While most small businesses understand that SEO is important you might not know exactly how SEO works, or how you can check your website's SEO performance. Here are five simple things you can look for and some tools that can help you tell if your website is optimized or, needs help to rank. Keep watching.
Hi, I'm Tom Malesic, founder and president of EZMarketing, and you're watching AskEZ. This is where small business owners go to get real answers to their marketing questions.
Is Your Website Already Optimized?
Before I jump in the simple answer to "Is my website SEO optimized?" is NO, because SEO is never done. SEO is an ongoing process. You constantly need to be adding changing and optimizing your content to stay on top of Google.
So if you're not actively doing SEO your site is definitely not optimized. But if you are doing SEO or have done any in the past here are some things to look for.
5 Ways to Tell if Your Website is SEO-Optimized
Are You Getting Leads?
As a business owner the number one thing you should care about with SEO is are you getting leads from your website? Are they filling out forms or picking up the phone and calling you? And if you have a shopping cart on your site are you getting sales?
If you're getting leads from your SEO, everything else is secondary. Your SEO company or your marketing team might be tracking 20 other things, but leads are key.
If you don't know where your leads are coming from you should be tracking them. We have a leads dashboard where we can track all your form fills and phone calls and show you where each and every lead is coming from!
Titles, Metas, H1s
One of the easiest ways to tell if your site is SEO optimized is to look at your title tags, meta descriptions, and H1s. The title, description, and headers on each page should include keywords that you want your page to rank for.
For example, you can see that our web design page is optimized for the keyword 'web design company'. It's in the title at the top of the browser window and it's in the main headers on the page.
And if you search for web design company on Google, you'll see the keyword again in the title and the description on the search engine results page.
You can check each page on your website individually like this or we use a tool called Screaming Frog to crawl your entire site and show you all your titles and metas.
Keyword Rankings
Next if your site is SEO optimized you should be ranking for keywords that are relevant for your business.
Googling your keywords is one way to check rankings, but it can be inconsistent. So, we use a tool called SEMRUSH that can track all the different keywords you're ranking for, how they change over time and even how your rankings compare to your competitors.
Site Speed & Mobile Friendliness
Google prioritizes websites that are fast and mobile-friendly, and their recent core web vitals update made site performance a ranking factor.
Bottom line: an SEO optimized site should load fast and provide a great experience especially on mobile. Google has a Page speed test and a mobile-friendly test where you can check to see if your website is optimized to meet Google standards.
Technical Site Audit
Finally, if your site is optimized for SEO, it should be relatively free of technical errors like broken links, 404 errors, uncompressed images, or other issues.
Using SEMRUSH we can do a site audit to improve the overall health of your site. Most of our clients start with a score of less than 50 percent and we work to keep their site health score at over 90 percent.
Have You Checked Your Site's SEO Performance?
Again, SEO is an ongoing process is never truly done. But if you're wondering if your site is SEO optimized look at your leads first, then dig into the details like your meta tags, rankings, and site performance.
Or even better contact me for a free SEO audit and I'll run the reports for you and then walk you through how you can get better results from your SEO.
And of course, if you like this video, don't forget to like and subscribe.
