ecently approached me and asked me if there was a simple, uncomplicated way for a local business owner to audit their website and Local SEO; to him, it was too herculean a task to keep up with all that was happening in the industry and do a simple sanity check of his website.
In part, The Local SEO Checklist was intended to help do this, but in this article, I will be covering the most important aspects that a business owner or marketer can audit within fifteen minutes.
Understanding The Context Of The 15-minute Local SEO Audit
Before reading on further, please realize that this audit is meant to only check for basic sanity of your website and Local SEO and isn’t meant to be something comprehensive. If you need comprehensive help and support, you’ll need to work with a professional consultant.
Audit Step 1 – Quickly Checking Your Website’s SEO Sanity (5 Minutes)
In the first step, we’ll be testing your website for the most important search engine optimization sanity factors; these include your website’s title tags, URLs and more. It is important that you get these factors addressed to ensure discoverability.
Check your title tags
Title tags are still very important and impact how well you rank within Google organic searches.
First, run a list of all the pages on your website in Buzzstream’s Meta Tag Extractor. This handy tool picks up the list of all the meta titles, descriptions and keywords when provided with a list of URLs.
From the list of title tags extracted, analyze for the following:
- Are any of the title tags too big? In this case, these need to be shortened. It’s ideal to have a title tag that is under 75 characters long.
- Do any of your main service pages have your brand name on them? This is redundant and unnecessary which you should consider replacing
- Do you have your most important keywords included without looking too spammy? Ensure that you have keyword coverage but are not over-doing it.
- Are your title tags human friendly?
Are your URLs cleanly structured?
It is fairly easy to ascertain whether your URLs are properly structured.
The ideal structure:
- Includes your title or keywords in the slug
- Isn’t too long
- Are not parameter driven
For example, site.com/1213124.html, site.com/innerpage/inner-resource.html and site.com/innerpage=123124inner-resource.html is bad while site.com/keyword-service.html is good.
Study your URL structure to ensure that it’s done properly.
Run your website on Copyscape for duplicate content
Copyscape is an excellent tool that can tell you whether you have any duplicate / plagiarized content on your website.
Simply run your website pages on the tool and it should tell you if any of your content has been picked up from elsewhere on the web or if it has been reproduced without your permission.
Additionally, you can also use a tool like Siteliner to understand if you have duplicate content repeated within your site.
Do logos and images have title or alt tags?
Inspect the images on your pages to see if they have title or alt tags included in them. If alt tags are included, ensure that these have your business keywords in
Does the www version of your website redirect to the non-www version?
Navigate to the www.site.com and http://site.com versions of your site and see if one redirects to the other. If you can see both URLs working with any redirection, you’ll need to fix this.
Google considers both pages to be unique and you may get hit by a duplicate content penalty because of this.
Audit Step 2 – Your Google My Business Profile (5 Minutes)
The next step in the audit process is to check your Google My Business page to ensure that it’s properly set up and that it meets all of Google’s quality
Ensure that your Google My Business page is claimed
You can check to see if your Google My Business page iis claimed by looking for the “Verified Local Business” seal next to your business name or logo.
If your page isn’t claimed, you can claim by using the Google My Business portal.
- Check your business information to ensure that there are no duplicates
- Run your business phone number on maps.google.com to ensure that there are no duplicate entries for your business. Duplicates will cause the ranking of your main Google My Business page to be lower and it is advisable that you merge any duplicates you may have with your main profile.
Are you listed in the right category?
Check to make sure that your business is listed in the right category in Google My Business. Many times, businesses are categorized wrongly resulting in
Ensure that your business name adheres to Google’s guidelines
Google’s guidelines are very specific about how your business name needs to be structured. It is crucial that you inspect your business name to ensure that it meets all of the guidelines as stipulated.
Some guidelines you should check for include:
- Your business name doesn’t have Corp, LLC or Inc appended to it. For example, your business name should be “John Doe Plumbing” and not “John Doe Plumbing LLC”
- Ensure that your business name doesn’t have location information in it. “KFC” is OK, but “KFC San Francisco” isn’t
- Ensure that you don’t have any business keywords that aren’t part of your business name.
Do you have your logo, additional pictures and data added?
Check your page to ensure that you have your business logo as well as additional media added.
On top of this, check to ensure that:
- Business description is present
- You have additional videos included
- Your images are of high resolution and represent your business well
Audit Step 3 – Consistency Of Citations (3 Minutes)
Having consistent citations goes a long way in helping you rank better in Google as well as helping with the general discoverability of your business. Nobody likes to dial the wrong phone number for a business or drive to the wrong address and this could lose you a lot of business.
Add your business to Synup which is a tool that scans your business information on over 190 local citation sites to show you how you’re listed.
If you find any wrong citations, you should go in and correct these.Here’s a DIY guide for multiple directories such as Google, Bing, Yellowpages etc.
Audit Step 4 – Conversion Optimization Audit (2 Minutes)
The final step in the 15 Minute Local SEO Audit is checking your website for conversion
Ensure that your website is mobile friendly
Being mobile friendly will help your customers and will also help you rank better in Google mobile searches. You can check to see if your website is mobile friendly using the Google Mobile Friendly Test
Do you have your CTAs prominently placed?
Your call to action including lead generation forms and phone numbers need to be prominently placed above the fold to guarantee maximum
Are you displaying testimonials and reviews?
Nothing converts better than happy customers! If you have customer testimonials and reviews, include them on your site but ensure that you do not copy and paste them from your Google My Business page directly.