Local SEO Mini Audit of a Fencing Services Website

Below is the transcript of a recent mini audit I conducted on a local business website.  It is just an overview audit but I do cover the main elements of a fuller audit.  I look at the overall look and feel of the site, keyword research, competitor analysis and Google My Business Audit.

Here is the video I put on my YouTube channel – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7D5Till7fY&

SEO Audit Transcription

Hi, this is Simon Kensington-Fellows from Kensington SEO and I’m just going to the quick run through of a local business site in the Northampton area. It’s a fencing company and I just want to look at the site and see how we could improve the on page so that this website would rank better in Google and through ranking better generate more leads and inquiries for this business. Now, the moment, the company that I’ve chosen here, I’m completely at random. It’s on page two for the keyword, a fencing services Northampton. And so I’m just going to have a look at this site and see over the next 10 or 15 minutes what they could do to improve it. I’ve done a little bit of research into the keywords and a little bit of research into the Google My Business and I’ve also done a little bit of competitive analysis to see what other pages are ranking for other companies.

Look and Feel of the Website

So let’s crack on. The first thing I’d like to look at when looking at a site of this kind is the look and the feel. Does it, does it give off trust signals? Because if you’ve got a site that doesn’t look trustworthy, then it’s going to be harder for to encourage people to do whatever you want them to do, whether it’s to, in this case, make a phone call or whether it’s to fill in a form or whether it’s to purchase directly. So the first thing we can see here is that the site has got an https although it’s not good a green padlock, that may just be the browser setting that I’ve got here, incognito but it has an https, which is a good ranking signal and it has a telephone number, some pictures. But aside from that, it doesn’t really offer any other kind of trust signals. And it isn’t GDPR compliant, there are no Terms of Service, Privacy, Cookie policy notices.  This really does need fixing urgently.

There are no marks for local business bureaus. There’s no kind of trade association marks, there’s no kind of business chamber type, links that you might expect on a local business website. So adding those sorts of links or badges or certificates that you get from being associated with those organisations would add some trust factors to this page. Now I notice this page is made by Yell so they’re kind of cheap and cheerful sites that are put up without consideration for search visibility but even so there’s a lot of sites that kind of come back from the web designer looking like this. So there are things that we can do here that will help other sites like this.

Basic Local SEO Keyword Research

So in terms of looking at the keyword research, I have gone through and looked at Google keyword planner and I’ve put the three terms, fencing, fencing services, fencing contractors and I can see that I’ve got a number of keywords to come back from the keyword planner. So you can see this 1,333 here and I think the two most relevant ones here, are fencing contractors and fencing services. Now this one has a bid price, which means that people are paying around about fifty cents per click for the ads that you see on the side of the page. So at the top pair, if we had any ads then they’d be paying around about fifty cents for those clicks.

So looking at commercial intent that suggests that people who are bidding on these keywords believed that fencing contractors are a better keyword than fencing services. Now I tend to agree with that simply because when you look at the Google my business, which is the free listing that any business can complete, we see that the primary category for fencing services is actually fencing contractor. So fencing contractor is what Google believes is the most relevant for fencing services as you can see, fencing services. So one of the tips that you can use to help rank better is to make sure that your website is in alignment with the Google My Business primary category. So if you’ve got a Google My Business listing and your primary category, which is here is fencing contractor, and if you add fencing contractor to your website, then Google’s going to be able to make that, that link much more easily and in turn will probably rank you higher than those that don’t have that on page somewhere. So when we look at how Bell Fencing Services, we can see that they don’t have fencing contractor anywhere on the website.

Competitor Analysis

So that’s one of the things that I would do. Now, this is interesting. This is the top ranking page for fencing contractors and they’ve got a lot more content on their page, a lot more links. They’ve got reviews, they’ve got generally a site looks a bit dated, but it’s got a lot more content on it. You can see on the bottom of their page here, they’ve got their address which makes it nice and easy to find. It doesn’t look as if they’re hiding anything. You can see up here that they’ve got their page title is Northampton fencing services, so they’ve got their keywords in there so it was probably one of the reasons that it’s helping them to rank higher in Google. Whereas we come back to our target site here. It’s kind of fairly plain and a bit simplistic in contrast to that.

So I’m looking at the on-page details for our Bell Fencing Service and we can see here that the main target here is fence panels, pergolas and steel fence and in Northampton, now that’s quite a mix of things. So we’re looking at fence panels and pergolas and steel fencing. Now those in my mind from experience, those are probably two different things to be lumped in on the same page. Google is going to be there thinking, well, is this page about fence panels or about Pergolas, which is arguably nothing to do with fences other than made from wood generally speaking and steel fencing and how does that fit in with that kind of fencing panels and things. So these keywords probably deserve their own pages rather than being all kind of lumped in on one. Google likes to have things laid out for it.

On-page Audit

And the simpler you can make Google’s life the better and you get rewarded with higher rankings. So when we look at the H2’s and the H3’s, we see that there isn’t anything in the, in these heading tags that would give Google the idea that this is wanting to be ranked for fencing services or even fencing contractor, which is the keyword phrase with the most commercial intent. We look at the word count, we’ve only got 274 words, so that’s not particularly high. The title has got the fencing services, but it’s part of the brand name so this is reasonably well optimized, but I think if we were looking at fencing services or contractors, then we could probably make this a bit more specific for fencing services, fencing contractors in Northampton.

