CT Inbound Marketing Blog | ImageWorks, LLC

6 Signs Your Website Needs an SEO Audit

Written by Brandon Choquette | Tue, Oct 11, 2022 @ 12:00 PM

 Are you looking to improve your rankings in Google? Of course you are— it’s an important item featured on the To-do lists of digital marketers across the world. Most marketers understand and appreciate that an effective SEO strategy is a critical component of any online marketing strategy.
Despite the growth of social media platforms, there’s no denying that people still rely heavily on search engines for relevant information, including researching companies and their products and services.
So naturally, if you want your business to be found and stand out from the masses, you need to show up near the top of these searches.
You may already have an active SEO strategy in place for you website, but are you seeing the results you want, or are you stuck, middling on page 5 of Google search? This post discusses several SEO mistakes that indicate it may be time for a full site SEO audit.

6 Signs Your Website Needs an SEO Audit

Sub-Par Hosting Leading to Slower Loading Pages

If you’ve recently switched to a low-quality hosting company, or a company whose data center isn’t in the best place to provide fast page loads for you website visitors, there’s a chance that website’s with less compelling content may rank better than you. Essentially, you want to ensure that the lion’s share of your website visitors have a crisp and quick experience on your website. This is often done by hosting your website in close proximity to your visitors, and paying enough to have your website on a server that isn’t hosting thousands of other websites. If you are confused about what your hosting company can do for you, check out one of our previous blog posts.

An Error in Your Robots.txt file.

About a year ago, we worked with a client who had an improperly configured robots.txt file on their site. In effect, the incorrectly configured file directed search engines to ignore the website and not let anyone find it originally. Typically, these files are used to prevent Google from indexing the site when developers are working to make big changes. Long story short: be sure to use best practices for your robots.txt file. A simple Google search and 10 minutes of work will ensure that you won’t have to worry about this in the future.

Keyword Stuffing is a Classic "NO-NO"

Keyword stuffing is one of the oldest SEO sins. If you’re not quite familiar wit the term, “keyword stuffing” is used to describe a situation where a keyword is used over and over again in your website content wit the intent that it will get you a better ranking. For instance, let’s say that you wanted to rank for “logo design” or “ logo design company”. This is what keyword stuffing would look like:

“Need a logo design for your company? Our Logo Design Company provides logo design   for companies across the state. We’re proud of our logo design and can offer jaw-dropping logo designs for your company, no matter the industry”

That’s painful to read, right? The language is unnatural and clunky. Please don’t write your content like this, considering that keyword density is a minuscule part of Google’s algorithm. Remember: Google’s top concern is the user experience. If all the articles people find are stuffed with keywords, no one will want to read them, which is the goal after all.

Ignoring Title And Meta Descriptions

Just as improper keyword usage can harm your SEO strategy, ignoring the significance of an instructive page title and meta description can detract from your hard work as well. Create unique and descriptive page titles and use your meta description as a final opportunity to provide a preview of the value of your page. Meta descriptions are used in search engine results, so make sure to create copy that grabs the searcher’s attention.

You Don’t Update Your Site Enough

Picture this: you’ve spent countless hours assembling an engaging, aesthetically pleasing, and user-friendly website. You’ve suffered through writer’s block and created a few helpful blog posts, and you have performed keyword research, taking the necessary time to optimize your site. Now you are staring at your analytics screen, waiting for site visitors to convert to leads; you’ve been working hard and deserve recognition, right?

I hate to be the bearer of bad news; however, SEO is a marathon not a sprint race and that means you need to actively update your site with useful content. While it’s great that you’ve created useful content, you need to stick to a consistent blog publishing schedule. If you don’t update your content frequently, search engines won’t recognize you as a relevant source.

Duplicate Content Will Get You More Than A Slap On The Wrist

We understand: you’re likely a busy entrepreneur working as hard as possible to put your company on top. You don’t have much time to write stellar content for your website and assume it’s easier just to copy it from somewhere else and paste it on your website. No one will ever notice, right? Wrong. Google is like a mother that sees and knows all.

Google considers copying content from another website to be duplicate content, which refers to content located on multiple websites across the internet. If your content is found within another website, your chances of ranking for your targeted keywords drops dramatically. Plus, not only is this practice ill-advised from an ethics standpoint, but it’s illegal according to copyright law.

ImageWorks, LLC | CT Search Engine Optimization

While professional SEO services can offer many opportunities to your business, you should never depend on SEO alone for the growth of your business. The companies that thrive on the online world have a comprehensive approach and utilize both online and offline marketing strategies. SEO can be a big piece; however, it is only one slice of the marketing pie.

By integrating all of today's Web tools such as SEO, social media, pay per click, and blogs, ImageWorks, LLC can turn your site into a lead generation tool.