Using Our Local SEO Audit Tool To Improve Your SEO – 194

Jesse Dolan: Take notes or mental notes, these things that we're hitting on, in this case, the title of your website, your title tag, why are we doing this on the audit? To see if the keywords in that title. Well, this isn't just about the audit, right? And how to read it. This is also your keyword should be in your title, right? So as we go through each of these things, whether you're using our free audit tool or not, this can also be a kind of a checklist for you on things that are important, right, for local SEO.

Welcome back to Local SEO Tactics, where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I'm your host, Jesse Dolan. In this episode today, we're gonna be talking about our free audit tool that we have on the Local SEO Tactics website, how to use it, how to go through the PDF that it gives you when you run the audit, and kind of what all that means, right? So I'm gonna share my screen for everybody listening. If you do wanna follow, excuse me, along on the video to kind of see this as I'm talking through it. just check it out on YouTube, or you can go to localseotactics.com, find this episode, and the YouTube video will be embedded on the page. I guess a couple quick plugs here. I don't know if any of you, well, I shouldn't say that, I know a lot of you do, because we see the traffic, but if you're out there listening, two things. One, if you haven't ever checked out the YouTube videos that we put out, every single one of these episodes exists as a podcast for audio, but also is recorded in video. So you can watch it on YouTube. Not all of our episodes have content that's like explainer or showcasing things that are gonna, you know, share the screen. But nonetheless, if we're doing an interview talking with Sue and Bob, things like that, you can watch it on YouTube as well. So check that out. And then also every single episode has its own episode page on our localseotactics.com website. You're going to see the transcription there. You can play the audio there. You can watch the YouTube video there. Anything in the notes sites that we talk about if we have guests their information basically everything about each episode It's on that page as well And you can just go to localSEOtactics.com either click on the episodes or just kind of navigate through the site to find your content or there's a search box as well Where you can just type in a few keywords or name of an episode something like that Whatever you can kind of use from your memory for whatever you're looking for and yeah find find all the content on there, so Yeah, quick, quick sidetrack, but check us out on YouTube, check us out on the website as well for additional content for more of this kind of stuff and to find what you're looking for.

All right. So getting back to this episode here today though, let's start at the top. If you haven't used it before, check it out. We have people using this all the time. It's our free audit tool on our website, local seotactics.com. Up in the top right corner, look for the yellow button that says free audit. Actually, yeah, free SEO audit. Let me share my screen here to start doing that. And with that. Here you go, here's what that'll look like. Click on the yellow button, get your free audit going. And hold on one second. Close circuit to the editors. Like complication, here we go. All right, let's kind of start over there. Alright, so now I have up on the screen what that page looks like. Click on the yellow button. You're going to be presented with something that looks like this here. It's pretty easy. A couple things to point out. This is analyzing a specific web page, not your entire website. So if you just drop in, you know, your root domain, i.e. your homepage, it's going to be looking at your homepage. So if you do want to analyze and get an audit on one of your inner pages, one of your service pages, one of your product pages, whatever it is, your location page. Make sure you're copying and pasting or typing in that URL exactly. And you just put that right there and we're running this test. We're going to run it on our own local SEO tactics. I don't think I've mentioned the website this many times on a single episode before, but here we are. Keyword phrase. Localize your tactics, type in your email, type in your name, click the green button here down at the bottom to run the audit. You are gonna have to also confirm your email address on a second screen that allows it to be sent to you via email. You're gonna then get that email. It's usually in one or two minutes. It's pretty darn quick. And it's gonna have a PDF in that email. Let me close this tab here and share my other one. which has the actual audit itself. And we can run through that. So I did this right before we jumped on to record. So this was done just a few minutes ago. And this is running an audit, doing exactly what I just typed in here on the demonstration, running it on our homepage for the keyword of local SEO tactics. Now, we should score pretty well, and we did as expected. But also, we expected to find some errors on the site, which we did. And I mean, nobody's perfect, right? Even SEOs are going to have a little SEO you can always do on your website. And so let's walk through this and see what kind of mistakes we have on our website and talk through those. Also the areas where we don't have mistakes. I'm still going to explain what each area is, why it's important to you. And yeah, hopefully if you've taken advantage of our audits or haven't, this will help you with some actionable tips and advice on what to do with this information. Should also mention that you can use this audit over and over again. So if you come back the next day, you want to run your page again, maybe a You made some tweaks, right? We wanna see how it scores again. You can do that. And you can do this again on multiple pages of your website. All right, so at the top here, we see the date that it's run, website, overall kind of summary. For us here on the homepage for local SEO tactics, we had a 85 out of 100. And some quick summary here of the points that it checks. 56 passed, we have 66 notices, five warnings, and one error. We're gonna find out what that error is. I peeked ahead, it's down towards the bottom, but we'll get there.

