Parker Davis — April 4, 2017 
Most small businesses understand how important their web presence is, but they probably don’t understand how important it is to audit their company’s website.
If a website isn’t generating business inquiries, sales, and customer feedback, there may be a problem. The idea of auditing a website may seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. Most in-house IT professionals can handle a bare-bones SEO audit.
Full corporate website audits can be prohibitively expensive for small businesses, so in many cases, the job goes un-done for way too long. Website problems don’t fix themselves, and waiting too long could cause the site to lose credibility with search engines like Google and Bing.
This decreases the site’s rank, so when current and potential customers enter the relevant search terms or even the name of a specific business, they could easily miss the site.
Being buried on page four isn’t something that any small business wants to try to fix. So handle the small business website now, fix any problems, and enjoy a site that points customers in the right direction.
Check the site for brand consistency
In any digital marketing plan, brand consistency is crucial. Make sure the domain name of the company’s website and the business name match. This will help current, and future customers find the company.
Owning a company’s exact match domain is important enough that small business owners who discover that their company name is available should plan to move their current site to that domain name as soon as possible.
Check each and every page of the website for the company’s name and logo. There should be a “Contact Us” page that’s easy to find with clear, correct, and relevant information about all of the ways customers can get in touch.
This is a great time to check font size, too. Many people access websites on their handheld devices, so a 14pt font or larger is a good practice to implement throughout the website.
Adding meta titles to the different pages of a site will help customers find the site again if, like most of us, they tend to have several browser windows open at the same time. It’s important to make sure the company name appears in the meta title and is consistent with the domain name and logo on each page.
Keep the design simple
Along with a larger font size, it’s a good idea to skip the flashy, overwhelming, or hard to read webpage design elements that seem so tempting. Choose one or two fonts and use them throughout the site.
Keep colors, formatting, and design simple and consistent. They should never distract from the company’s marketing message. If the template won’t facilitate these changes, choose a different one.
Use an auditing tool
For every problem a small business owner faces, there is a software solution. SEO auditing doesn’t have to be a long and complicated process. If using an auditing tool gets the job done, simply pick the one that seems the easiest to use.
Here are a few recommendations:
MySiteAuditor shows a page ranking percentage that helps small businesses rank on a page on for their niche.
Screaming Frog crawls the entire site and offers data from an SEO point of view. It’s fast and free for up to 500 URL’s.
Marketing Grader, owned by HubSpot, Inc., looks at a company’s social media channels, mobile site, lead generation ability, and SEO. Its comprehensive data makes it a favorite for small business owners.
SEO Report Card gives a quick analysis of a site and also has a free version. There’s even an email audit option.
WooRank is another favorite among small business owners concerned with SEO, and its data is designed to offer ideas to optimize a website. There is a free version and SEO teams rate this particular tool highly.
Small business owners are usually jack-of-all-trades types that aren’t afraid of a DIY project. These tools will help them decide if they need further (more expensive) help or if they simply needed a small tune-up.
Over three billion people use the Internet regularly. Making sure the small business website is easy to access by conducting an SEO audit as soon as possible belongs at the top of the company’s “to do” list.
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