backlinks
You probably know by now that backlinks are a crucial element of SEO. Google will grade the quality of your website based on the quality of the sites that link to it. It was prevalent back in the day to exchange reciprocal links with other websites to improve SEO. It is no longer an effective practice today, but backlinks are still relevant. This time, backlinks are more about quality instead of quantity. Therefore, you should verify in your SEO audit if the websites that links to your site come from reputable domains.
Like I said at the beginning of this post, SEO audit does not have to be an overwhelming task. You can do it with the help of a tool that is readily available online. All you must do is pick the right one based on your budget and specific needs.
The first and most sensible option is Google Analytics. As someone tasked to market your brand and optimize a website, this tool is a must-have. It does not only help you by providing critical indicators of SEO metrics but will also hand out a user-friendly guide in performing SEO.
Another option is Google Webmaster Tools. It is a platform that offers a handful of reasonably priced tools needed for an SEO audit. Its most notable advantage is that you can check your website’s SEO performance based on how Google sees it. Since you are hoping to have your site ranked on top of Google, then it makes sense to use this tool.
In this comprehensive Local SEO guide, we’re going to show you how you can win at search ranking in 2021.
Small and medium-sized businesses rely on local search more than ever. Seven out of 10 consumers search Google to obtain local information. So, if your business website isn’t optimized for local search, you’re likely missing out on more than half of your prospective clients.
With so many changes every year, you feel a ton of pressure to update your SEO strategy. But it won’t matter if you’re not into local SEO.
You lost some ground last year, but this year is your chance for redemption. Build upon local SEO to keep your brand relevant, and this article serves as your comprehensive SEO guide.
Start with Google My Business listing – If you haven’t done so, set up a Google My Business listing. It’s the digital equivalent of the Yellow Pages. If you intend to rank in the local search, a GMB listing makes perfect sense.
There’s no reason to skip this step – it carries weight in local SEO, plus setting it up takes minutes. See to it that you put all the details about your business.
This must include your products/services, the main business category, and the secondary business category. Filling out the subcategory is critical in your Google Maps rank.
List your business in online directories – GMB isn’t the only listing out there. List your business in other relevant online directories, but don’t overdo it.
The key term is “relevant” since all the others are trash and won’t do your business any good concerning local SEO. Focus your effort and time on these directories:
Review your NAP information – Be consistent with the business information you put on your listings, especially the name and place. Google wants the information to be accurate for it to trust your business.
Even an honest mistake on inputting the wrong phone number could become a red flag for Google, giving it a reason to stop displaying your listing. Even the smallest details must be consistent, like how you write abbreviations and company suffixes. If you prefer “inc.” instead of “incorporated,” do it in all your listings.
Focus on local keywords – Shift your attention to local keywords this year, but don’t ignore the value of long-tail keywords for your business, too. If you didn’t climb up to the SERPs last year, you might have undermined keyword research value.
This time see to it that you compare search volumes for a couple of almost similar search terms. You may feel like there’s no point in it, but there’s a significant difference in impact for “roof repair, Vancouver” versus “roof repair, VBC.”
Rethink your SEO strategy by using local keywords – Once you’ve figured out a new set of local keywords, the next step is to optimize your business website with them.
This isn’t a newfound strategy, yet it’s still as useful and indispensable this year as it was a decade ago. Optimizing your site is no cakewalk as it involves several components that are worthy of a separate discussion.
Anyhow, the fundamental rule is for your homepage and the product/service pages to showcase the local keywords, specifically in the following:
Gone were the days when you can insert keywords while ignoring the natural flow of content. Google hates keyword stuffing and unnatural placements, so see that you’re putting value to your content by flawlessly incorporating the local keywords.
Create local content – It only makes sense to fill your pages with local content since you’re shifting to local SEO this year. Unfortunately, your current content marketing strategy is all but local.
You’ve learned a while back that non-local content reaches a broader audience (and supposedly more web traffic), but you can’t take full advantage of it since you’re a local business. Maximizing your efforts in content marketing for an improved lead generation means creating local content.
Create a mobile-friendly website – You may skip this part if you’ve done this already, and we’d be surprised if you haven’t. You know how impactful a mobile-friendly website is for SEO in general, and it’s essential for local SEO, too.
Almost 40% of mobile searches are location focused. It means that almost half of consumers who stumble upon your site via a local search are using their mobile devices. Imagine the number of opportunities you’re missing out if your site isn’t mobile responsive. That’s scary.
Place value on inbound links – Inbound links boost local SEO when you know how to do it right. Put some effort in building those links this year but focus on the proven strategies.
Come up with a list of acquaintances who are in some way related to your business, i.e., wholesalers, contractors, business partners, and suppliers. Search for relevant pages on their respective websites where you’re allowed to place contextual links.
You’ll use this link to contact those businesses and then recommend the link placements. Aside from this strategy, you can also generate inbound links via guest posting. Offer to write content for related businesses with the condition that you place a link to your site.
Create location pages – If you happen to have branches of your business, then you must rank in local searches in those areas, too. The most convenient way to do this is by creating location pages.