All right, starting out at the very top, we are analyzing the title tag. The title of the website, you can see here, within the head section, we're looking to see if it contains the keyword. And a lot of these too, if I don't mention that we're looking for the keyword as I'm scrolling through these, that's what we're looking for, is the keyword to be in particular areas and things like that. So, like I said, first thing it's looking for here is the keyword, local SEO tactics in our case, in the title. of the website, one page, I should say. And yes, it is here. So that's something also for everybody listening or watching as well. I'm walking through our audit, but also just take notes or mental notes. These things that we're hitting on, in this case, the title of your website, your title tag, why are we doing this on the audit? To see if the keywords in that title. Well, this isn't just about the audit, right? And how to read it. This is also your keyword should be in your title, right? So as we go through each of these things, whether you're using our free audit tool or not, this can also be a kind of a checklist for you on things that are important, right, for local SEO. So we have our keyword in the title, is the title within the recommended length. We have 53 characters, recommendation out there is 20 to 65. And what that is is just kind of the size of it. And that's important for what you see, either when somebody is sharing it on social, copying and pasting it, maybe in your email. or obvious and most importantly, as it shows up in Google. Beyond that, it's gonna maybe cut off, right? You're not gonna read it all, things like that. And you can see here, as we're looking on the screen, the audit, the PDF that the audit provides is pretty cool in that it's gonna show where you are, right? And give you, you know, did you pass or fail or what's your score, right? Things like that. But then also it's looking at the top competitors that I've found, because when we type in our keyword local SEO tactics, It's also doing a search in Google to find out who's ranking for that in addition to yourself and it's analyzing those results and showing those in parallel with yours. So you can not only see how you score and how you're stacking up in this audit, but also how the top competitors are in these same areas. For example, on this here for the length of our title tag, we're at 53 characters. We've got what an average here of about somewhere in the high fifties and our, our Largest outlier competitor is 71 characters and the lowest is 42 right for example. So at 53 we're right in the zone Next item title tag within the recommended pixel length So number of characters and pixel length are two different things pixel length is kind of measurement right for size on the screen how many pixels and ours is 478 recommended is up to 600 So we're within the tolerance on that and again here you can see what the average is where maybe on the lower end of of that average compared to some of our competitors that are ranking, but that's just fine. Title take includes the analyze keywords. Yes, it does. Description of the webpage. So again, that's in the head section of your page, just like your title. And we're looking to see if the keyword is in that. Our keyword is in that. Here we have our first warning that we're encountering on the audit. The description exceeds the recommended length. 60 characters. I'm sorry, decrease the number by 60 characters. We have 218. They recommend on this audit, our audit, I should say, I keep saying we, or they, but it should be we. I recommend up to 258 characters. Top five competitors are between 122 and 218, average is 148. Not super concerned about that. Sometimes these will get rewritten by Google maybe, right? So, and. if something's going to get caught off, I'd much rather have the little bit end of the description caught off than maybe the title or things like that. Also, if there's text in that description, maybe that's not visible to a user, but you still want it in there for Google. I think it's okay to have it be a little bit long. We're not super egregious there by any means, but it's still throwing us a warning, something to take note of. Here is the graph that we're showing. We are definitely on the higher side of what it's showing. The average here is right in that 160 is range or under. So we are the outlier in that. Description exceeds the recommended length. Decreased the description by 362 pixels. Again, just like the title, we refer to it in number of characters and pixel size here. Again, just like the number of characters were too big. That's fine. Go big or go home, right? That's not true. Don't take that advice. The description includes the analyzed keywords. Yes, it does. Our description has local SEO tactics and the URL is within the recommended length. The URL is the actual address of your website. If you're not familiar with that term URL, and that is including the entire page that we're on. Right. So for us, we're on the homepage, just localseotactics.com. If we were on one of our inner pages, there'd be like slash SEO audit, for example. Right. how many characters are in that entire address for the page that we're analyzing. Our value is 31, recommendation is up to 2000, which is crazy. Top 5 competitors, 