Improve your Search Rankings with a Website Audit

You’ve probably spent heaps of time, energy and money building a great website for your company, so it is mandatory to take a few steps to ensure that your website is being properly indexed in search engines like Google. Below we’ll show you some necessary steps in order to improve your search rankings and get an edge on your business competitors.

Making sure your site is accessible by the search engine bots is extremely important and simple. Checking your robots.txt file of your website to ensure no content is being blocked from Google’s sight. Sometimes a simple oversight can make a huge difference in driving web traffic to your website.

Google’s Webmaster Tools interface makes it real easy to verify your website and submit your sitemap (a text file outlining all your web pages) so the web crawlers can easily index your website content and include this content in search results so your customers can find you!

Is your website properly optimised for SEO?

This is most times referred to as on-page optimisation. Having unique content that is relevant to your business is the most important on-page SEO item. Google stresses quality content over anything else these days so this is your primary goal, Content that is Unique and Relevant. You never want to repeat words and phrases over and over again just to emphasise your products or services, as this is considered spamming and Google will penalise you for this. As long as you keep your content aimed at your potential customer and not for search engine bots you will be fine. Long gone are the days where you can trick the search engines with spammy techniques.

Check the URL of your posts and pages to make sure you are not using random numbers or words that make no sense. Words are good, however numbers are not helpful at all. Including a nicely worded phrase summarising what the page contains is the best way to structure your URLs.

For example if you are a plumber in Melbourne serving the eastern suburbs you could use a page URL structure like plumbing-services-in-east-melbourne.html for the Services page of your website.

What websites are linking to yours?

Websites that are closely related to what your business does are great for pointing links at your web pages. The more inbound links you have from high authority and high link juice sites the better. See our article about Link Juice for more details. This however is not to be confused with link farms and other spam techniques which will get you on Google’s bad side and ultimately off their search results altogether.

The steps above are only a few of the many steps that you need to follow to keep your business website competitive on the internet. Consult Netwizard SEO about a complete Site Audit and our Content Marketing program.