Did you know that VSG provides a full website evaluation to any new client or existing client? It’s a great way to have a clear view of not just what your website says, but how it’s working to improve your business.
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When evaluating a website we measure two key metrics. A user’s experience of your website and a search engine’s experience of your website. When focusing on the user, also called a visitor, we focus on performance and page load speeds. When evaluating a search engine’s experience we look at what’s called search engine optimization, or SEO for short.
In this blog post we are going to focus on the SEO portion of our website evaluation. We will talk about what comes in an SEO report, how often you should be running these reports on your website, and some of the why’s behind ensuring your website has a healthy SEO.
What is an SEO report?
SEO reports are crucial to understanding what’s going on with your website’s searchability. These reports give insights into technical mistakes your website may be making as search engines have a set of rules they follow when deciding which websites to show first. The primary function of the report is to check and see if your website is following those rules.
How often should I be checking my website’s SEO?
At minimum, once a week. Due to the high value of being listed first in search results, search engines are constantly changing their algorithms to prevent anyone from using loopholes to cheat the system. These changes also make it easier for search engines to identify what your website is about, whether it’s relevant to a particular search term, and the quality of your content.
Our SEO reports aren’t just for when search engines make a change though. Often times the things we catch are issues with new content. For example a new blog post might have been written without the proper HTML header tags or images and links don’t have the proper attributes. These parts can get easily missed and a weekly SEO report creates a safety net against them hurting your website’s searchability long-term.
If you want your website to be found, you should be keeping tabs on your SEO. If you are not then you’re probably missing a lot of opportunities for improving your searchability and ultimately the success of your website.
Now let’s dive into some of the metrics we measure in our SEO reports
The devil is in the details
This is a snapshot of the overview portion of one of our SEO reports. On our report we’ll tell you how many pages we crawled/checked, the total number of issues we found, and details about them.
A: Number of pages we checked
Our software crawls your entire website following every link. This is important because sometimes your website can link to other websites improperly, causing search engines to think that it’s an extension of your website. Not only will they flag you negatively for this, the credibility of those websites could cause yours to be considered untrustworthy. This metric gives us a good idea of whether that’s happening or not.
B: Total issues found on your website
This number gives us a quick idea of how healthy your website’s SEO is. The higher the number of issues the worse your website’s SEO is. The goal is to get that number to 0. On average we see websites with no prior SEO report between 100 – 500 issues.
C: Details about what issues we found on your website
The overview of the report helps identify exactly where it is that your website’s SEO needs improvement. We break down the issues into five categories: Critical, Warnings, Redirect, Metadata, Content.
Critical issues will hurt your website the most. Things such as links that point to pages that don’t exist, pages that report server errors, and pages that redirect to pages that don’t exist.
Warnings are not always issues, instead they indicate areas that might be optimized differently than you intended. For example, let’s say your website was telling search engines not to show your blog in search results. This isn’t something search engines consider bad however, you’d be missing a big opportunity for your unique content to boost your website’s SEO.
The remaining types of issues help paint the picture of how your website tells search engines what it’s about, what your content is focused on, and what to consider when showing your website in search results.
Our Best Recommendations
In reviewing your evaluation, we can then provide industry standards for comparison and provide specific recommendations for your site.
Get Your Own Free Evaluation
This is just a brief overview of the details you can expect from one of our website evaluation. When we sit down with a prospective client we dig deeper into what is causing these issues, what it would take to fix them, and whether or not we’d be a good partner to help improve your website’s functionality. A high-performing website can be crucial to bringing you new business and is an integral part of any holistic marketing plan.
