Important resource or an email scammer’s dream?
As a business owner, you invest time, money and resources into creating a powerful and captivating website that generates brand awareness with your customer base. Using carefully chosen keywords, your goal is to increase the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. So why are companies soliciting you to tell you how much you need their help? It’s confusing and worrisome. We’re here to break down what SEO assessments are, why they may/may not be necessary, and how to avoid unwarranted email scams.
Why Won’t They Stop Harassing Me About SEO Assessments?!
You’re probably familiar with the emails by now:
“Dear Sir/Madam: I would like to disclose some facts about your website. By investing a few months in SEO, you can see drastic changes in your website internally and externally. We will show you improvements in your keyword rankings, link popularity, organic traffic and many more.”
Most companies today have a website. It allows you to create brand awareness and targets your end-users. That’s why your goal is to appear at the top of a web search—so you know your brand is top-of-mind with your audience. You can achieve this “priority placement” through a combination of carefully selected keywords, headlines and content. Businesses continually conduct SEO assessments to ensure their website is performing as they desire. Web companies know this and now inundate business owners with a “value-add” by selling them a website audit.
What is an SEO Audit?
Every SEO company does audits and assessments a bit differently. Some simply run your website through software that spits out a standard report. Others take a deeper dive into that data and give you an unparalleled look into your site’s performance, structure, and authority. Most of the information these companies charge you for are things you should be discussing with your trusted agency partner. We can help explain what all this data means to you, and what you should pay attention to.
A proper SEO assessment should include the following touch-points:
- Robots.txt: This file is used to prevent search engine crawlers from indexing pages on your website that you want hidden from public view. Similar to the sitemap, it identifies pages you want search engines to include or exclude.
- Site errors: These can have a devastating impact on your website’s performance. Any errors on the page send signals to search engines that your site is not trustworthy and will not receive a priority listing spot.
- Indexed status: This process adds web pages to a Google search. Depending upon which meta tags you use, Google crawls and indexes your pages. You want your report to show the that number of pages crawled is relatively equal to the number indexed.
- Page speed: Users are impatient, and search engines know this. Even a fraction of a second can impact conversion rate.
- Meta tags: Duplicate titles, descriptions, and site content can all negatively impact your site’s search engine rankings and click-through-rate.
- Linking domains: How popular your site is affects its ranking. Search engines use external links from other domains as an indicator of popularity.
- Action plan: Any audit should conclude with a clearly defined plan-of-action and next steps.
The Market Mentors Difference
At Market Mentors, we help you grow your digital footprint with our search engine marketing expertise. We take the extra step with all our clients and conduct rigorous SEO assessments of their websites on a continual basis. For instance, rather than just using standard algorithms that are oftentimes cost-prohibitive, we look at a variety of factors that these scam companies often overlook. This includes website performance (speed matters), key competitors and how you stack up, who is linking to your website (to determine if the leads you receive are relevant), and keyword selections (word choice matters and drives search engine rankings).
Many of our clients have recently noticed an uptick in the number of SEO assessment solicitation emails they are receiving. Our advice is to not fall victim to these scams. It’s always best to consult the experts. We can help you gain a much better understanding of your SEO strategy than an automated system ever could!
While we can’t stop the emails from coming, we can provide you with the guidance you need to ensure your website is fully optimized and performing to your goals. We’d love to have one of our SEO experts share our best practices with you. Contact us today to get started!
