Local Business SEO Audit For Virtual Assistants Business
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Local Business SEO Audit For Virtual Assistants Business

SEO AUDIT local business

Local Business SEO Website Audit

Hello and welcome to another 2017 free site seo (search engine optimisation) audit service by Simon Kensington from Kensington SEO. My goal is to offer analysis, insights and advice to local businesses on improving the content and marketing of their websites. I have picked this site, not for any particular reason other than I was looking for local businesses that I could and audit on. As usual, with the audit, I will start off going through my seo audit checklist and looking at it from a visitors point of view and looking at the three questions a visitor usually asks themselves when they hit a website. They are: What is it? What is it about? And, what’s in it for me? Then we will report on some other on-page conversion optimisation issues that there may well be. Then we’ll check some top technical SEO optimisation issues and keyword selection and see whether there are opportunities to improve the organic rankings of this website.

Here is the video screen cast recording of this seo audit report.

Here is the home page image with notations for this audit.

seo audit for local business

Can I Tell What This Web Page Is about?

Looking at this domain https://www.pink-spaghetti.co.uk from the, what is it? It’s a website about hiring virtual assistants. I can see that right away. There’s a nice professional logo, that gives confidence. It’s a nicely laid out site. There is a nice tagline up here: efficient, affordable, approachable. So, I’m already getting that if I am looking for a personal assistant or a virtual assistant, that this is the place that’s going to help me and if I’m looking for somewhere that’s efficient and affordable, then that’s good too. This looks like there’s some interesting navigation here, which can work in a couple of ways. It can either be missed because it’s not conventional, so you need to be careful and I would look at the click-through rates on these and see whether people actually realise that these are navigation. With click-through data, you can decide whether these are better navigation and whether you need these here. Perhaps this real estate prime location could be used for something that would drive more conversions.

Video Does Really Help With Conversions

We’ve got a video that’s been nicely optimised with a call to action question here. What would you do with an extra hour of your day? So, that is really useful. Videos do help sites rank. They also help keep visitors on the page longer which is good for overall rankings.

Images Add Interest To A Web Page

This homepage is laid out very nicely. There’s some text here and another big image here. Images are nice and eye catching, but again, you’ve got all this prime retail space, as it were, and it may well be better used for a call to action because that seems to be one thing that’s missing from the page here is a big call to action. Hit me with a tell me what to do button or headline or something. So what’s my next step? You should really be asking for that so that it’s obvious what the visitor should do next.

Make Sure Your Web Page Complies With The Law

From a legal perspective, we’re good. We’ve got the cookie consent here. That’s essential for UK businesses of Britain in the European Union. It started as an EU Directive that was adopted by all EU countries in May 2011. The Directive gave individuals rights to refuse the use of cookies that reduce their online privacy. Each country then updated its own laws to comply. In the UK, this meant an update to the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations.

At the bottom here, we have got other useful and critical issues covered, such as the privacy policy, terms and conditions, cookie policy, terms of business, all those kinds of things. So, that’s also very, very good. We have also got the legal thing covered here for a limited company.

Google My Business Name, Address And Phone Number (NAP) Info

We have down here the business address, which may well tie in with the Google My Business page if there is one. So that’s important to have that on all of your pages so that Google can tie your Google My Business page with your website. Then we’ve got links to some of our social channels, so they all seem to go to the right places, which is great. Overall, nice eye catching site. Got most of the basics covered. I think the only thing really to do to improve it would be a big call to action button.

Website Page Speed

Let’s move on to some of the technical things. Web page load speed, how fast does the page load for the visitor. This is Googles own page speed tool and Google will soon use the mobile version of your website to rank both the mobile and the desktop version. So, you need to make sure that your mobile version of the site is as well optimised as possible because it will affect your search engine rankings. As we can see here that we’ve got a poor rating here. Usually, this is referring to the speed of the site. So, if the site is loading slowly then that’s a bit no-no in Google’s eyes. So, optimising images and compressing code adding caching, those kinds of things, a straightforward fix. I think this is … Let’s just have a quick look. Yeah, it’s a WordPress website and Genesis is usually a framework that loads really, really quickly. So, I think there was probably just a few issues with regarding the image optimisation. Big images like these, perhaps need to be optimised a little better and adding a caching plug-in would be useful. It’s better on the website but again, there’s still opportunities for improvement there. This web page test a queue so we’ll have to wait, if that hasn’t finished by the end of the review then we can look at that later.

