If you're not completely convinced your SEO company is actually doing anything for you...Then follow these 11 steps to check a few key indicators for yourself. The tips are easy enough to follow but give you the info to make sure you're keeping them honest.

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11TipstoKeepYour
SEOCompanyHonest.
Small business hack

2. it was cheap offers of 500 links and recently it was promises to get you to
number one in Google. Dodgy or irresponsible SEO companies have played
on the fact that many small business owners don’t understand the landscape.
Now, there are some SEO companies out there taking monthly fees from
small businesses, providing shady reporting that keeps the business owner
believing the investment is sound. Is that their fault or yours? Either way I want
to help put some power into thew hands of the small business owner.
Below I have posted 11 signs your website is not optimised for Google, a
beginner’s guide to help you understand whether or not your SEO company is
value for money.
IN THE EARLY DAYS,

3. The permalink/URL structure of your site helps the search
engines crawl your website to understand what it is about and
what it provides visitors. If you can better assist this process you
are more likely to get your site to rank for your target audience.
Go through the pages of your website and check out the URLs for
each page, for example: www.yoursite.com/about-yoursite/ and
www.yoursite.com/contact-us/. If you notice characters or words
irrelevant to the page in question, something is wrong. If the URLs
are exceedingly long, something is wrong.
Even if these mistakes were made by your web developer, your
SEO ‘expert’ should have picked up on them and corrected them.
UGLY
PERMALINKS1.
HOW TO TEST

4. Some businesses advertise their website as www.yoursite.com and others as simply
yoursite.com. You want one or the other, not both. Basic inconsistencies should be
avoided by your web developer and is one of the first things your SEO company should fix.
Type your website into the Google URL bar without the ‘www’ and wait for it to load. If the
URL changes to www.yoursite.com, there’s a redirect in place and you’re all good. If the URL
is still without the ‘www’, type in your web address again, this time with the ‘www’. You want to
be directed to yoursite.com without the ‘www’. If you’re not, your site does not have a redirect
in place.
If your site does not have a redirect in place, Google views the home page as two separate
pages – www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com. This will be the case for each page of your
site – www.yoursite.com/about/ and yoursite.com/about/. This means that any authority you’re
building is diluted and you may be viewed as having duplicate content, which is not great.
No WWW
redirect2.
HOW TO TEST

5. Heading tags are strong indicators for search engines, so you want to get
them right and have them optimised for your preferred search terms. The
biggest issues to check for are no ‘h1′ tag or multiple ‘h1′ tags. You want
to see only one and the keyword should be super-relevant to your site and
popular with your visitors.
There are numerous browser extensions you can install to check this. A
quick and easy way is this web-based tool. Enter your site’s URL and click
the Checkup button. Give it a moment, then scroll down for the results. It
will show you the content included in both ‘h1′ and ‘h2 tags. You can have
multiple ‘h2′ tags but again you want to see keywords relevant to your site.
Problems with
heading tags3.
HOW TO TEST

6. Google doesn’t have an army of people browsing all the websites on the
planet. They have spiders. They crawl the sites and they don’t recognise
images, so Google relies on the associated data. Image alt tags are a great
way to indicate what your images are about.
Obviously there are hundreds of factors which help search engines determine
what each website page is about, but image alt tags are easy to implement
and will help rank your image within Google’s image search results.
Use the feedthebot ImageSEO tool. Enter your site’s URL to grade every
image on the page. Scroll down and scan for the image alt text. You want
to see appropriate data for every image on your site.
Missing far too
many image tags4.
HOW TO TEST

7. Have you Googled your own business name? Of course you have. What shows up in
Google’s search results is a title and description. This is your metadata. Both the title and
description are super important for different reasons.
The title is still considered a strong influence on search ranking. So you want it to include
targeted keywords which are relevant to your page. It is important that this title is not too
short, so you’re not under utilising, but also not too long, so it doesn’t get cut short. The
title should be no more than 70 characters.
The description is no longer a direct influence over search rankings, at least not by
Google. But it is going to influence whether or not a person clicks on your site. So it should
be unique to your site, include the likely search terms and be persuasive. Your description
should also be unique for each page on your site. The length of your description should
be approx 155 characters to ensure you’re utilising the two lines but do not have your
sentence cut short.
META WHAT?5.

