If your website has been up and running for a couple of months or more, an SEO health check is a good idea (search engine optimisation – the process of optimising your website for search engines like Google). Take a step back and see how your website is performing in Google and how much traffic you're getting to your website. If you're only getting a handful of visits each day or less, you might have a SEO problem!
If you're new to SEO, check out our SEO Basics series first.
To measure your traffic make sure you have Google Analytics setup to track visits to your website. You might find our setup guide on this helpful.
How to do a basic SEO health check
The quickest way is to put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers and do some searches in Google and see where you rank. Go to www.google.com and perform the following searches.
- Search for your business name
You want to be on page 1 near the top for this. - Search for your industry/services and location
For example "Dentist in Cambridge". Try a range of industry terms too, and make a note of what position you sit in the results. - Search for advice in your industry
For example a mortgage broker might target a search like this "Buying a property in NZ but live overseas". Try a range of "common" questions your typical customer has and make note of where you sit in the results.
Check 1 is important. For many businesses, their leads come from word of mouth referrals and if someone can't find your website near the top of page one when searching for your business name, they may give up trying to find you – even if they were a warm referral from an existing customer.
Checks 2 & 3 are better for reaching an audience that may not have heard of your business before but are searching for more generic industry terminology/keywords relevant to what you offer.
If you weren't on page one for any of the 3 checks, you're most likely missing out on valuable visitors to your website. Below I'll outline some quick tweaks you can make to improve your rankings
The quick tweaks
A quick note, it's usually not possible to rank well for every keyword & industry term. Pick your most important ones (3 - 4 per page) and rank well for them rather than trying to show up for too many terms and then not showing up for any of them.
- How to show up in searches for your business name
Make sure your business name is at the start or end of your title tags (In Rocketspark this is setup on the Get Found (SEO) area of Dashboard). Also make sure your business name is part of the H1 tag on your homepage. (Note: you only want one H1 tag on your homepage). Also make sure it appears in the paragraph text on your homepage. If your business name is a noun or not unique then you might have trouble here.. You could look at Adwords and Google Business listing or focus on tweaks 2 & 3. - How to show up in searches for your industry/services
Similar to the tweaks in step 1, you need to make sure your industry terms and the geographical location/s you provide your services to (if applicable) appear in your homepage's Title tag, H1 Heading and in Paragraph text. - How to show up in searches for advice in your industry
Industry advice and help related searches are best targeted using Blogging for business. Write helpful blog articles on what your customers are asking so that you get indexed in Google for these searches. It might take you 30 - 40 minutes to write a good blog post but this is possibly the best way to improve your sites ranking in Google for specific terms.
Other quick wins
- Make sure there are links back to your website from other websites. Free directory listings are good for this.
- Get Google Business setup, this gets you right to the top for location based searches with a pin on a map.
- Setup a Facebook page for your business, add your website's address and share your blog posts. This creates more links back to your website.
Remember that changes to your website's content can take a couple of weeks to affect Google search results. We recommend you run the SEO health check every couple of months to make sure your site is still in tip top SEO shape.
If things aren't working out, or you're running out of time! Get in touch with the Rocketspark team and we'll let you know about our SEO Package (exclusive to Rocketspark customers).