Structured Data Mark-up

Now, structured data. This is an opportunity to put some code on your site that will tell Google exactly what your site is about, tells them about your business, what your business does, what other sites you’ve got on the web that are linked to this, such as your social channels. I’m using this tool from Google From what we’ve got here, this websites mark-up, which is not really very helpful, all it does is just tells them that it’s a website. We’ve got creative work that isn’t particularly useful… really that’s not the correct mark-up to use. Creative work is more for reviewing things like books or documents, papers, those kinds of things. Really what I’m looking for here is local business mark-up or professional services mark-up where you can be specific with exactly what your site is about. So, there’s a missed opportunity here to make it clear to Google what this is and what it’s all about.

Webpage Word Count

Web page word counter. Looking at the number of words on a page, there’s been some tests done recently that prove that sites with more words on them will rank higher. Looking at somewhere in the region of 300 words, very basic minimum on a page that’s not very important moving up to 500, 1500, even 3,000 words on a page that are really important to rank. So, here we’ve got 419. I think there’s an opportunity to perhaps add some more words to that but it’d be interesting to do a comparison with the other competitor websites to see whether or not there’s any benefit from improving the word count on there.

Optimising OG Data

Open Graph (OG) Data is the data that is shared when a webpage is shared on a social media site.  It determines how this site is shared, how it looks when it’s shared on, for example, Facebook. We’ve got here an app ID that could be created as a plug-in in WordPress. It’s probably the Yoast SEO plugin that’s generating this and it hasn’t been set up properly. The SEO plug-in could be better optimised so that it links better with the businesses social profiles. This is how it looks when it’s shared so it’s actually a good image. It tells in a few words exactly, what they do and how they can help. Adding a phone number to the image might help improve conversions. You can also look at this text here. One of the things that you can do is you can set this up to have a video so the video that you had on the home page, you could actually set that up so that when this is shared you get the video showing up, which is really cool. So, this is your open graph data. It’s good, better than most that I see but an opportunity to just perhaps to tie up the loose ends with that.

Is The Site Indexed In Google’s Search Engine?

Now, this is all the pages that are indexed from the site in Google. As we can see, there are 180 pages that are listed here and we can see that there are all sorts of different pages. What I’m looking for here are what are known as thin content pages. Those pages are things like tag pages, author pages, category pages that haven’t been properly optimised but have got their way into the search index. If there are any, I can’t see any just yet. Here we go, tag. So, if we look at this, this is just a page that has got a tag on it. So, all of these tags here. So, every one of these tags is going to be generating a new page and this content is going to be duplicated on all these tag pages. That’s going to possibly give you problems with what’s known as duplicate and thin content. These issues may result in a Google Panda penalty, Panda is Google’s algorithm that grades the quality of a webpage.  From a tag point of view, you can use them. Ideally, you want things just tagged with just one category and you certainly want to be de-indexing all of your tags to avoid that duplicate content. There are some things that you can look at. A quick scroll through here, see that we’ve got another tag page, tag page and so on.

Website SEO Audit Tool Using Screaming Frog

Let’s just go over to this tool here is a free tool, it’s Screaming Frog and basically what it’ll do is it will look at your site in the same way that Google’s spider will crawl it and it will give us some information about the pages and how it’s all set up. I am looking here, these are all of the pages. We can see that we’ve got category pages indexed, we’ve got date pages indexed, more date pages, more date, we’ve got more tag pages, all of these dates and tags, really they’re weighing your site down. They are pages that are either duplicating content or they’re pages that have got unnecessary content on there. So, it really would be a good idea to get rid of those by de-indexing them. You can do that through the Yoast SEO plug-in that you’ve got on your WordPress site. Once you de-index those, after a while they will drop off of Google’s search engine. Which is good to know.

