You don’t have to be an expert to know more about where your own website’s SEO stacks up against your competition. There are plenty of free and easy tools in place to help you determine where you stand from an SEO standpoint and what areas you can improve upon. This is great whether you want to do your own SEO or need to be more educated before hiring and working with an SEO firm.

We’ve come up with some ways that you can do your own SEO research and get a better sense of where your website (or the website of a competitor) stands:

Check Your Domain Authority (DA) Ranking. This is a number that shows how “authoritative” your site is, and how much credibility search engines give it. Your DA is determined by factors such as its age, link backs and overall SEO ranking. You can check this by going to Open Site Explorer (https://www.opensiteexplorer.org/). A DA of more than 40 is considered to be good.

Test Your Site Load Time. Google punishes sites that take too long to load. This can be because it has too many slow-loading site elements or isn’t optimized correctly. Check your site’s loading time at Pingdom (https://www.pingdom.com/).

Determine If You Have a Working Sitemap. Search engines such as Google want to see a well-organized website and a sitemap is proof that your site is easily indexable. You can see if you have a sitemap by typing your website’s domain name followed by “sitemap.xml” into a Google search.

Find Out If You Have a Robots.Txt File. If a robot.txt file has major disallows, it can keep search engines from indexing your site. Type in your website name with /robots.txt at the end and see what comes up.

Evaluate Your Meta Content: Open up your website’s source code in your browser and search for the relevant meta content that might be within. Google no longer uses meta keywords, so this isn’t important, but you’ll want to do a search for meta tags and meta descriptions to make sure that they are being used for each page. You’ll also want to make sure that you are using your header tags correctly.

Find Onsite Content: This is more important when you are reviewing your competitors’ sites. Find links to “blogs” or “articles” on their website. If you can’t find any, do a search for their URL with the word “blog” included. You’ll also want to see how frequently and recently they are updating their content.

Search for Longtail Keywords: You can enter crucial longtail keyword phrases that you want to rank for into Google to see where your pages come up. If they aren’t on the front page, you’ll want to work harder to get them up there.

eVisible understands how to help small businesses gain online attention in competitive markets. Our local business online marketing services leverage multiple components so we can create a total strategy that’s right for your situation. From planning to execution and reporting, we’re prepared to guide you through every step of the SEO process.

We also understand that you might want to do SEO work on your own, which is why we offer free and premium eVisible online marketing tools that you can use to audit your own website or get information that is valuable in helping you work with an outside SEO agency. Tools such as the free sitemap submission or the premium high PageRank blog posting will make sure that you get the most out of your SEO.

If you are running PPC ads, you need to be performing A/B testing on a regular basis to ensure that your ads are performing as well as they should. A/B testing gives you a way to test different elements of an ad to see if changes improve or harm the clickthrough rate. Doing this is a critical step to keeping your ads fresh and improving your performance. In fact, when you hire a PPC management expert to help with your program, A/B testing is one of the first things that they will likely recommend.

A/B testing might seem complicated, but it’s something that anyone can accomplish. We’ve put together some easy steps to help you to do your own A/B testing and improve the performance of your PPC ad campaigns:

1. Determine the highest-performing ad from an ad group that generates a high amount of traffic for you. You’ll want to focus on ads that have already proven to be successful to see where they can be tweaked.

2. Put the original ad on hold and make a pair of duplicate copies of this ad. From there, make a pair of tweaks to perform the test you want to accomplish. This can mean changing the text from “all caps” to all lowercase, using different images or color elements.

3. Halt all of the other ads in your ad group so only the ads that you are running A/B testing on are live. Make sure to label these ads with their date and the changes made in AdWords.

4. Make sure you have “Optimize for Clicks” selected in AdWords to get the most accurate results.

5. Let the ads run for a lengthy period of time before you start to try and collect any conclusions. You’ll want to get several weeks’ worth of data and hundreds of ad impressions before you have a data sample size that is large enough from which to draw conclusions.

Most people understand the importance of creating an effective content marketing campaign. However, it’s much more difficult to create a campaign that is destined for success. In fact, most content creation strategies are doomed to fail before they even get off the ground.

Here are a few of the most common issues that cripple content marketing campaigns and what you can do to avoid these mistakes:

Not Establishing Your Parameters Before Starting Your Campaign.

When This Happens: In the early stages of a campaign, usually when a company decides that it needs to do content marketing in the first place.

Why This Happens: It’s easy to get excited about starting a content marketing campaign. It’s often so easy to get excited that you don’t think about why you are doing a campaign, who your target audience is or what your objectives should be.

How to Avoid It: Think about who the ideal person to read your content is, then write content that you believe will directly impact this person’s life.

Not Creating Content on a Regular Basis.

When This Happens: A few months into a campaign, as soon as the “newness” of launching a creative campaign wears off.

Why This Happens: It’s easy to devote a lot of energy into a content creation campaign at the beginning. But it’s also easy to give up on a campaign before it really gets off the ground.

How to Avoid It: You need to understand that Google rewards content only if it is done on a consistent basis. Set a schedule to post several times a week at the start of your campaign and stick to it.

Keywords Matter.

When This Happens: Poor keyword strategies often doom content creation campaigns from the beginning.

Why This Happens: It’s common to take the wrong approach to keywords, such as keyword stuffing or using keywords that are too broad.

How to Avoid It: Start by doing some effective keyword research to make sure you are targeting the right phrases that will connect with your target customers.

Failing to Create Internal Links.

When This Happens: At the start of a campaign before you even write your first piece of content.

Why This Happens: Many people simply don’t understand the importance of internal links and how much of a role it can have in helping the overall SEO on their site.

How to Avoid It: Content and links are two things that should work together and not independently of each other. Think about ways that you can internally link to multiple pages on your website with each piece of content.

Failing to Diversify Your Content.

When This Happens: Whenever a marketer fails to realize that everything they publish can potentially be content marketing material.

Why This Happens: It’s easy to get locked in on a certain type of content (such as blog posts) and continue to produce it again and again.

How to Avoid It: Diversify your content. eVisible can help you to create high quality blog posts for your site. We can also provide you with the right mixture of premium content and link creation.

Not Integrating Images Into Your Content.

When This Happens: Throughout the entirety of a content creation campaign.

Why This Happens: Too many people associate “content” with “words” and don’t understand the potential value of integrating images into your articles, blog posts and onsite content.

How to Avoid It: Images make stories more interesting and help to improve SEO results. Use them every time you create content.

Not Using Social Media to Promote Your Content.

When This Happens: After the first blog post is a written and a content marketer simply expects that people will magically find it and make it viral.

Why This Happens: It’s a fundamentally lack of understanding about how content gets shared. You need to promote your content in order for people to find it.

How to Avoid It: Use popular social media sites to share the content you create. Come up with ideas such as mailing lists or forum postings to expand your reach.