00:01 Hello, this is a Local Security Company SEO Audit, so I met at the owner at a networking meeting in Thrapston, and he asked me to have a quick look over his site. So I’ve gone through and done what I would call a simple SEO audit for you, which will highlight a number of the issues you have with the website and I’m listing things that you need to do, a checklist of things that you need to get done to help you improve your ranking. So hopefully you find this local security company SEO audit useful.
00:58 So I’m just going to take you through your website and show you some of the issues. I’ve got a notepad here where I’ve just taken some notes of some of the issues with the site. I expect this will take about 15 to 20 minutes, so start off with. It’s a, it’s a nice little site. It’s functional, it’s on WordPress, which is good. There are a few kinds of legal things that need to happen. You need to have an EU cookie consent pop up. You’ve probably seen those annoying popups on other websites where you need to have one on here so that you can, you can do that via a WordPress plugin. There are plenty of those. Um, and also you need to have, I can’t find them anywhere, some privacy pages and your terms and conditions pages, especially as a limited company.
01:59 You should really have those on the website as well and you can just pop them in the footer bar here, the footer menu here to keep them out of the way that they really ought to be there. One comment on the homepage is there isn’t really a lot of information and to improve your rankings it will be a good idea to add some more content. One of the biggest issues I see with websites these days is they try and look better than they are useful to Google. So, you know, it looks nice. You got a big header image here and you’ve got the three content boxes here, but the only real content is this a little bit here and it’s not really enough for Google to be able to understand what your site is all about. So let’s just have a quick look at the Moz toolbar.
02:54 This is something that just gives us some information about the page and you’ll see as we go through this that there are some reoccurring themes. A page title, this should be around about 75 characters and yours is 133. And for most of the pages, the page title is too long. So we need to look at reducing the page titles, the Meta description as well, which is here. This is the snippet that shows when somebody does a search and Google, this is too long as well. There should be shorter than this, otherwise, it gets truncated and it doesn’t make sense for the searcher. So we need to look at shortening those on the page. One of the things that most of your pages have is these Meta keywords, now this has been dropped by Google.
03:52 I would remove those keyword tags has probably been done by the Yoast plugin, but you can disable that. So I would get rid of those. We’ve got an H1 tag here. There’s no H1 tag. It will be good and helpful to have an H1 tag, although we’ve got an H2 tag. It was possibly something to do with the theme or it might just be the way in which the text has been formatted, but you would certainly want to have an H1 tag not having an H1 and just having an H2 wouldn’t make any sense to Googlebot. So that needs to be looked at and there’s no bold words or Italics. Ideally, you want to bold your main keyword and italicize some of your main keywords throughout the content, preferably in the first paragraph.
04:46 This is the ALT tag, a little explanation that you can add to any images that you’ve got on the page so that a web browser can read them and understand what the image is about. And also screen readers use this for the visually impaired. If you’ve got people with accessibility problems, shortsightedness, those kinds of things, then the screen readers will be able to tell them what the images are and all throughout your site, your ALT tags really could do with being better optimised. This is pretty much the standard that we’ve got on every single page. That’s mainly due to the logos and that in the footer. So it will be better to look at improving the ALT tag and again, through WordPress, that’s reasonably straightforward because each image has the facility to add an ALT tag text to it using the media library.
05:51 There isn’t any Schema markup on any of the site. Schema Markup is something that is a code that you put into the site which will tell Google exactly what your page is about in an easy to understand machine language. You should, as a local business, have at least local business markup you can use. You can use a plugin to help you with this and it should ideally be in JSON LD, but it could also be in microdata format, but really it tells Google what your business is, where it is, and also helps to link together your social profiles so it can start to build up an idea of who your business is on the web and start linking those properties together so that when you tweet something or you share something on Facebook, Google can understand that it actually is about your website entity.
06:50 One last issue on the home page, something that is a ranking factor these days, which again now isn’t that difficult to do, is to switch to an https website, a secure website. You’ll need to make sure that you do any redirects from the old site to the new site, but that would also help to give your site a little ranking boost. So, just looking at, these other pages, we’ve got things like security guarding and again, it’s a fairly similar thing. We’ve not got anywhere near enough content on these pages. There should be at least 300 words as a very minimum. And if you’re looking to outrank competitors, then you need to make sure that you’ve got more and better quality content for your pages to make sure that you rank for these. Again, looking at the on-page stuff, we’ve got a page title too long meta-description this a little bit too long.