On Page Optimisation – Page Title, Meta Descriptions, H Tags

Going to look at page titles. Page titles are essential because they are what Google uses to index your page. So, we need to look to make sure that … have we got any missing? Nope, we’ve got no missing ones. Have we got any duplicates? We’ve got some duplicates here generated by the blog so you need to make sure where you’ve got multiple blog pages like this that you’ve got the rel and next tags added so that that is properly catered for in Google otherwise it may look at duplicate content issues on those. So, just worthwhile checking that you’ve got the real previous on those. Now, 65 characters. There is a limit of an optimised length of your title tags. That’s between 65 and 70 characters. So, we’ve got all of these are over that by quite some way. So, you really want to look at reducing the length of these long title tags so that they are shorter and more keyword orientated.

Meta descriptions are the little snippet of text that shows up in the Google search engine results page (SERP) under the page with the URL. Important from a click through perspective because it’s your opportunity to write an ad for the page. So, the more compelling that you can make it, the more likely it is that someone will click through and the more that people click through onto your page, for that search query, the more higher Google will rank you for that search query. So, well-written meta descriptions are essential on a page. Meta keywords, we haven’t got any. That is good stuff, we don’t need those. We’re missing H1 tags but these are all these tag pages so they will be de-indexed anyway so that’s not important. Duplicate, we’ve got some odd pages listed here. We’ve got a home page test so we want to make sure that that is de-indexed or at least put a 301 redirect on there to the current home page.

Just looking at the pages. Have we got any missing pages? We’ve got a load of pages here that need to be dealt with. Some of them are page not found and these are the tag pages. So, these 400 errors, these need to be fixed. 404 errors ar broken links. So, that looks like someone’s linked out to this one printer and that page is now gone, that needs to be fixed. H2 tags, we’ve got duplicate H2 tags. H2 gives another opportunity for a keyword variation for the keyword you want to rank that page for. So, it’s a missed opportunity here just by having this default one. That’s really confusing Google completely. Then we’ve got duplicate H2 tags. You can have multiple H2 tags but it will be better to use it as an H3 tag and organise the page better.

Using Images On A Web Page

Looking here for big images. We’ve got some very big images here. So, we want to make sure that we optimise those for the reasons that we mentioned earlier about site speed and that kind of thing. Missing ALT TXT Tags. These are used by Webpage readers in accessibility software to understand what an image is.  When you have an image screen readers and Google can’t understand what that image is. So, you have an opportunity to tag it with some descriptive text, which you can use to describe that image. So, it’s best

Looking here for big images. We’ve got some very big images here. So, we want to make sure that we optimise those for the reasons that we mentioned earlier about site speed and that kind of thing. Missing ALT TXT Tags. These are used by Webpage readers in accessibility software to understand what an image is.  When you have an image screen readers and Google can’t understand what that image is. So, you have an opportunity to tag it with some descriptive text, which you can use to describe that image. So, it’s best practice to make sure that that’s got some keywords in it so that Google can understand that the image is relevant to the page. Also, they can show up in the Google image search, which can again drive traffic to your page from there.

SEO Website Audit Summary

Overall, there are quite a few technical issues that can be addressed which will help make this page even better than it is. It is good that the site has an SSL, this means the website is secure and will get the green padlock in website browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer.  Site security is believed to be a ranking factor so if we’ve got the secure our page here then this site will likely get a ranking boost over similar websites. I haven’t done any backlink analysis on this domain but I could use a SEO audit tool like ahrefs to examine the number and quantity of backlinking referring domains.  All in all, it’s a good effort but I think there are opportunities to be able to improve this site even further. Overall, a pretty good effort, some technical issues, and some conversion optimisation things that can be looked at.  We are able to provide more in-depth search ranking analysis with our paid for seo website seo audit service and SEO consultancy. So, if you find that you want to have a chat about this feel free to get in touch. You can find us over at Kensigntonlinkbuilding.com.

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