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This guide outlines the benefits of an SEO assessment and why you should not delay doing one.
You’re the pro when it comes to running the business. When it comes to making the most of search engine optimization, you’re not so sure of yourself. While you’ve dabbled in the process a little and even spent time reading a FAQ about SEO, you do wonder if there’s something more that you could do.
According to HubSpot’s State of Inbound report, expanding the company’s SEO practices and organic presence is a top priority for marketers – ahead of blogging content creation, content delivery and marketing automation. This data only helps to reinforce the need to put SEO assessment techniques into practice to achieve success in the digital world. It is not a luxury, but a necessity.
Do you want to be easily found by your potential customers to start good relationships that turn into sales? So getting the page optimization right is the first step in putting this into practice. Do some keyword searches related to your business on Google. Who are the companies that appear in the first places? If your business page were the first result you would have the opportunity to close more sales?
If a large part of the relationship between companies and customers has migrated to the internet, increasing your company’s visibility is the first step towards gaining more customers. Page optimization is a requirement for success. One solution is to have a professional conduct an SEO assessment of your online efforts.
Reasons to do a full SEO assessment
Here are some reasons why you should make that call today.
You’ve never had an SEO assessment before
For you, SEO has been more of a learn as you go strategy. In fact, you are just learning that there are consultants who can help with this type of thing. What would an assessment uncover about your efforts? Are they providing all the benefits that you want or is there room for improvement?
Having that first assessment can be an eye-opener. You’ll know more about what is working in terms of attracting positive attention and what may be holding you back. The good news is that along with evaluating the effort, that professional can provide some insights into how to make things better.
You’re not sure how to evaluate your efforts
You are familiar with some of the online tools that make it possible to identify keywords and learn how to use them. There are also tracking programs that you’ve looked at and gleaned some information. The truth is that you’re not sure how to use them effectively. That’s where the expert comes in.
A professional can identify online tools that make it easier to see what’s happening with your search engine rankings, organic traffic, and what traffic your ads are generating. Along the way, you’ll learn more about how to use the features in those tools. By the time the initial evaluation is done, you’ll know a lot more about how things are going and what can be done to build on any successes.
Using social media effectively is a mystery
You do have social media accounts for the business. There’s even some posts in place on each one of those accounts. What you’re not sure of is how to attract more attention to those posts. As part of the evaluation, an expert can provide some insights.
The best SEOs in Toronto will take a look at the company website, the blog, and the social media accounts. Utilizing all these resources in a unified manner can help drive more traffic to each one and make it easier to reach your targeted consumer base.
You want to improve the company’s online reputation
All your efforts should be aimed at doing more than attracting attention. When people do end up on any of your pages, they should like and trust what they see. That means investing in content that provides useful information on pages that are easy to navigate. It also means making sure that those readers can contact your business without having to jump through several hoops.
One of the suggestions that may arise from the assessment is redesigning some or all of the website pages. Fresh content, a cleaner look, and pages that load faster can accomplish quite a bit for your online reputation. If people like what they see and read, they’re more likely to share links with those in their networks.
Importance of SEO assessment
An SEO assessment allows the entrepreneur to have an insight into the impact of all the factors that influence the ranking of their page in search engines . This becomes even more important because of the frequent changes in ranking factors.
Until a few years ago, companies used some techniques to bypass search engines – such as using keywords without context, creating microsites just to use links that redirect to your site or buying links. However, none of these practices currently work.
Currently, algorithms are configured to value usability and relevance. When a user searches “What is SEO?” at Google, the priority is on results that can answer this question completely. For this to happen, several ranking factors are used. According to SEMRush, the main ones are:
Direct visits to the website
Length of stay on the site
Pages visited by session
bounce rate
reference domains
Number of backlinks
reference IPs
Number of follow-backlinks
Content size
Website Security (HTTPS)
anchor texts
keyword in anchor
Keyword in the body of the text
keyword density
Use of keyword in title
Use of keyword in meta description
Video embedded in the page
Considering the large number of factors that influence the optimization of your page, an SEO assessment needs to be done periodically to ensure the health of your website.
7 Steps to a complete SEO assessment
A really effective SEO assessment needs to evaluate many factors considered relevant by search engines. Therefore, we can divide it into three key points:
- Backend factors such as hosting and indexing
- Front-end factors such as keywords and content
- Quality of links and external references
Based on that, check out the 7 steps to an SEO analysis:
1. Track your page
The first step in your SEO assessment is to do a crawl – which is a routine to identify errors such as broken links, misused keywords, poor quality images, duplicate content, title issues, and many others. To make a crawl you can use one of several digital tools: Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool, SEMrush, SEO SiteCheckup, DeepCrawl, Ahrefs or Google Search Console.
2. Look for other versions of your page
Imagine a website that has a version in “http” and another in “https”. Although it doesn’t seem to have any differences in practice, search engines can perceive it as a duplicated page and degrade ranking. That’s why it’s important to check for these minor differences and correct them – ensuring that all pages on the site only use the “https” protocol.
3. Check the on page SEO
On page SEO factors are those present on your company’s page and can be edited at any time. To start, start by searching for duplicate content with the help of the Copyscape tool. After that, go over the main criteria used by search engines in relation to on-page SEO:
- Page titles and title tags
- Content quality – including size, up-to-date information, keyword usage, visitor length and media usage
- friendly URL
- Meta description
- Alt text attribute on images
- Clarity in the hierarchy of pages
4. Evaluate internal links and external links
Internal and external links are very important for ranking a page on Google. Therefore, it is important to frequently fix broken links and assess the quality of the links that lead to your page as part of your SEO assessment. To facilitate this SEO assessment and not just rely on manual efforts, you can use some tools such as Integrity and Xenu Sleuth.
5. Test your website speed
The longer a page takes to load, the more likely a user will abandon it before loading. For this reason, search engines evaluate the loading speed of a website in its ranking. To run a speed test and get a detailed report on the points that can be improved you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
6. Check off-page SEO
In SEO assessment, it is important to analyze both on-page and off-page SEO – which is related to factors external to your website but which also influence the ranking. Among these factors are backlinks, the authority assigned to your site, and the influence of social media. Therefore, it is important to evaluate the use of your social media to generate website traffic and analyze the external links that lead to your company page.
7. Track Google Analytics
Finally, you can finish your SEO assessment by tracking the results recorded in Google Analytics . This is a powerful tool that allows for a lot of important analysis about the performance of different pages on your website.
You can identify which pages are the most rejected, the main traffic sources, which blog content is most accessed by organic search, among numerous other relevant information to complement the SEO analysis.
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