32 to 69, so we're on the lower end of that, but this is just our homepage. Maybe some of the other content that was ranking wasn't just a homepage, probably inner pages, right? For example. So within that, we're on the lower end of the average, which is fine. We're getting green check marks in all these areas, except for that one warning so far. Couple other quick here just here. URL does not contain uppercase letters. You don't want uppercase. URL does not contain underscores. We definitely want to avoid those. That's our advice always. And the URL includes the analyze keywords. Maybe we're cheating a little bit here with our audit going after local SEO tactics when that's the actual address of our website, localseotactics.com. But nonetheless, our URL does include those keywords. So we're good there. So that's getting into kind of the top level of your webpage, right? Your title, your description, URL, things like that. Now we're gonna get into the content on the page. At this section, it's analyzing the text on the page. Description here for it is primary keyword density in the body tag. And that's kind of your main content of your website, right? Is in the body. the page effectively how we would view it as human beings on the screen. Primary keyword density is 2.33 percent so local SEO tactics as a phrase makes up 2.33 percent of the content on there while within range here and I'm sorry I should go back up range is between 0.5 and 5 percent keyword density and we are a little bit or much higher than the competitors here. We're probably the only one that has that in our URL and it's the name of our show, right? So we have a ton more compared to everybody else. Most people are mentioning it just a few times on the page.

Primary keyword, next item here, primary keyword density is in the main content in the normal range. So not just looking at the overall page itself, but the kind of primary content, the main content of the page in that same context, we're 1.74%. looking between 0.38 and 5% as a score here. So we'll row within that tolerance. And again, because it's our name and everything else, we're a little bit higher than our competitors as graphed out here. Keywords in use, local SEO tactics, primary keyword, it's found in the title, description, H3, H4, paragraph and content. So it's kind of just giving a quick breakdown of how it's being found, how that keyword is being found and used on the page. content of this page is unique. That is the next item here. So let's just check, right? That's don't really need to dive into that any deeper. Haven't found any data in the search results. Here we're looking at the headings. So H1 through H6 is what it's looking for. And when we say H1 through H6, we're talking about H tags or headline tags. So an H1 would be your primary headline usually, ideally at the very top of your page. Biggest, boldest headline should incorporate your keywords, things like that. An H2 would then be the next sub headline down, then an H3, then an H4, you know, five and six, right? So if you're not familiar with that terminology, that's what we're talking about here. Number of words on page, we have 1800 words on our page, a little bit under the competitive average here. So it looks like this is right around 3000 words on average. I would say we, the top five that is looking here on the report, we are the lowest amount. So this is an area that we're gonna be taking a little bit of advice from this and we're gonna add more content to our homepage. Try to beef that up a little bit. 1,800 words is not a ton of content. So we should be able to definitely put whether it's more snippets from each episode. I think we list the five most recent episodes on our homepage and maybe more content from that. Maybe a better summary down at the bottom, intro for the show. Something like that, right? You can always come up with pretty easy ideas on how to add more content to a page. So in this case, we're gonna definitely take an action item here and beef up our homepage with some more text, some more content. Number of words in the main content, 1551, 1,551. And we're a little bit lower compared to the competitors that it's analyzing here. But again, that's just cause we have less content on the page, we'll rectify that. Number of characters, it's showing we have 11,211. Again, a little bit behind some of our competitors. Looks like some people are over 20,000 characters on the page. And again, that's in line with number of words, things like that already. So this is all very reflective. Still number of characters and main content. Ninety seven forty seven. Again, here we're on the lower end compared to our competitors. And so reading through this section that would tell us again, like I said just a few seconds ago, we need to add more content to this page. If we if we think that's an area that we want to improve on. Yes, we do. in this case as we're going through it. So we're going to add more content to that page. It doesn't mean you have to take this as gospel as you see these areas in the audit. If you think it's okay, don't worry about it, right? This is not an area that has a warning or any kind of an error. It's just kind of comparing us. But yeah, I think this is an area that we want to improve on our page. So we're going to.

