Check List Archive - Page 3 of 3 - Local SEO Checklist 2023

When a user lands on a new website, he acts like a lost puppy in a strange neighborhood. If this website is yours, you’re going to want to guide this puppy home. On the way, you would want him to have some fun and pick up a few treats.

Now you could hire a guide that takes new visitors through your site, day in and day out. The guide could point them in the right direction based on their needs and your visitors would have a good time. There is a chance that they would then recommend your site to their friends and you end up getting some referral traffic.

But what happens when this guide is broken? Your visitors won’t find what they came in looking for and would leave right away. As a result, your bounce rate gets worse and Google will reduce your PageRank.

Why do I need a navigation menu?

It is imperative that you pay attention to your website’s navigation menu as it acts as a suitable guide for your visitors and the search engine crawlers. The idea of framing your navigation menu should come in while planning your site’s architecture. You could put down a basic flowchart that has the headers of all the pages you want to build. It can be helpful while structuring your URLs as well.

Navigation menu and search engine crawlers

As a web developer or a business owner with a website, you have to make sure that all the pages on your website’s domain get indexed. In other words, the search engine should know of all the pages you have created and in what way they are related to your website. All of this is conveyed to the crawlers by your navigation menu.

The navigation menu talks to search engine crawlers about the hierarchy of pages on your website.

For example, the above screenshot of Sotheby’s navigation menu has three main items – Buy, Sell and Discover. These options are pretty straightforward for a search engine to understand and convenient for a new visitor to navigate through. Under the item Sell, you can find a bunch of other options which are categorized to be related to the users that would want to sell real estate.

Search engine crawlers will only understand the hierarchy that you tell them. If you want three, four or five specific pages to be looked at as the most important ones to your website, you should link them to your top navigation menu. The pages that fall under these sections are ranked next in priority. You can add them to the top navigation menu, as items on a sub-menu.

It is a common practice to have a maximum of six or seven items in your navigation menu. Anything more will crowd the page and probably confuse the visitor. Although Google allows around 250 links from a single page on your website, it is advisable not to overcrowd the page with links. If you have too many links that you have to add on your homepage, you can always place them in your footer section.

Navigation menu and website visitors

When thinking of your navigation menu, you should keep in mind how your audience would perceive it. At any point of time, your navigation menu should be easily understood by a new visitor to the webpage.

Let’s say you’ve spent months designing a new website with fresh ideas and content. It is not going to be of great use if the user doesn’t understand how to navigate through it. Your end goal should always be to keep it simple and straightforward.

Having a bad site navigation menu can lead to confused visitors and thereby, less conversion . If a user does not find what he wants easily, he/she will leave the page immediately and look for a different, simpler website that can help him out.

Improving your navigation menu

As it is with most items on a website, you have to continuously keep improving on your navigation menu as well. The most important aspect that you should consider from an SEO perspective while optimizing your navigation menu is the indexability of the pages. You have to make sure all your webpages are indexable from your navigation menu. No page should be left unconnected to another. In other words, don’t orphan a page in a way that a search engine crawler doesn’t understand its relation.

Make use of the data you see on Google analytics and Google Search console to make informed decisions on your website’s navigation bar improvement. You should also consider doing a basic competitor keyword research using Google’s Keyword Planner. Try to understand the kind of keywords your competitors are ranking for and are bidding for. This can help you frame your site’s navigation and overall flow better.

While putting down content for a website, business owners and marketers always look to include images. Media in the form of images, videos, infographics, creatives and GIFs have become one of the most important aspects while building a website these days. They promise to bring color to the site and help in making the content more vivid. Another way in which images help is that they attract the attention of readers and trigger emotions.

Why do I need images on my website?

Well, it is not a myth! Images do help in SEO for your website. Images provide perspective to long form content that goes up on your website. Adding images, videos, infographics or any other form of media to your blogs can help improve the readability. Adding screenshots or graphs can help build credibility for your content.

Most visitors to your website will want to visualise what you are describing. If you are extensively describing a specific product or a service that you offer, it makes sense to include images of the same. You could also try to depict the process that your business follows to source the product. Or if you offer a service, images of the team and the professionals can be used.

How do I pick images?

The natural thought that marketers or business owners tend to have when picking images for their website, is to go with high resolution images. Although your intent might be pointed in the right direction, High resolution images are not the best pick for websites. These are files with huge sizes and end up increasing the website’s load time. What happens then? The bounce rate for your website increases and Google grades your website low on user experience!

Spend some time and decide on the images that are to go up on the website. Always use images that are relevant to the content. The more relevant the images are to your content body, the higher Google will rank your page.