08:02 We’ve got meta keywords that need to be removed. We’ve got H1 tag, but really we could do with better optimising that so that it’s more keyword rich. And we’ve got an H2 tag with the content “why use us?” That’s a bit of a waste of a keyword in the H2 tag. Again, no bolding or Italics to identify or highlight the keywords that this page is about. So in an ideal world, you have, for each of these pages, this is your security services page. Your title will reflect that your meta-description will reflect the keywords, the keywords that are bolded in the text reflects that the H1 tags reflect that the H2 tags, the images, the images, ALT tag text on the images reflect that as well. So the whole page is themed around these, the main keyword.
09:03 So I won’t go through the rest of them because they’re all pretty much the same. I’m just moving over to here. Accreditation’s again, it’s just a similar theme. There’s just not much content and Google really doesn’t like what’s known as thin content pages, ones that don’t have much content. So you need to look at putting more information on your pages or combining the pages so that it’s. I said that they’re kind of better laid out. On the meet the team. I thought it was a bit odd because I was expecting to see staff images and that kind of thing and I got an About Us page essentially, so we might want to look at kind of rewording that or doing something so that it seems to make more sense and it looks as if there’s been some copying and pasting as gone on because there’s a lot throughout the whole site.
10:02 There are these areas here where you’ve got odd characters and these are ‘dot formatted’, character’s usually where something’s been copied and paste from word and it’s gone in and WordPress hasn’t quite understood the character and coding that’s gone through, so this all needs to be attended to. It should be fairly straightforward just to go through the text and make the changes so that we get rid of these odd characters. I noticed there was a lot of it on the job vacancies page as well. I’m down here. We’ve got kind of odd characters around here and here, here and various others here and I think on one of the pages right at the bottom where it was it. One of the pages contact us, one of the pages that have got a big banner at the bottom, which is kind of got your motto and that was messed up as well. So let me just see if I can quickly find that for you whilst we’re flicking through.
11:17 The other thing that we can do to the site is what’s called siloing, this is about building buckets of related content. The other thing is to do with silo in and that is where we create content stacks if you like, and where we start linking from our content to relevant content within our site. So we haven’t got any of that at all. So we’re not helping google to understand what the site is about. The other issues looking through my little list here is that we’re looking at targeting these local areas, which is absolutely fine, but there’s nothing on the site other than the keywords that have been put in which needs to be got rid of. That really indicates that you are a local site targeting these areas.
12:11 So really to do this properly and efficiently it will be a good idea to have a locations page tab here with the various locations and the services that you provide in those locations. And then build out content within each of those that let’s say for Wellingborough. So let’s say you want to provide these four services within Wellingborough where you recreate these pages within the Wellingborough location tab and you then put the content in there and you make the content relevant to, to Wellingborough. If you want to rank locally, you really need to look at doing more about optimising your site for local search intent because at the moment you’re not really taken advantage of that. Although the keywords seem to suggest that that’s what you want. So overall, there are quite a few things from an on-page point of view that need to be looked at.
13:17 Your Google my business page. That’s an important element because it kinda tells Google that about your business. And really that kind of ties everything together. And the one of the ways, the main ways that Google will tie that together is by using what’s known as the NAPW, which is your name, address, phone number and website, and these details need to be the same across all of your web properties and directory listings. So on your Twitter, on your Facebook, on your Google, My Business page, on your Yelp or Yell.com listings, or any of the free listings that you can get. These all need to be exactly the same and they need to be the same as what is on your Google My Business page, which at the moment is showing this address which is slightly different to what you’ve got is different to what you’ve got on your website and different to what you’ve got.
14:11 Because as we see down here, we’ve got your Registered Address. So it might be better if you put the registered address in your, say your terms and conditions page. And then you had your address down here, which would then match up with what was on the contact page. And the contact page addresses, again, slightly different to this. So that would need to be changed up so that it actually matched the address because it needs to be exact. Say they haven’t got that in the Google My Business listing and the postcode is, is formatted slightly as well. So there’s a little thing, it might not seem much, but in Google’s eyes, they’re as different as chalk and cheese. So you need to make sure that the address is laid out correctly and is the same and consistently the same. Otherwise, you won’t benefit from those mentions, what are known as citations from across the web.
15:12 So I think we’ve got a good deal of things that we can target to improve your website on-page, you’ve got a lot of keywords here and you have got the opportunity to make some really good content written about this. So a content marketing campaign, creating interesting posts about all of these topics and then getting people to link back to those articles locally will really help you to start to boost the authority of this website and really help to improve your rankings, which will, of course, get you more calls, enquiries and generate more business. So I hope you found that useful I’ve got a separate report which I shall include with the email to you and I’ll send this all over with a link to this video so that you can watch it and if you need to, you can obviously watch it a couple times. So feel free to get in touch if you want some advice on how to get all of this done on the implementation.