As a small business with a website that features a limited number of webpages, a full SEO audit for your site may not be a feasible option. However, you should unfailingly opt for a lite SEO audit to locate bottlenecks that may have prevented your website from achieving better rankings and higher traffic.
Your lite SEO audit should commence by scrutinizing the content on your website. The content should be completely related to your actual business and should certainly contain essential target keywords. Your text content should not contain merely broad keywords, but should include specific keywords that are extracted after careful keyword research and analysis.
If your website contains very little text content then you need to add high-quality content while adding related images, videos, user testimonials and reviews to impress search engines and visitors alike. You should try using the site command along with an intitle command to see how your content differs from target keywords.
In addition, checking if your Title Tags and Meta Description Tags contain the right keywords should also form part of your lite SEO audit. You can use the “View Meta Tags” feature in Firefox to get an idea of your on-page optimization efforts.
In case you have recently updated pages of your website then you also need to add a 301 Redirect to ensure that your visitors end up at the latest updated page. This move will also prevent duplicate content from being indexed, which in turn will adversely affect your rankings.
You should also check if you have used images in the form of navigational links. If you find such links, a better option would be to use descriptive anchor text along with text navigation. Furthermore, all images on your website should be scaled to make sure that your website loads quickly. You should also replace all BMP images with JPEG as well as resize them to suit your specific webpage.
Your aim should be to reduce the size of the image file without affecting the quality of the image to a noticeable extent. You can use Adobe Fireworks to optimize your images while looking at the effects of your efforts as well as the changed size of the file on a real-time basis.
Another important aspect to consider is to make sure that there are no missing plug-ins to damage the reputation of your website. You should not only embed Flash and your YouTube videos, but should also optimize those videos.
Yet another crucial tool ignored by many small business websites is setting up a Google Analytics account. Google Analytics provides a host of webmaster tools and features that can help track the performance of your website, which in turn can help make necessary changes to improve its performance, rankings, traffic, and ultimately, conversions. Other search engines such as Bing too provide valuable tools that should be used to find out just how your website performs in natural search as well as provide various reports to further fine-tune each aspect of your SEO strategy.
Your link-building strategy too should form part of your lite SEO audit. Your links should work flawlessly and should lead to sites that command high authority in the eyes of major search engines. You should add links that lead to your industry association or local chamber of commerce. You should also provide links that lead to a respected and related blog or can start a blog by yourself. This blog can help solve problems faced by general customers, answer queries posted by interested visitors/prospective customers, display articles written by guest authors, and provide news and videos on the latest news about your industry or market, among others.
Needless to say, your website should certainly contain your physical address in detail, if any, as well as your contact phone number, fax number, and email address, among other details. These NAP or Name, Address, and Phone details will deliver improved rankings in local search results as well as convince search engine bots and visitors that you are a trustworthy website that has dutifully supplied all contact details. You can complete such an audit using websites such as Yext.com.
Finally, canonicalization issues could create several duplicate pages for your website, which in turn could affect rankings in an adverse manner. You need to examine www. as well as non www. versions as well as mixed case to ensure that canonical issues do not bog down your website. You can use ISAPI_Rewrite or .htaccess to get rid of all canonicalization issues affecting your site. An audit of all internal links including inline and navigation links should ensure that they lead to only the canonical versions of your URLs.
The above lite SEO audit for your lite business website will help you get rid of issues affecting functionality, accessibility, and ranking of your website. You will be able to achieve improved rankings and provide an improved user-experience with a slick and fully-functional website.