Next area here we're looking at is keywords are used at the beginning of the page. We always tell people, right? Google, just like us human beings in... you know, America in the Western hemisphere, English speaking world, we read top to bottom and left to right. So having your keywords be at the beginning of the page, right there at the top and to the left, if you will, right there, that some of the first things we're reading, topically relevant, important, sets the tone early, maybe of Google or a human, has an error where they don't scroll down or read down the page any further. We wanna make sure we're digesting our primary keywords, right, no matter what. So having them at the beginning of the page. So we got a green check there. This next section is our headings, H tags, headlines. Are those headings being used on the page? Here's an area that we definitely dropped the ball. We have no H1 on our homepage, can't believe it. Like seriously, this is ridiculous. We review websites daily for people. This is one of the things that we look for all the time. Is there a clear H1 on the page? Does the H1 include your keyword? We don't have that. We don't have that on our homepage. So we're gonna fix that. That's a glaring error. But as it goes down here in the audit, it's gonna show us from our H1s to our H6s, how many of those are on that page. In our case, we have zero H1s, horrible, horrible. Zero H1s, 13 H2s, six H3s, four H4s, zero H5s. And as it goes down, it kind of breaks down where it's finding those and in the main content, sub content, what is the H tag, and then what is the text for that. So you can quickly. Scroll through this and see what kind of keywords are in your headlines, what type of headline, what type of HTAG is it, things like that. Headlines are very important on a page, right? If you think about it, if you were just to scan an outline, what are the headlines? What are the sections? That's a very identifying for what your content is. And from a human being standpoint or from Google or any other bot standpoint, these are pretty key in navigating and understanding what we're looking at on a webpage. So definitely take a look at the headlines on this report to see what keywords and phrases are being used in your headlines. A lot of times when we're reviewing client websites, the H tags, the headlines are being used more for, you know, how it looks, the style of the font on the page. They're not necessarily doing it to call it out as a headline for SEO benefits or this type of architecture. So I always think it's very advantageous to look at this audit. take a look at all your H tags and then what are you saying in them? You may be surprised that you're using words and phraseology that really doesn't give you any SEO benefits and maybe you can just tweak those around a little bit. Get a little tip there for you. So, yes, we have a problem here. No H1s found on the page. It's going through then in the next section here, talking about the keywords that are found in those. We have local SEO tactics in one of the H3s. There are next section here is checking for grammatical mistakes. Uh, if it's a clear grammatical mistake or they're just less than 10% of the page, that's going to report on that. Basically, before I write, did you pass or did you fail? Um, here it's worth highlighting. If you're again, watching on YouTube and looking through this, or if you get your own audit pulled up just because it is highlighted as a grammatical mistake, doesn't mean it actually is. In this case, we have, uh, at the very top, what we're looking at on this page is a snippet from episode 193, which is showcased on our homepage right now. And in all caps, this is latest episode, latest episode. That's something that just doesn't look good on there, but formatting wise on the homepage, it's good. Villy, which is who we interviewed in that, right? It's highlighting a possible misspelling on his name, things like that. ChatGPT, which was another previous episode. It doesn't like the way that that's spelled, so that's. Highlighting it as a potential error, right? But you'll just want to scan through this and see if there is any grammatical errors. Everybody watching on YouTube, I'm just scrolling through these. None of these really matter at all. They're all fine. Intrix, that's a word nobody knows how to spell. So it's highlighting that as a typo, but that is accurate as well. Okay, going down the page. Now it's showing a graph just like the other ones. How are we comparing on our page versus the top ranking competitors in this area for grammatical errors? Good, passed on that. Are there any punctuation mistakes is the next area. Same thing, just like the grammatical errors, that's gonna show what it's finding, what it thinks are potential. Just review those and see if they're legitimate or not. If there are errors, then definitely fix them. Otherwise, you can just ignore that. Here it's showing our percentage of punctuation errors compared to competitors, and we are good. The amount of irrelevant, next section here, the amount of irrelevant content does not exceed 60%. This is something that's, I think, very interesting on the audit, but also take it with a grain of salt. Is this content irrelevant or not, right? Who's deciding that? So we can just like the grammatical and punctuation. You can use this as a guide, something maybe to look into, but if you think it's fine, then it's gonna be fine. Here it's looking for all the different stop words, ones it's called out in. our homepage here are need there be throw already before using, et cetera, et cetera. Now we're having a lot of these show up on our homepage because we're using snippets from each episode and we're highlighting episodes on the page. Those snippets are natural conversation based things like that. So that's fine. We're comfortable with this. You definitely wouldn't want to overdo it with these kinds of stop words or irrelevant words, you know, so just kind of pay attention that as you're writing your content, but wouldn't worry too much if we look at the graph here comparing us to our competitors, even though it's saying, you know, there are some things for us to look at here. We're below pretty much everybody else for the most part. So not a concern, even if it is showing up, you know, on your page, how does it stack up to everybody else?

