Website Search Engine Optimization – SEO Audit

How is your website performing?

Local Search Engine Optimization

Online Local Search is the new Yellow Pages

Over 90% of us online use search engines to find information. Microsoft research has found that 86% of searchers start at a major search engine when shopping online.

Even when consumers plan to purchase offline, they often go online first. 42% of retail sales in 2009 were online or “web-influenced” ($917 billion in US sales were “web-influenced”).

Search Result Page Showing 3 Different Areas

More specific to local business, 63% of consumers use the internet to find local businesses, but only 44% of local businesses have a web site. That same study also found that 50% of us turn to search engines first for local business information, vs. 24% who turn to the Yellow Pages first. Yet Google recently estimated that only 10% of local business have optimized for Local search.

There has been explosive growth in mobile devices such as smart phones like Android, iPhone, Blackberry and tablets like the iPad. This market is larger than computers and owners of these devices use local search more to find local business!

Local Search is different than regular or organic search

Search engines have invested a great deal of money in creating a number of different vertical search engines including for video, images, maps, news and blogs.

10 Vertical Search Engines – what’s next?

Organic search combines everything together.

Local search aggregates the specific information that shows the search has a local intent. That means Local search is unique from organic search. Search engines determine regional/local intent with a number of signals:
• The domain accessed (google.co.uk vs. google.ca)
• Country-restriction (only search pages from Canada, etc. option)
• Location of searcher by IP address (at the country level, and local levels, such as the city and area in city)
• Location modifier or language intent in the query … ie: Flowers Surrey, BC vs Flowers Ottawa
• Searcher’s default location (such as set in Google Maps)
• Language the query was composed in…
• Probability of local intent from search query ie. Plumbers (You aren’t normally searching for these from places far away from your current search location – this is being integrated more each day.)

The major search engines – Google and Bing/Yahoo ( …Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo search are merging right now) have invested massively in this.

Combine that search infrastructure with the ongoing and accelerating drop in use of Yellow Pages as well as the growth in mobile device use, add in that your competition does not know about this and you have an unprecedented opportunity to promote your business.

Website Search Engine Optimization Audit

The below analysis of your website looks at the most important aspects of getting your website to rank for local search. As you can see from the example web search images below, there are between 3 and 7 businesses that are shown first in a local search result page.

Getting listed in the top 7 (or top 3) means that you will get many more inquiries about your business, products and services. The phone rings! To get listed in the top 7 takes hitting all the below points to both ensure that you are ranking highly today and for the future.

Website Audit For: Business and Website

Company Web site: www.examplewebsite.com

Market Niche: ie. …retail, …jewelry, …cosmetic dentistry, …personal injury lawyer, …appliance repair

Major Categories:  These are the categories of products and or services offered by company

Keywords: First level research on what keywords people use when searching for product or service

“On-Page” Local SEO on website: Ranked 1-10

• Title Tag Optimization for Local Search: (x) … (we look for Title Tags that have the business name + service type and optimal local search keywords)
• Meta Tag Optimization: (x) … (we look for Meta Descriptions that are unique to each page using action words and reasons to click. Note: does not help rank but will help “sell the click”)
• H1, H2, H3 Tag Optimization: (x)  … (we look for H1 + H2 tags that contain the business name and the (specific keyword) focus of the page)
• Content Optimization: (x) … (we look for Content on the pages that contains the keyword theme started in the Title tag)
• Image Alt Tags optimized: (x) (This is a less important factor but still helps in competitive situations)
• URL Naming structure: (x) … (we look for local search specific keywords in the url, keywords separated by hyphens)

Off-Page Links to Entire Site:

• (reported by Yahoo Site Explorer + Google): (xx)
… (Then we compare to their top ten ranking competition); For “keyword” the competition has between 15 – 19,600 links to just that page on their site.

Local SEO “On-Page” Factors

• Site Speed: Good/OK/Slow (Site speed is now very important to rank. We briefly report optional steps to improve speed… ie. This page has 12 external Javascript scripts.  Try combining them into one. This page has 4 external stylesheets.  Try combining them into one.)
• Site Traffic tracking Installed: Yes/No … (Critical – if you cannot measure your results, how do you know what’s working, and what needs improvement?)
• Geositemap file: Yes/No … (This file is specific to local search and gets the website indexed accurately on the Map)
• Sitemap file: Yes/No … (This file is specific to search and will get more of the site indexed)
• Business Address, Phone number in footer on each page: Yes/No … (This provides an easily found way for search engines and customers to pick up on the business address and phone number)
• Contact Page optimized for Google Local: Yes/No … (we look for all the above plus an embedded Google or Bing Map to location, driving directions, hCard file format display of Business name, address, local phone number)
• Video used on site: Yes/No … (Rich media – audio, video, interactive elements, etc. are more important than ever for rank)

Local SEO Google Places Page

• Claimed: Yes/No … (we look at their Google Place page to see if it is claimed)
• Fully Filled Out: Yes/No … (we look to see how completely it is filled out since completely filled out Google Places pages rank higher; examples…Payment accepted, Hours, Pictures, Video)
• Citations Indexed: x – (30+ is good) … (we look to see how many local links Google Places is reporting – more links is better)
• Reviews Entered: Yes/No … (we count how many reviews are entered – more is better)

Performance on Local Search:

List of important Keywords: (that get the most searches)
keyword phrase 1, keyword phrase 2, keyword phrase 3, keyword phrase 4, keyword phrase 5
1st Page Local Search for keywords: (Keyword and position on Google Maps)
1st Page Regular Search for keywords: (Keyword and position on Google organic search)

Social Media Profile

• Have and update a YouTube Channel, Facebook Page, Twitter account: Yes/No … (Social media drives traffic and creates high value links to their website)

Recommendations: … (here we make brief recommendations to address what we have found)

1. Optimize for the highest searched keyword terms. Site is performing well in some searches, but the potential is huge based on the number of keyword possibilities and the number of searches.
2. Start link building! This is lacking with your site, in comparison to your competition.
3. Start a local seo campaign and gather even more leads from your website investment.
4. Put more content on your site – a website (today) is never done. Add more detail for each product and service… Also: What do you specialize in, what are you known for in your niche that should be highlighted?

For a free SEO Audit, it contains a ton of detail, and a great deal of useful information. A perfect score on this goes a long way to getting much higher rankings… but, of course, there are more elements.

Want an unfair advantage? Call Top Local Rankings to do your Local SEO and start getting more business from your website. And please get our free SEO Audit.