Category: Tips & Tricks

Citation Audit

A citation is a listing online that includes your business name, address and phone number – also referred to as an NAP. Your citation listings that appear online need to be accurate – even down to the suite number. A typo on a listing on another website where your phone number or name is incorrect can affect your search rankings and/or even direct traffic to your website.

What is our recommended solution? We will check your NAP details on directories where your citations appear. We will search on Google for the following NAP related items:

• Variations of your phone number such as (###) ###-#### and ###-###-###.
• Variations of your business name.
• We can also search by partner names of people working in the same company

Another alternative is to search for citations by looking for citation directories. We review the top directories and niche/local directories to validate your listings. Some of the main directories include Google, Yelp, Yellowpages, CitySearch, Superpages, and DexKnows.

We can also claim listings for your business in case they have not been claimed already. This process will ensure that you are given access to edit and update your listings going forward

Meta Tag Audit

• We review your website Meta Tags for conversion purposes since they are often displayed on the listings of Search Engine Results Pages (also known as SERPs).
• A second test is to validate that your main keywords appear in the Meta Title Tag. We also want to make sure that what appear is at least human readable – i.e. not just a list of keywords.
• Location-specific pages should include city and state references.
• Your Meta Description should be written in sentence format and up to a maximum number of characters.
• There should be a unique Meta Title Tag and Description for each unique page.
• We generally use Google Webmaster Tools to identify duplicate content in your meta tags.

Website Content Audit

• We review your website content to avoid duplicate content (both inside your site and on other websites too). Your web pages should contain unique and original content with keyword phrases naturally appearing inside the content.
• We use tools like SiteLiner and CopyScape to discover content that has likely been copied from other websites.
• Because you need to insert relevant keyword phrases into your web copy to attract search engine rankings, we apply a few tests to determine if your writing methods will trigger any content penalties. We advise clients to alternate the use of similar keywords by varying syntax and applying synonyms.
• If you are struggling to come up with keyword phrases to embed into your content, we can do keyword research and competitor website analyses to create a keyword library for your internal usage.

Link Structure Audit

• URL’s (i.e. website addresses) should be keyword rich. If you are using WordPress, make sure you activate Permalinks.
• URL’s should be human readable because it will reduce higher bounce rates which occur when people click the wrong link.
• We use a sitemap tool like XML-Sitemaps.com to create a list of all your website URLs. This is a great tool to keep in your SEO arsenal.
• URL’s with multiple words should be joined together with dashes (-) rather than underscores or no spaces at all. Underscores are used in coding language, Google doesn’t treat underscores as word-separators, but does for dashes.
• Consider using a “Flat Link Architecture” for your site links so that you don’t have a sitemap that includes many levels of pages. Think of this as NOT having a file cabinet with folders inside folders inside even more folders.

Google+ Page Audit

• When auditing a Google+ or Google My Business page, we check your Google dashboard profile to ensure your profile has been completed and verified.
• We will also check that your NAP listing on Google and Google MAPS is correct.
• We will validate that your Google+/Google My Business is tethered to your website. It is recommended to place the Google +1 button on your website.

Online Reputation Review

• Do you monitor customer reviews and ratings on popular review sites such as Google, Yelp and Facebook?
• There are tools you can purchase to aid in this process including: Trackur, Synup and Social Mention:
• We can also help you respond to reviews and questions online.

Backlink Review

• If we are doing a backlink audit, we will first assemble a list of the web pages that link to your website.
• We will then check the quality of those backlinks to see if we can identify low-grade websites that we should tell Google to disavow.
• Google Webmaster Tools can also help in this regard if you use the Search Traffic feature.

Website Speed Audit

• Google wants fast loading pages – often under 4 seconds.
• Google’s page speed insight tool is useful in our process to validate page speed.

Local Schema Audit

• Schema is web coding on each page that tells Google about specific parts of your page content. We will review schema architecture which also has an impact on Google’s Knowledge Graph.
• We also use Google’s Webmaster Tools’s Structured Data Testing Tool during this audit step.

Google Analytics Implementation Audit

• We will make sure your site has the Google Analytics code on each page you want to track. Check the configuration at http://www.gatective.com.
• With advanced tag implementation, you can monitor how your site is performing with lead generation, sales activity and high performing pages.
• Google also offers a Tag Assistant to help you.