Next section here is looking for duplicate headings. There are none on the page. So we get a good green check mark there. Next section, keyword keywords are not used in tags. Here's another area. We completely dropped the ball. We gotta do better on this. We need to have more keywords. I'm sorry. I totally misinterpreted that as I was reading it. We're good there. We don't have as many as our competitors. We're at what 61.77. Other people here are higher in the 60s, low 70s. So using keywords in tags, right? Underlined, italicized, bold, things like that. If we kind of go back, we're talking about headlines and headings, right? And having your keywords and phrases in those. Same thing here. We wanna see your keywords and related phrases, things like that. utilizing these tags, this special font, as I like to say, on the page. If you were, again, just to put your mind like a Googlebot, you're just reading this page more like an outline, just the text. What are the headlines? What are the bolded words? What are the italicized or underlined words? Those are important. Those are special on the page compared to all the other text. Bullet pointed lists, right? Things like that. You're gonna wanna make sure your keyword phrase, related phrases, things like that, are using this special text and special characters in these tags, and that way, just like your headlines. So we're looking pretty good compared to our competitors, a little bit below average. We'll beef that up a little bit too, taking a closer look at some of that content. For us, that's a little bit tricky. Content on our homepage changes, which is not necessarily ideal, but that is how we roll nonetheless. And so depending on when we run this audit, some of these may have a slightly different score. Content score, we have a value of 72. And I don't remember what that is about. Well, let's just pretend we didn't address this section. We'll move on to that and come back later. Maybe give some clarity on the episode page. I don't have a descriptive paragraph here on what that was talking about. But hey, even without knowing what the hell it is, our score is pretty good. Right in line with the average of everybody else. So there you go. Page experience, this gets a little bit not as concrete, but... This is an area that Google rolled out, what, a year or two ago now that the page experience, you know, was supposed to be a ranking factor, something that really matters, and this section of the audit goes through what those areas are. So here we have the largest visible element of the page is displayed immediately. For us, it's 21, I'm sorry, 2,163 milliseconds. Recommendation is up to 2,500. We are on the higher side. of this than our competitors. So that's something that we're gonna wanna fix. And what does that mean? It means we have contents either loading too slow, maybe too bulky files, things like that. So we'll definitely wanna address this too, to A, speed up our website, but then B, make the larger content pieces show quicker. And I guess maybe more in layman's terms or kind of just saying it in a different way, that's making sure that... you know, your largest piece of information are loading and loading quickly. On the page from an experience standpoint, that's important as you're scrolling through a page, right? You don't want to wait for stuff to load and things like that. If that makes sense, I hope it does. Next section is the page quickly responds to the user's first input. We got a green check on that. What does that mean? Our value is 31 milliseconds. Recommendation here is up to 130. We're well within the tolerance of our competitors and we're on the lower end of that. So even though some pieces of content on our page may load a little bit slower, the top part of the page and where people are gonna be interacting does load quickly and it's good. Page layout is stable during loading. Yes, ours is. Compared to our competitors, everybody's pretty good in that sense. Another way to think about that is as elements are loading, right, is the page. rearranging. I mean, I think we've all probably been on a page of a website or maybe a lot of that stuff will be like through Facebook or something. If you're looking at an article, especially if it's very click baity and you may go to click that button right for next article or read more whatever. And then boom, suddenly there's an ad where your fingers trying to click and you click on that ad. That would be an example of, um, that page kind of rearranging itself, right? Or the layout shifting or being unstable as it's loading. Next section here, interactive page elements are fully usable immediately. Again, here we're