Use as many original images as possible for your business website. While most generic websites out there tend to purchase stock images, you can make your brand stand out by using real – life images of your team or the services you offer. The essence of your brand can be delivered through the imagery on your site.

If you cannot upload images of your own, try using free images from the many repositories on the internet. You could try looking for relevant images on unspalsh.com, freepik.com or pixabay.com. Don’t forget to give credits when using from a platform that requires it.

Given the popularity of GIFs and their ability to quickly communicate the idea, emotions and elicit a laugh, you could add them in your article or content piece as well. As long as the media you use is in accordance with the tone of your content, anything should be fine.

Basic pointers while optimizing images

They say an image is worth a thousand words. But the same ideology should not be followed when uploading images on your website. You have to be aware of how the search crawlers are going to read them and how your website visitors are going to perceive them.

Pay close attention to your image ALT tags. What are ALT tags you ask? Well, it is essentially a descriptive phrase that you have to put together for your images. These show up when a website visitor is unable to view an image for some reason. These tags also help convey the right message to the search crawlers which helps in indexing. You should always try to include the focus keywords, which might include location names, in your image ALT tags.

You also need to pay attention to the file name of the image you upload. The name needs to be relevant to what the image is and also in what context it is being used. Place the focus keywords towards the beginning of the file name. Try including location keywords in the name of the image. Ensure that the name is void of any stop words like a, an, the etc.

While scaling down your images, you also have to make sure they are responsive on mobile devices. You could use a WordPress plugin to ensure this.

Captioning the image is another important step that helps with SEO. You could add location details in your image captions to make it more relevant. Your website visitors can learn a little extra about the specific topic and the image through its caption. On the other hand, search crawlers also tend to scan these captions and make sense of its relevance to the content. So make sure the information you provide is not very repetitive and caters to both.

You have to make sure that information regarding the images you use are included in your website’s existing XML sitemap. If not, you could try and create a separate sitemap for your images.

Last but not the least, don’t forget to make the page look good. Pay attention to the proportions of the image and the alignment with respect to the content. If you get all the technicalities right but don’t make it look pretty in the end, chances are your users will bounce off anyway.

Building perfect URLs is every business owner and web developer’s dream. It holds great value as it is the first thing that search engine crawlers and website visitors notice. URL structures have a significant impact on your website’s SEO and also help build the site’s hierarchy.

Search Engines and URLs

Search engines have now evolved to a point where you don’t have to spoon feed every tiny bit of detail about your business and the content you develop to them. Crawlers have grown smart enough to understand what you are trying to say and also what users search for on the internet. Their sole aim is to match the two correctly.

With that said, you have to ensure that the URLs you frame for your business website pages are not just easy to understand for your users, but are also search-engine friendly. What we are talking about here is more than just the specific URLs. We need to ensure that the entire framework behind your URL structure is clear, simple and focused on ranking and readability.

Purpose of URLs

Website URLs are considered an easy and foolproof manner to gain an edge over competitors. They not only help you rank higher for relevant keywords, but they also help in improving your site’s pagerank. The better the structure of your website URL, the better Google will rate your website for user experience. Google now holds user experience and interaction on high ranks to decide which business comes up first on search engine results.

Where do I start?

The easiest and most direct way to start off with your URL structuring is by working alongside the flow of your website folders. Follow a breadcrumb trail that starts off at the core website domain and then branches out to the subfolders. This also ensures that your URL structuring is scalable as and when your business and the website grows.

Example:

www.thebusiness.com/resources/blog/how-to-run-business

Shorter URLs are better for user experience. Web browsers allow 2,083 characters in URLs which should be more than enough for any business page out there!

Dynamic or Static?

There are broadly two types of URLs you can look at implementing – one is dynamic and the other is static. Simply put, static URLs are the consistent ones, while dynamic ones change depending upon the search trigger on the website database.

Static URLs are better for SEO and help for better ranking. Period.

Key pointers for structuring URLs

The most important factor to keep in mind while structuring the URLs for your website is that the crawlers should be able to pick them up easily. This means that the structuring should be in a way that the search engine understands your logic. To put it In simple terms, make your URLs readable, stable and static.

You should always ensure that your URLs are easy to read and make logical sense. This will help search engines and your audience understand your website better. If your visitors like a piece of content or a specific page on your website and the URL makes sense to them, they are bound to remember it and come back to it directly instead of visiting your homepage and looking for the page .