Come up with a service page for each city instead of having just one service page for all your branches. You may optimize these pages for local search terms. But be sure that you use unique content for each page. The last thing you want is for Google to see it as duplicate content.
Though you’re setting your sights on local SEO for 2021, don’t turn your back on traditional SEO. Remember that Google factors in your website’s ranking in organic SERPs in local SEO.
The lack of implementation of some of the components of traditional SEO may even adversely affect local SEO.
Take this SEO guide and make the best of simple practices to make a profit of your website… but if you don´t have time, experience or any other related, then call us. Best SEO in Canada is here to help you out.
It’s a great accomplishment when you reach the first page of Google. You probably have an influx of clients and a boost in revenue. All those blogs, white papers, website links, and digital marketing efforts are finally paying off. You’re successful enough that you don’t have time, or perhaps the will, to market yourself. After all you’re a success so that means you can take your foot off the pedal, right?
WRONG!
Guys- keyword stuffing kills your SEO.
SEO and keywords go hand in hand. Arguably one of the most important aspects of sound SEO, keywords play an insanely vital role in your search engine placement.
They are the link between what your potential clients are searching for, and when/how thy view your business online.
Singular words, or phrases- keywords help connect search engine users to your online content. Keywords are found everywhere within your online strategy- social media, your website, PPC and even Youtube!
Too little, or the wrong keywords? You may as well be sleeping on the Internet.
With that being said, it would make sense to choose a few top performing keywords and use them everywhere and as much as possible. The more the merrier, right?
And the more anchors you have to your line content from each search, the more you will be seen.
Well, no. Not at all actually. The intelligence of search engines far surpasses shoddy practices like keyword stuffing- among others, like backlink farming, spam ads and duplicate content.
Funnily enough, keyword stuffing used to be considered a leading SEO practice.
Loading the same keywords into every area of your online content- both the front and back end – used to gain an unfair rank advantage in search engines. The top SEO experts would stuff the same few keywords in their meta tags, content, backlink anchor text, alt images etc. for simply better SERP rankings.
But even back in the days where it was acceptable, it was still spammy and annoying- but Google and other search engines found it downright devious in a world where transparency and genuineness is heavily demanded online.
You will 100% be penalized for keyword stuffing, but it doesn’t mean that content curators out there don’t do still do it for rankings until they are caught.
The minute Google noticed the amount of keyword stuffing going on out there, they were quick to crack down and implement strict guidelines on how repetitive you could actually get when curating content.
Seriously, they wrote an article about it.
And why goes Google care so much about keyword stuffing? The answer to that lies in the user experience. Google wants to uphold themselves as the search engine that delivers valid and helpful answers- if they can’t, people will just use other sources.
To increase the quality of each searchers experience, Google updated their algorithm to scan and point out keyword stuffing. If you’re manipulating your SERP rankings, rather than earning it, your content will be penalized.
And really, it’s not all about Google and SERP rankings. Don’t forget, actual humans read your content- and it’s them that will be the true qualified leads and sales. Keyword stuffing can never sound natural, and it will never sound genuine. To the average human, it will read as robotic and repetitive and that’s bad online marketing all around.
Of course, there is no easy answer to this question. It’s a total grey area.
Keyword stuffing vs. keyword optimization is a tricky thing for even SEO experts to master. The execution of just the right amount of keywords and strategic placement is an art in itself.
At the end of the day, you’re satisfying the need for transparent and genuine content for the user with the demands of a robotic search engine.
And that’s tough. But what you’re aiming to achieve is health keyword optimization, working natural and true content around a few keywords that accurately describe your business.
Healthy keyword optimization does not force content based on leading searches- it will mirror what your business offers and what your specific market is searching for.
Your content should also provide helpful, relevant content specific to your business as a primary goal, with strategic placement of relevant keywords as a second goal.
As with a lot of content creation, there isn’t a black and white rule to avoid keyword stuffing. At RAD, we do use a benchmark that helps us create natural, engaging content. Without the use of repeated keywords every two sentences.
We write with keyword density in mind.
There are some companies (and sadly, agencies) that will try and by-pass this by putting text on the page that is the same color as it’s background. Readers can’t see it, but search engine crawlers can.
PSA- Google knows, and you’ll be penalized.
Others repeat keywords in comments, reviews, in the sites code and more to again, trick the search engine crawlers but not interrupt the user experience.
Again, Google is smarter than most of us and will catch it.
The best way to avoid keyword stuffing is by curating raw, real and smart content. That engages readers on a natural level. Your website will rank higher on the SERP engine- and stay there- by appeasing Google AND your readers. Yes, it will take longer- great SEO is gradual and requires consistent work. If your work is wholesome and true, your place on the SERP will be as well.
As if there wasn’t enough to add to SEO best practices, we want to touch on backlinks.
Okay, no- we really want to dive into backlinks, because they are just that important.
As Kelowna’s leading premier WordPress marketing agency, we work around the clock to boost our clients search engine ranking. Our toolbox is full – website development, content creation, keyword research, social stacking- but backlink building is always directly on our radar.
