Is my SEO working?

So it’s all sorted, you have found an SEO agency, they seem like a nice bunch, and they have promised that they will take care of your website and guaranteed that you will move up the rankings pretty sharply and pretty soon. You decided on a mix of what they called Organic SEO with a few Google adwords thrown in. You have agreed a budget of £300 per month for the adwords plus one day a week SEO support. Seems pretty reasonable so you are happy.

But still the ‘e-mails of mistrust’ keep arriving offering link building, directory submissions, title tag changes and to ’put your website on the first page of Google, Bing or local search engines’. To begin with, like any rational person, you ignore the mails. You are sorted. You have an SEO agency and they seem like a nice bunch… But the ‘e-mails of mistrust’ keep popping into your inbox and over a few weeks you begin to wonder why. Are you being targeted because your website is actually really bad and the emails are from genuinely caring people just trying to help.. I mean you don’t remember getting them this frequently before you started working with the SEO agency.

Three months in, you’ve spent over £4,500 PLUS the £300 per month for the ‘adwords’ and you really haven’t noticed the calls to your office increasing, and can’t spot any additional e-mails coming through from the website.

You have a meeting with your SEO agency.. they show you some charts that they claim illustrate how successful they are being at getting more visitors to your site, they use words like alt text, bounce rate, indexed pages and say that they want to concentrate for the next quarter on the ‘user experience’. It all sounds very impressive.. but there is just this little niggle in your mind,  are the agency actually any good, they seem like a nice bunch, but it’s a lot of money for no obvious return.

That’s it.. that’s the moment when you ask yourself…

Is My SEO Working?

We have put together some simple ways you can check that your SEO is being done with the amount of care and attention that is essential if you want to move up the rankings, and stay there.

Check 1) Indexed pages

Check how many pages you have indexed on Google.  An indexed page is a page that has been crawled by Google and is recognised as being a page on your website. To check this simply put site:https://www.yourwebsitename.co.uk into your Google search bar. If you have a large site and only a few of the pages seem to have been picked up or if you have a small site but lots of pages seem to be indexed then there is probably something wrong. Something that should have been picked up by your SEO agency. Take a look at what pages are shown and if you see any obvious omissions or errors like for example a page called Logo |yourcompany name – then you know this is not right and needs to be fixed.  (it’s a fairly easy fix in most cases, we call it good housekeeping!)

If you are not happy with the results you see when you do an index check then talk to your SEO agency.  They should be able to detail their plans for ensuring that only relevant pages are indexed and that the descriptions for each page are relevant and engaging

Check 2) Page Descriptions

As you are looking at the indexed pages take a look at how each page is being ‘described’.  Unless a description has been specified by your website builder or your SEO agency then Google will pick up text from the individual page that it thinks is most relevant. Page descriptions are really important because they are the way that you encourage users to your site, if you let Google decide what the page is about you cannot specify what is said.

If you are not happy with the page descriptions you see then talk to your SEO agency about their plans for reviewing and rewriting these in line with your goals and objectives

Check 3) Making sure all directory listings are up to date

If you put your company name into Google, as well as seeing your site and social media links and a Google my business listing (that should appear on the right hand side of your browser) you will probably see a range of ‘listings sites’. These include sites such as freeindex.co.uk, yell.com, findit, bark as well as many local and sector specific listings sites. Ideally your business should always be referred to in the same way with the same information in all listings. In SEO terms this is known as your NAP  (name address and phone number) but it should also include a consistent description about what your company does. Google loves to see that these listings are consistent .

If you find incorrect or inconsistent directory listing – talk to your SEO agency about their plans for updating this information. It is a time consuming but important aspect of SEO

Check 4) Deadlinks

Broken links can negatively affect a users experience on the website and therefore harm your website's SEO performance. It’s really easy to see if your site is suffering  we would recommend using something like https://www.drlinkcheck.com/ or https://www.deadlinkchecker.com/.

If there are a hideous amount of links with issues then raise this with your SEO agency and ask them about their strategy to fix the links.

Check 5) Google analytics

To understand how your site is performing from Googles perspective it’s a good idea to take a look at your Google analytics, make sure your SEO agency has given you access so you can review if and as you want.

We do not expect you to become an analytics expert but why not suggest to your agency that at your quarterly meetings they go through the analytics with you. They will be keen to show you their successes, but if you have a live demonstration and you see too many downward flowing charts you will pretty soon get the idea that things are not as they should be, unless of course we are in the middle of a COVID crisis in which case rules are slightly different!

If you don’t have an SEO agency and you really are not sure if you need one, why not have an initial conversation with one of our team? We can give you an overview just based on how your site is currently being viewed by the search engines

Want To Find Out More?

If you want to find out how other people got on when they called us for advice you can read our Google reviews.

Read more out our ASSET Approach to SEO

Call one of our team now on 01273 670100 or e-mail info@build14me.com

For more information on our services, check out our Web Design Services and SEO Services.