Local SEO Audit Checklist

SEO SMALL BUSINESS GUIDE: Local SEO Audit Checklist Before you choose you local SEO company, take one hour to complete the following small business audit to educate yourself about your website and where it needs improvement. The following audit is intended for small business owners, some of these tasks may be considered more advanced. Fill out the following checklist and see what your score means below. Does your site have a robots.txt file? Visit www.domainname.com/robots.txt and see if you have this file. If so, you will want to make sure search engines are indexing the site. Disallow means that search engines are not indexing that page or pages. Is your site getting indexed by Google? In Google, search site:domainname.com and see if your site is returning the appropriate amount or results. If your site returns no, or very little results, you have an indexing problem and needs to corrected. Does your site have a sitemap? Your sitemap is a roadmap that you provide to search engines, visit www.domainname.com/sitemap.xml to view your sitemap. This needs to be up-to-date and submitted in Google Webmaster Tools for best results. Is your site clear of any 404 errors? 404 errors are pages that cannot be found on your site. If a link on your site points to a page that doesn't exist you will experience this error. Search engines frown upon this and all occurrences need to be corrected. Visit www.brokenlinkcheck.com to see what errors you have. Does your homepage have one URL? Your site may have up to 4 pages indexed for the home page such as http://domainname.com, http://domainname.com/index.php, http://www.domainname.com and http://www.domainname.com. Your site needs to have one URL as the home page. Does your site have SEO friendly URLS? SEO friendly URLS are not only beneficial to search engines, but beneficial to users. An SEO friendly URL would be http://www.domainname.com/. This shows relevance to search engines and helps with your site's rankings for the relevant keywords. Does your site have duplicate content? Duplicate content on site and off site can be troublesome. Visit http://www.copyscape.com and enter your website. If there are results that have the same content on other sites, your website may be copying other sites or being copied by others. Does your site have descriptive titles? Each web page should have a title tag. You can view this on the top of the browser or by viewing the source code and searching for title. Your title tag should be descriptive of the page content and concise, no longer than 70 characters. Is your content relevant to the headings? Search engines look for relevancy of content and major titles and headings. If you content is relevant and structured well you are in good shape, if not your content needs to be re-evaluated and "optimized". Does your site have a 75% Moz Local score? Moz Local allows you to check your business for local listings that are a key component in the local search algorithm. Ideally a 100% completion is preferred, but having a 75% or greater is a great start. Does your business have positive online reviews? Online reviews are becoming more relevant to local search. Yelp and Google reviews show signals to search engines that your business provides a quality product or service. Does your site have a Domain Authority of 40+? Moz, as previously mentioned provides an off-site metric to evaluate a websites authority in the search engine's eyes. Links to your website help increase rankings and obtaining a 40+ Domain Authority is positive for local search. Visit http://www.opensiteexplorer.org to view. Total Check marks: /12 WHAT YOUR RESULTS MEAN: 0 - 3 4 - 6 Your site is in dire need of help. A full local SEO audit is recommended. Your site has a few key components in order to rank, however is missing a lot. 7 -9 10 - 12 Your site may not need a full local SEO audit, but still needs improvement. Your site is in great shape, continue your efforts and grow your business online. O Copyright 2014 Tide Interactive Group: Prepared By Josh Freeman