We’re not going to lie to you; even as SEO professionals, backlink building is hard. Backlinks are a huge part of SEO best practices, but take time and knowledge to build.
Referred to as “online citations”, backlinks are simply links to your website, or web resource, from an external website, or web source. Web sources can mean articles, directories, online archives etc. They act as a vouch of confidence for your website and content, both to users and search engines.
Backlinks are typically the hyperlinks you see in articles (you know, the clickable text underlined in blue) but can also be image tags, social stacking or listings.
Rad- we’ve got the textbook definitions out the way.
Now let’s talk about how backlinks are super essential for your website- and why.
Yes. 100% they do.
Good quality, reputable backlinks boost your SERP pretty aggressively and actively contribute to your overall online marketing.
That’s why prior to Google’s Penguin algorithm update, SEO professionals around the globe were doing anything they could to gain backlinks.
Take a wild guess how Google felt about that. Let’s back up a little.
The obsession with backlinks began in response to Larry Page’s algorithm contribution- PageRank. This particular algorithm basically determined the order of search results- so who would show up or not. PageRank was the first algorithm ever used by Google to index sites and use this index to determine websites rankings.
Guess what PageRank focused super, super heavily on?
Backlinks. Once the cat was out of the bag, the frenzy of every SEO professional around to get as many backlinks as possible to boost their SERP ranking began.
It was seriously like wildfire. Experts starting bypassing the natural requirements of the algorithm- clean, quality backlinks, and creating backlink farms (as we cover later.)
They are a prime example of speaking both to the user and search engines.
Backlinks indicate trust, relevancy and authority to search engine crawlers. By another reputable site linking to yours, they are vouching for your site and letting Google know that “hey, they’re great.” It accelerates your exposure to Google bots and get your site indexed faster. Good quality backlinks produce “linkjuice” which is credible equity from one site to another. The more juice you have given to you, the stronger your site will perform in search results.
Kind of like, Redbull giving you wings. Popeye and spinach. You get the idea.
Backlinks provide you with referral traffic. And who doesn’t want extra traffic to their website? Better yet, the traffic coming from these high quality backlinks is going to be pretty targeted and relevant to you. Free traffic is pretty rad. Search engines think so too- the more quality traffic you drive to your site, the more they notice you and the more likely they are to index you with a little love.
Hyperlinks, our little blue text links (or anchor links) even help with your specific keyword ranking. Google crawlers go as far as to see how much “support’ you have for any given keyword on your website’s pages. If they find your keyword relevant to the rest of you, it will boost your exposure on that single key term as well.
Backlinks aren’t all for the search engine though. Remember- there’s a user on the other end of the computer.
Backlinks give you great brand recognition and exposure. They act as somewhat of a review- a link to your site from a credible site will not only promote your brand but also – again- vouch to the user that your website is A-Okay. Repeated mention of your website throughout credible sources just adds to brand recognition; people see your brand and begin to recognize it within their online experiences.
Backlink farming is the very reason Google’s Penguin update ever came into effect.
Like we mentioned earlier, SEO experts were desperate to get hundreds of backlinks for their site once the ball dropped on PageRank- Google’s first algorithm for ranking that focused lots on backlinks.
Of course, deceptions of this algorithm were pretty easy to brew up (likely why Google stays so hush-hush about their algorithms nowadays.) By creating networks of spam websites and directories with the sole purpose of all linking to each other, paying your way into hundreds of unearned backlinks became a widely used tactic in every level of SEO out there.
That’s where the ability for site crawlers to determine the quality of the links, not just the number of them, was born.
And it’s fair. Reputable backlinks are built on trust, relationship building and genuine online presence.
Backlink farming is still a grey area. While giant networks and rings are easy to define as backlink farms, there are operating businesses out there that offer backlinks in return for pay. Crowned “black hat SEO”, buying backlinks poses as “backlink strategy growth” and still remains…..questionable.
Buying backlinks might grab you some short term SERP rankings. You might even get away with it for a while and see a huge change in your website analytics and rankings. But once Google figures you out, you can kiss goodbye to your growth – buying backlinks is a direct violation of Google’s advertising code.
Listen, don’t shoot the messenger, ok? Buying backlinks is so much easier than organically building them and can seem like a great option for those wanting to really boost their site.
We get it, honestly we do. But it’s really not worth it.
Organically growing backlinks takes time and effort, but it will pay off.
Now, we can’t let our own cat out of the bag and give away all the secrets.
But, here’s some practices you can undertake to start building an army of reputable backlinks:
Add links on all your social media profiles – (hey, social stacking!)
Monitor your best performing posts and pages, and expand them routinely.
Create content that is useful and exciting to a reader- content that helps them solve a problem and share it among their networks for the same reason
Off page, build relationships with influencers, industry leaders and bloggers to trade valuable backlinks. Believe it or not, you can also strategically work with your competitors to do the same thing!
Monitor your competitors backlinks, and look to see if you can also be placed within those sources as well.
Google is constantly changing their algorithms and it’s the job of SEO experts to stay on top of them so here are some of the major changes Google has made this year.
