Free SEO report for existing websites

Why is technical SEO important? Getting good rankings for your website is challenging enough depending on your business. It requires creating unique and engaging content. It requires commitment as you need to either pay someone to create the content or time to do it yourself.

Technical on-page SEO is about ensuring that Google can interpret each page clearly. Ensuring they know about all your pages but also making sure low quality content doesn't get included in their results.

When doing a technical SEO report, what do we check?

Here is a shortlist of the key things we will look at.

Page speed and SEO

Page speed is of critical importance. “All else being equal, the faster site will rank first” is a well known phrase amongst SEOers.

Think about it from Google perspective. Part of their mission is to promote a great experience for their users. If their results were full of slow websites, their users experience will be poor. People would continually get frustrated and “Bounce” back to their results.

Putting aside the technical side of SEO, you want people to have a great experience when visiting your website. Slow page load times is certainly not inline with that goal.

Dead links

One thing we don't want is dead links. That is a link that returns a page not found error page. This happens when the URL for a page is changed and links to it are not updated.

For user experience this is obviously terrible. Google know this and thus demotes websites that are full of them.

We'll provide a list of such links and where they can be found. In Drupal we use a module called redirect that aims to deal with this issue. When a pages URL is changed, it will create a redirect from the old URL to the new one.

URL redirect chains.

A redirect chain is when you have a URL that redirects to another one. If there is only one redirect this is reported to be OK albeit not perfect.

URL1 → URL2

If a URL redirects multiple times this is not good for SEO.

URL1 → URL2 → URL3 → URL4 → …. and so on

As with redirects we will provide a list of redirect chains.

Proper use of headings

Headings are great for giving structure to page and for readability. It is a lot easier to skim through a page with headings as they emphasise the content of the proceeding paragraph. Headings are not just used on websites, they are also applicable to documents generally.

When it comes to SEO they help the search engines understand the structure of the page. It is also worth getting your keywords into these headings. The page you are reading right now is making use of headings.

It is important that you only have one “Heading 1” on a page otherwise it would be spammy. You can however have many “Heading 2”, “Heading 3”, “Heading 4” and so on.

Metatags

Metatags control how a website is displayed in Google.It is important that that we make the most of these to increase the likelihood of someone clicking through to us and not the competition. Our CTR (Click through rate) impacts on our rankings because it is seen as a good signal that our website is a good match to the given keyword. 

Alternate text for images

Images add a lot of value in terms of SEO. However we must describe each image to Google. This is done through what they call Alt text. We'll check the website for any images missing this critical information. Without this information, the search engines won't know what the image is of.

XML Sitemap and Robots.txt

The XML sitemap is used to tell search engines about all our pages. The file can also be submitted directly to search engines to speed up the time it takes to appear in the results. Not to mention it leaves nothing to chance it terms of them finding all your pages.

The Robots.txt file is often used to tell the search engines what not to show in the results. This sounds like a odd thing to do - More the merrier - Right? No. Take for example the login page. For the mahority of our clients they're the only ones who login. So we don't really want that page in Google. 

Once we had a client whose Robots.txt file explicitly told the search engines to exclude the whole website from the search engines. So a wrongly written file can have devastating consequences

Conclusion

There is more to being successful online than just looks and a presence. We can give you a clear feedback on what your website is doing well and areas where it can be improved.

The free report gives you a general overview. It will confirm that everything is as it should be or if problems / opportunities for improvements exist.

If the overview highlights that problems exist, you can pay us to generate a full report detailing where the problems can be found so as to improve them more time efficiently. It may also be possible to pay us to fix them for you. 

Contact us now to learn more.