Give Your Site a Check-up
As a small business owner with a website, you probably know a little about SEO or search engine optimization. To make the most of your web presence, you want to go through your website and see if it’s fit for the eyes of Google. Here are some ways you can run an SEO audit on your site:
To start things off, you want to Google your brand name. This has to be a clean search, meaning no “personalized results”, so you’re best off using Google Chrome’s Incognito Mode or Firefox’s Private Browsing Mode when doing this search. In addition, you can type this URL in your browser: https://www.google.com/search?pws=0&q=brand+name. Just make sure that you replace “brand+name” with your own brand, using + signs where the spaces should be.
Once you search for things, take a look at the current results on the first page. If your social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, or even unrelated sites are outranking your own website, then you most likely have some on-page SEO issues.
In these same results, you can also click the link for the “cached” view of your site. Basically, this is what the search engines see on your site. If the text and content in the cache doesn’t look ideal, then you have other things to fix on your website.
Your site’s blue link title in the results should also have targeted keyword phrases in addition to your brand. This helps your site’s rankings for those particular queries.
Lastly, you can use the site:yourdomain.com query to see what pages of your site are being indexed by Google. If only a fraction of your pages show up, there might be some site structuring issues at hand.
Read more at the Washington Post.
