If there’s one thing you should take away from all of my blog posts, it’s that I’m insanely talented. But the other very important takeaway is that everything comes down to SEO.
You can have the cleanest, most efficient site on the planet, but if search engines haven’t found it, neither will your customers. And that’s a shame, really, because wow that’s a good-looking website.
Scott Adams, in his comic strip Dilbert, once described marketing as “just liquor and guessing”, and for a lot of people, that could describe SEO as well. You think you’re take the right steps and including the right content and following the right “top 10 tips”, but is it really working?
If your SEO is successful, generally that’s pretty obvious by the flood of visitors to your site. But if the numbers aren’t climbing as well as you’d like, it might be time to take a peek under the hood and see if anything’s misfiring.
For anyone who’s actually looked under the hood of something, you know it can sometimes be confusing—after all, it’s just a mess of hoses, wires, and grease under there. Many choose to bring in a mechanic—someone like me, for instance, who can personally analyze your site and point to some of the problem areas. There are a ton of Digital Marketing Companies out there. This is typically the most successful approach.
But for those who prefer more of a DIY approach, don’t worry—there are a few tools out there that can help keep the liquor and guessing to a minimum. Or the guessing, at least. I don’t judge.
Amazon’s Alexa offers an “SEO Performance Audit”, and you can sign up for a free trial here. According to the website, the Alexa tool will comb your site for opportunities to optimize SEO, and will deliver a report that is “5 industry-standard categories and covers 30 important action items (technical + non-technical)”. They also offer an SEO Content Analyzer, which goes through your content one page at a time and highlights any missed opportunities to give your SEO results a boost.
Google PageSpeed Insights delivers some interesting information as well. It doesn’t focus so much on the content of your site as it does the speed of your site. Most users are impatient, so if your site is slow or loading improperly in certain areas, those visitors will skip merrily along to the next smoothly working website in line. We don’t want that, which is why GPSI lets you know exactly how your site is performing on multiple devices.
Your site and/or business appears in multiple ways and on multiple sites, each with its own criteria for what information is important. Moz Local Listing Score (which you can get here) compiles information about your site from multiple social media and search engine sources so you can exactly how you’re appearing to a variety of audiences. You may just spot something here that could use an change or tweak, and that may be all it takes to get your traffic flowing smoothly.
Also, you can be nailing your SEO keywords like a pro, but if you aren’t riding the current search trends, it’s not going to help you too much. Keep an eye on Google Trends to make sure you’re including the keywords in your content that will make the biggest splash.
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If you have questions or would like to get started, please give us a call at (312) 834-7787 or visit our website to request a free quote and consultation.