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.

seo-checklist

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.

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