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Insights @Work, Life, and Work Life
Diagnosing Your SEO Health: A Check-Up for Your Website
When you visit the doctor, your provider runs through a list of checks to get a picture of your overall health. They listen to your heart, review your lifestyle choices, and test your reflexes (a fancy way of saying they’ll use a tiny hammer to see if you flinch).
With this knowledge, they can tell you what’s going well and where you might need some adjustments. It’s a lot like getting a cheat sheet for the game of life, helping you level up your health, dodge pesky diseases, and, ideally, live longer.
At SFC Group, we believe in letting experts do what they do best. While your healthcare providers can support your physical health, we can optimize the health of your website, including your search engine traffic.
Search engine optimization (SEO) helps your website and its content rank higher in search engines, like Google and Bing. Because organic search is the primary way people access information online, using SEO best practices is critical for the success of your business.
We love a good checklist – one that’s easy to follow and hard to mess up. Use this list to review your website’s health so you can get more traffic and more business.
Getting started: SEO basics
SEO basics are like the heart and brain of your website. Without them, your site will have a hard time surviving, and, eventually, it’ll end up so far down search engine rankings that it might as well not exist.
SEO basics checklist
- Are Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools set up, allowing you to monitor your site’s performance?
- Is Google Analytics set up, granting you access to important data?
- If you’re using WordPress, are you using an SEO plugin to help with SEO?
- Is your sitemap submitted to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, helping them understand the setup of your site and noting changes?
- Have you added a robots.txt file to tell search engines which pages are on and off limits?
- Is your website indexable by search engines?
Content, structure, and metadata: on-page SEO
They say content is king, and “they” are not wrong. With poorly written content (including metadata), you’re not doing your website any favors. Not only will Google and other search engines push your site down the ladder, but users will also leave your page if they manage it make it there.
On-page SEO checklist
- Is your content useful, engaging, accurate, and credible?
- Do you have title tags, image tags, meta descriptions, and alt text? (And are they actually helpful?)
- Do you include primary and secondary keywords relevant to your marketing strategy throughout your site, including title tags, header tags, meta descriptions, and content?
- Have you avoided duplicate content and keyword stuffing (unnaturally including keywords to rank higher in search)?
- Have you avoided keyword cannibalization (when too many pages target the same keyword or phrase)?
- Do you have useful internal links?
- Are your images the right size, helping them load quickly?
- Do your URLs use clear, concise language?
Performance, speed, and UX: technical SEO
What’s the use of a great website if it doesn’t load properly? Trick question – it’s not a great website. Make sure your technical SEO is up to par to ensure users don’t want to throw their computer or phone out the window (or just leave your site) because of your site’s speed or performance.
Technical SEO checklist
- Are you using HTTPS in your URL to increase the security of your site?
- Do your pages load quickly?
- Do your pages meet Core Web Vitals metrics, which measure load speed, interactivity, and visual stability?
- Are all links working properly?
- Are you using schema markup (a code you add to your site) to help search engines understand your content?
- Is your site mobile friendly?
- Does it take more than 3 clicks to get to any page? (It shouldn’t.)
- Have you fixed all 404 errors?
- Have you changed all temporary 302 directs to permanent 301s?
Backlinks, brand building, and local directories: off-page SEO
In marketing, reputation is everything. That’s why your site’s health depends on more than what happens on your web pages. Your brand building and web presence are just as important and can play a role in your search engine ranking.
Off-page SEO checklist
- Do you have backlinks (or links to your site from other credible, relevant sites)?
- Do you have guest posts or blogs on other relevant sites?
- If you’re a local business, do you have a Google Business Profile?
- If you’re a local business, have you submitted your site to online business directories, like Facebook, Yelp, Apple Maps, and Bing Places?
You don’t have to conquer SEO alone
It’s results time! If you checked off most or all these boxes, your site is probably in good shape. (Although best practices suggest updating content frequently, so don’t get complacent!)
If your results are not what you’d hoped, you aren’t sure how to manage your site’s SEO, or you still aren’t sure what we’re even talking about, don’t fret. SEO is not something you can learn overnight (or in one checklist). It takes time to understand and masterfully execute.
That’s what we’re here for. SFC Group will help you tackle everything from minor fixes to major overhauls. After all, just like prioritizing your physical health requires playing the long game, so does SEO. The steps you take now to implement SEO will impact the success of your business now and well into the future.
Time to improve your website’s SEO? Let us help.