In order to improve local SEO, you can add language markers in URLs. For example:

English: www.thebusiness.com/en/blog

French: www.thebusiness.com/fr/blog

Another important aspect for ranking higher on local SEO is the kind of keywords you use. Always do a thorough keyword research before framing your URLs. Add only the relevant terms and avoid keyword stuffing in URLs. Placement of keywords does not influence SEO. It wouldn’t make a difference if you have your keyword at the end of the URL or at the beginning. As long as the content, the URL structure and the keywords used are relevant, it shouldn’t matter.

A lot of your URL ranking depends on the strength of your domain and the credibility that search engines have given your business and the content. You should always try to host content on a trusted domain like “.com” or one of the region-specific domains like “.uk”, “.us” etc. Another major tip here – Google ranks https pages higher than http, as the content on https is considered to be more secure.

You should look at setting up canonical tags correctly on your website to avoid search engines picking up the wrong links. Your site might get marked for duplicity and end up getting blacklisted just by avoiding canonical tags.
Another huge no-no on URLs are unnecessary words like – a, an, the etc. You could also look at avoiding special characters($,!,@ etc) which reduce the readability and thereby make the UX unfriendly. Hyphens are a standard protocol used in URLs and accepted by all crawlers.
In conclusion, all you have to focus on while working on your URLs is the relevancy and structure. That will help you not only rank higher, but also improve brand recall.

Improving on a business’ local SEO is not the most enticing task, but it is a rewarding effort one can take. It is a low-hanging fruit that business owners and marketers should concentrate on to reap benefits.

Every busy entrepreneur or stressed marketer is constantly trying to improve the traffic to their business website. While trying to do so, one must start off by rectifying the on-page elements. Que in, title tags!

What are title tags?

As the name suggests, title tags are part of the website’s html code that indicate to search engines and web crawlers what the title of the page is.

This is what they look like in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP):

The title tag here is – “Find Dentists in San Francisco & Book Online Instantly! – ZocDoc”. It tells the audience what to expect when they click on the link. Think of title tags as appropriate chapter headings in a book. When your audience searches for something relevant on the internet, you want them to land up on your business website.

How to frame the ideal title tags?

Title tags are meant to be short and simple but at the same time, should serve multiple purposes. This means that your title tags have to:

Be relevant to the content on the page
Sound interesting to the audience and push them to click on it
Be simple enough for the search crawlers to understand it

I know what you’re thinking – how can one make something sound enticing to the audience and at the same time make it search-engine friendly? Well, that’s SEO for you.

Optimizing title tags on any website is a simple fix. Experts have said that title tags are the second most important on-page element for SEO, after the content, of course. They are one of those elements that require minute fixes but yield heavy results.

Points to keep in mind while optimizing title tags

Creating search engine – friendly title tags should be your aim. But as stated earlier, the verbatim used should be attractive for users as well.

Let’s spell it out for you with some good practices:

Keep the title tags unique. Having the same title tags for multiple pages might confuse the search crawlers and result in black-listing of your page(s)
Title tags don’t have to be the same as the heading of your content piece or the page. Your title tags can be short and concise, while the page headings can be slightly longer and descriptive.
Google generally truncates title tags that are longer than 60 characters. So keep in mind not to exceed the limit if you want your audience to get a clear picture.
Include keywords (or synonyms) in your title tags to improve chances of getting ranked.
Try keeping the major keywords close in the title tag. Don’t compromise on the readability of the tag.
Make it a habit to include the location (name of the area or city) that you are looking to rank for in your title tags.
If you have any special offers/discounts/benefits, make sure you include them in your title tags as well. This generally works well for offer-specific landing pages.
You can look at installing the Yoast SEO Plugin if you use WordPress for your website. It can help you picture your title tags clearly and also gives you a preview of what your snippets would look like.

What are the advantages of optimizing title tags?

Firstly, modifying or improving on your title tags will definitely help improve your local SEO. Your site or landing page will help rank higher for relevant keywords and will improve the traffic of prospective customers you see on your page.

Imagine a scenario where a user has multiple tabs open on their system. If they want to navigate back to your site, the content of your title tag is what is going to be visible on the browser tabs. If the text is relevant and simple, the user will get to it right away, easing their experience.

Title also prove to be useful when your content piece or page is shared on social media platforms. The text that comes up as the heading on the thumbnail is picked up from your title tag.

In conclusion, creating and optimizing title tags for your website might seem like a tiresome task, but once you start working on it, you will realize that it’s a pretty straightforward. Try not overthinking the task and get started with it right away!

Local SEO Basics: Strategies To Improve Your Rankings

Archives: Check List