Evaluating a website for SEO

23
Mar

Search engine optimisation is the only way to hep your website rank highly on search engines like Google and Bing. And ultimately, these search engines will become your number one source of organic traffic. As a result, the higher you rank, the more traffic you will gather, and the more sales you will have opportunity to make. But to keep your rank on the SERP, and to stay on top of competitors, you will need to stay on top of your SEO techniques and practices. This includes regularly evaluating your website. Here at Pumpkin Web Design, we are Preston’s leading web design and web marketing company. And we work with companies and businesses across the region to provide the highest quality web solutions. As a result, we have produced this guide to evaluating a website for SEO.

The top 10 questions you should focus on when evaluating a website for SEO are:

  1. Are there more than one H1 tags on any pages? This can be misleading to search engines who use the H1 data to establish what the main focus of the page or article is. Multiple H1 tags indicate multiple focuses and this will mean that you will not rank as highly, if at all.
  2. Do you use Javascript for navigation? In terms of cross browser compatibility, there are not many aspects that can have such an impact as the use of Javascript for navigation. As a result, your website will produce a range of errors, and may not rank as a highly because of this.
  3. Is the content good quality and does it answer the users query? If your content is not unique, and is not top quality, your website ranking may well suffer.
  4. Do you have multiple URLs that are the same? If you have more than one URL that is the same, this can become a duplicate content issue and search engines will not know which URL to show for which query. This means that it simply wont show any. So you could be missing out on those click-throughs.
  5. Does your website have an XML sitemap? If not, this could be one reason why it is not performing on the SERP. Adding one can really make it easier for search engines to crawl your website.
  6. Is your XML sitemap error free? If you do have an XML sitemap, does it contain 4xx and 5xx errors or blocked pages? Even sitemaps that are too large can cause a problem for your SEO.
  7. Landing page optimisation– SEO is not just a site-wide job, it is important for all individual pages to be optimised fully, especially all landing pages. If your landing pages are all optimised for the same keyword, then this will class as keyword cannibalization, and the wrong page may rank, or even none at all. It can also dilute your link quality.
  8. Do you have a responsive design? With the introduction of Google’s mobile first algorithm, having a responsive web design is now a requirement for good SEO.
  9. Is the website crawlable? Disallowing robots.txt can prevent any crawlers from accessing the website, or indexing it at all.
  10. Are there too many links? Too many links on your webpages can indicate that you are spam website. So make sure you keep the links to only necessary ones that make your website better quality, or more helpful to the user.

For more information or advice, or for professional SEO support, get in touch with the experts today, here at Pumpkin Web Design.

Pumpkin Web Design Ltd is a small and highly results driven digital agency working for like minded clients in Preston, Chorley, Southport, Blackburn, Burnley, Morecambe,Wigan, Manchester, London, Warrington, Blackpool, Lancaster, Leyland, Lytham St Annes, Bolton, Chester and the UK. Our services include web design, SEO, content marketing, video production, brand design and much more.