Now, the meta description here, which is the bit that shows up in the snippet in Google’s search results, you can control what this says by putting the right code on the page. If you don’t put the right code, Google will just pull a random snippet. Now if you add the keyword into the Meta description, you’ll find that you’ll get more consistent rankings, so it would be a good idea to put in fencing services, fencing contractors in here as well, so this a reasonable length, but we would just want to put in the keyword in there so that it makes it easier for Google to understand what the page is about.

So in terms of the site strength and authority, it really isn’t up to much and traffic-wise it’s probably not getting a great deal. It’s ranking for fencing Northampton as number 15, Northhampton concrete posts at 49 and timber supplies at 98. So it’s certainly not on page one for any terms. And here we’re talking about page four, five and an even higher on here. So in terms of being found on Google, this website is failing big time in terms of generating any kind of reasonable amount of phone calls or enquiries for this company and all that could be changed just by adding some more information onto the pages, restructuring the website and genuinely making it more google friendly. And they don’t take a huge amount of time. In terms of local ranking factors, the things that Google likes best and there are four of them, there is the page title, and that’s the bit that shows up in your browser tab, that needs to have your keyword phrase in it.

Then you’ve got what is called the h1 tag, your first heading tag, which is usually on the top of the page here. And then you’ve h2’s, h3’s which are the subheadings. And in those, usually you want to put a variation of your keyword and then you want to make sure that you have your main keywords in the first paragraph and the last paragraph, the first and last 100 words are best. And you also want to make sure that you’ve got plenty of content on the page to describe what that service is. Aim for just a bit more than your competitors. So probably if we’re looking at garden and security fencing, probably find that these are actually two different target groups. People might be looking for garden fencing and then other people might be looking for security fencing. So probably a good idea to create two pages. So we’ve got one page that targets garden fencing and then another one that targets security fencing, and then we can label up those pages appropriately so that there’s no confusion at all so that when Google is thinking about where to put that page, it knows what this page is all about.

Garden fencing, the page titles mentioned garden fencing, the h, one tag mentions, garden fencing, the h2 tags mentioned variations of those. The content is about garden fencing and so that’s the sorts of things that you want to be looking at when you’re putting together a page and wanting to get it ranked in Google. Now I’ve done some analysis on a with a tool that I’ve got. I’m using the keyword phrase fencing services in Northampton now. This has pulled out a number of variations and if you recall, I mentioned about putting these variations in places like your h1, h2, h3 and h4 tags, and within your content, these are the sorts of words that you should be having in your content for this keyword. So including words like fencing, contractors, fencing contractors, Northhampton fencing services, Northhampton fencing services, fencing services, a fencing company, these are the phrases, the words that Google likes to see an irrelevant to this keyword.

So these are the sorts of things that we need to be putting on our page. Now that’s in part come from some analysis of the top ranking sites that I’ve pulled out here and these are local business competitors and this has given us a page score of 47 per cent, which is not very good at all. So if we wanted to improve this page, then there are some recommendations that we can do here. So we ought to put our keyword in the main URL, we want to put it in the page title. We want to make sure that it’s in the h1 tag. Now from our analysis, the rest of these are okay for the variations and it seems that we’re over optimized for the variations. So we need to look at how we can perhaps remove some of these references where we are talking about these more than we’re talking about our keywords. So the things that I would do is look at going through some of these and making sure that I am not over optimised and not under optimised. So those are some of the things that I would look at. I would also look at adding some more words to the page. The average target count here is just under 400 so we can put a good deal more relevant content on our page to help to boost the relevancy of our page. And I did another analysis here. Using keyword fencing contractor, now fencing contractors, for this site, ironically optimise a little bit better, but again, we are under optimised in those key areas and for the variations were over optimised. So these are some of the things that I would look at in terms of trying to get this page ranking better.

Google My Business Audit

Google My Business Analysis

The other big issue is that this site doesn’t have a Google My Business listing. Now Google My Business (GMB) is free to set up and it’s relatively straightforward to go through, but it is important that you fill it out properly and you make the correct links between your Google My Business listing and your website. The important thing to bear in mind is that the maps listings account for about 33 per cent of clicks on a page. So if you’re going to be in the top three here, you’re likely going to get some of the third of all of the clicks. Now, about 10 per cent of the clicks will go to any adverts and then the rest will go to the first two or three results down here. So as you can see, being up here is a huge benefit to your company. And so optimising your Google My Business listing is vital to getting clicks. So that’s another recommendation that I would make for our business here, is to improve the content on the page using some of the tips that we’ve gone through and also creating a google my business listing for this so that they can start to have a shot at ranking up here and getting the lion’s share of the clicks, which will generate more inquiries to the business. So hope you found that useful when I’m Simon Kensington-Fellows from Kensington SEO. Many thanks.

Audit Summary

This Yell made site doesn’t work as a lead generating site on so many levels, aside from the main fact that it isn’t GDPR compliant and could render the owner subject to prosecution!  Aside from the compliance issue, this site may just be a ‘brochure site’ like an online business card or maybe somewhere to send paid traffic.  Although due to the lack of legal policy pages I doubt it is Google Ads compliant.

We offer a full audit service and you can read more about the SEO audit here