Had a website for a couple of years, the designer said he did some basic SEO at the beginning, how can I check what he did and where should I start making changes if needs be? Many thanks
Having access to analytics means you can check the volume of traffic, which Pages people land on and where they come from. You can then see how many people come directly from Google and which pages they arrive on, this will give you an overview of how well your site is optimised.
Ideally, you should see people landing on INTERNAL pages of the website, it should be treatment or service pages.
If people are just landing on the homepage, this will be seen as '/' in the Google analytics report, this means people are landing there, likely by typing your name or business… This would indicate not such great optimisation for treatment and geographical area search terms.
Having access to your Webmaster tools account will let you know how Google views your website, are you being listed? Which pages of your website is Google listing? How many times are you shown in search results? This is different to Google analytics, web master tools will show you the number of times you appear in the search result whether or not someone clicks on that link, this is really good information for optimisation.
Within your web master tools account, you will also be able to see the number of sites that links to you. You ideally want to have a wide range of sites linking to you, Google views each of these as a vote, the more votes you have from quality websites the higher you will rank.
I would suggest you get both of these sorted prior to looking at your website at all… Any further questions, I'm here :-)
Hi Sue, great question.
The 1st 2 things I would make sure that you do are:
Make sure you have access to your Google analytics
make sure you claim your Google Webmaster Tools account, now known as search console.
Having access to analytics means you can check the volume of traffic, which Pages people land on and where they come from. You can then see how many people come directly from Google and which pages they arrive on, this will give you an overview of how well your site is optimised.
Ideally, you should see people landing on INTERNAL pages of the website, it should be treatment or service pages.
If people are just landing on the homepage, this will be seen as '/' in the Google analytics report, this means people are landing there, likely by typing your name or business… This would indicate not such great optimisation for treatment and geographical area search terms.
Having access to your Webmaster tools account will let you know how Google views your website, are you being listed? Which pages of your website is Google listing? How many times are you shown in search results? This is different to Google analytics, web master tools will show you the number of times you appear in the search result whether or not someone clicks on that link, this is really good information for optimisation.
Within your web master tools account, you will also be able to see the number of sites that links to you. You ideally want to have a wide range of sites linking to you, Google views each of these as a vote, the more votes you have from quality websites the higher you will rank.
I would suggest you get both of these sorted prior to looking at your website at all… Any further questions, I'm here :-)