8. Head to Google again and type site:www.yoursite.com. Google will
return every page it has from your site within its index. This allows you
to quickly scan through each page’s meta title and meta description.
Does each page have a unique and optimised title? Are the
descriptions unique, relevant and compelling?
META WHAT?...5.
HOW TO TEST

9. Schema data is a particular markup language that the key search engines
agreed to use a couple of years ago. It helps them to understand our websites
better, and it provides your website with an advantage.
Head to Google’s Rich Snippets Tool. Enter your URL and scroll down to
find ‘extracted structured data’. Ideally, you want to see local business
or organisation information including business name, address, phone
number and ideally your company logo.
No schema
data6.
HOW TO TEST

10. A sitemap lays out the navigational structure of your site so the search
engines can understand levels of hierarchy and how best to navigate.
You could ask your web developer or SEO person for the sitemap URL.
Alternatively, try these common sitemap URLs:
- www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
- www.yoursite.com/page-sitemap.xml
You should see a page of links throughout your site, many of which
you won’t understand. If you see nothing, I would be making your web
developer or SEO company work a little harder
No sitemap7.
HOW TO TEST

11. The quality of the websites linked to yours influences your domain authority. This is the
metric that measures how much authority your website URL has, which in turn has an indirect
influence on your search performance. If you have links to your site from gambling and porn
sites, your authority is shot. Building as many links as possible, regardless of context or
quality, used to be a popular strategy to get a site ranking. But now we have to be careful;
links to cheap- looking sites that have no relevance to your own can be detrimental to your
business. You should be aware that there are still plenty of SEO companies that do this as it
can mean an easy, short-term win for them.
Go to Moz’s Open Site Explorer. Enter your site’s URL and it will return a heap of valuable
metrics for you. For this particular problem, focus on two tabs. Click on the ‘linking domains’
tab to see other domains linking to you. If any of the sites look dodgy, read the domain
authority score beside them (anything less than 15 is a concern). Now click on the ‘compare
link metrics’ tab and read your ‘page MozRank’ and ‘page MozTrust’ – if both scores are
above 4, you’re doing okay.
Your link profile is all about the numbers,
not the quality or context8.
HOW TO TEST

12. Your site should have links to other sites, but they should have a ‘nofollow’ tag
associated with the link. Links create flow. Internal links create the flow of authority
between your pages, and external links spread authority to other sites. You want
authority to flow to yours but you do not want to lose any as it flows to others. Your
SEO complement should implement ‘nofollow’ tags with each external link.
There are plenty of tools for this but the simplest is at Getrank.org. Enter your
URL and click ‘continue’. It will list each of the external links on your page and
tell you if it has a nofollow. This is just testing the home page but it’s a good
indication of whether your SEO company is doing their job.
You’re leaking
like a sieve9.
HOW TO TEST

13. As mentioned above, you want to create a flow of authority between
the pages of your site. A popular page will have more authority than a
less popular page, so you should have an internal text-based hyperlink
between the two. They should be relevant, contextual, contain a
keyword, and not be overused.
Just browse through your site.
No WWW
redirect10.
HOW TO TEST

14. A recent industry survey indicates that Google Webmaster Tools is the
most popular SEO tool amongst Moz members. When you have an account
connected to your site, Google will monitor your site and provide you with lots
of useful data to help you ensure your site is healthy and optimised.
If you don’t know ask your SEO people. They may have set up a profile for
your site on their account. Definitely ask for access to the data.
All the best with your website and your search performance. Hopefully this
post has made the issue of search engine optimisation a little clearer and
will help you determine whether or not your SEO person is worth their salt.
You don’t have
a GWT account11.
HOW TO TEST

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