To get the most out of your company’s website it’s important to take stock of how well your site is performing on search engines. It is also important to compare your website to that of your competition. This is why you need an SEO check. 

SEO check 1. How Not to SEO Check Your Site…

It’s still commonly assumed that googling your own site’s name and likely search phrases for what you do will give you an accurate idea of your site’s performance for everyone.

Search engines often take into account your search preferences unless you’re searching in incognito or private browsing. They do so by looking at data such as your location and browsing history. As such, it can be difficult to get a baseline just by doing that – and even if you did, your potential customers will have their search histories affecting their results. Not to mention all of the differences in algorithms, indexing etc. In short, no two sets of results are the same. 

Here are some useful rules to bear in mind:

• Your site’s search engine performance isn’t static; it’s always improving or worsening relative to your competition.
• Search engines want to give users the best possible results. The better for a particular query it thinks your site will be, the more your performance will improve.
• Because of these two rules, what you need to check is how well a page of your site serves visitors looking for a specific search query.
• Consider how likely it is that they’ll choose to click through to it from the search engine results. Use Google Search Console to check the actual data. 

SEO check 2. So How Do You Tell How Your Site Performs?

Obviously this takes more work to determine than simply looking at where your site currently sits in search rankings, but it provides a much fuller picture – even highlighting areas where significant improvement can be possible.

SEO check 3. Using All Available Data

There’s a lot of information available which can be used to identify where and how best to improve your site’s internet presence. Making the most of this data requires a lot of analysis, but we’ve found data-driven SEO is so much more effective that it easily repays the time investment.

SEO check 4. Tapping Our Experience

We perform these SEO checks ourselves for all ongoing clients regularly, but we also offer in-depth SEO audits as a standalone service – these will also come with recommendations on how to put the information to use.

SEO audits like these are the key to real, ongoing improvement of your online audience, while other approaches only give you the tools to help in the short term if that.

To arrange an audit or discuss any other aspect of what we do you can fill out our contact form, email us at [email protected], or call us on 01524 566 736 and we’ll be happy to talk you through anything you want to know.