talking milliseconds, how much time is this taking? We're at 1,047 milliseconds, recommendations up to 3,800, so we're well under that, and we are also a little bit lower than what our average competitors are, so again, good loading times and fast accessible content, which is good. First content on the page displayed immediately, this is our next section, we are at 680 milliseconds. Recommendation is up to 1800. Same thing here, we're within the average and below it compared to our competitors, so we're in great shape there. Next one page responds to user input immediately. We are at zero milliseconds, recommendation up to 300. So we're pretty much instantaneous. I wonder if there's a slight error there, like zero milliseconds. That seems a little bit off, even though I expected this to be fast compared or in a line with the rest of it. Have to check into that. That's interesting. This is a free audit to write. There's a couple of bugs here and there. Don't sue us. Right. There's a lot of good information, a lot of good information still. Next area here, the server responds quickly. 400 and I'm sorry, 580 milliseconds for us up to 600 is recommendation. There are some people that are definitely a little bit slower than us, but some people that are faster. Right. So this is an area we're going to have to look at and see if we can improve a little bit. All in all, up to that point, though, not a whole lot of concern on the page. We're doing really good. We're doing really good. So if you run an audit on your page and you're getting something similar to what I'm scrolling through here in this video and on this podcast, you're in good shape too. Here we're coming across a warning, unused JavaScript code is increasing page load time. So even though our page is loading pretty good, there's definitely some stuff that we can do here. We're using a WordPress website for this. And here we see there's some, looks like a plugin, a revolution slider. podcast player. It's showing us some of the resources that are taking a while though to load and some potential savings in size for that file that maybe we can minimize some of the JavaScript. Maybe remove some of these plugins, remove the JavaScript. It's unused JavaScript according to this audit so we'll have to look at that a little bit closer see if we can boost the page speed there. Third party code isn't affecting page load time. If it was, it would give a warning here and say it was affecting load time. In this case, anything that we're pulling from a third party website, we'll get some Google fonts, things like that. They're not affecting load time at all. Everything's looking pretty good. Here, kind of like JavaScript, we do have some, the next section here is a unused CSS increasing page load time. So we got to look at some of our CSS. See, there's some old stuff that we can cut out or what's going on there to reduce some bulk. Next section, page content is being displayed immediately. We're at 1,986 milliseconds, recommendations up to 3,400. And here again, we're a little bit on the higher side compared to some of our competitors. And if we think about, you know, again, some of the bulk, the JavaScript, things like that, we have some parts of our page that load quickly and are accessible, but there's still maybe here some bloat and some things that we can do to make it even better. Next section, text-based content is compressed. Check mark on that. And that's just kind of, again, compressing and minimizing your, your file size. So it can be delivered quicker.

Next section, the text to HTML ratio is acceptable. We're at 6% text HTML. Want to see that somewhere between four and 70. We're kind of in line with our top competitors, uh, as we would add more text to the page that will increase. We talked about that earlier, right? We want to probably add, I don't know, maybe another thousand words on the page. Um, beef it up a little bit. That's going to change and put us even. further towards the better end of that. Next section, the page HTML code size is optimal. How big is the HTML file size here, right? How much is it getting delivered? We're at 156,000 kilobytes. Recommendation is 3,000 kilobytes, up to 3,000 kilobytes. Top five competitors, 156 to 508. That's kind of strange. You gotta make sure that that is not a typo. I'm looking at my kilobytes correctly. Yeah, I think that recommendation is probably wrong. Or something on the graph here. I have to look at this part. Why are we 100? Oh, I'm sorry. That's a, I was reading that as thousands. That's supposed to be a decimal, but it's shown as a comma on the report. So we are at 156.39, not 156,000 K. All right. So we're at roughly 156 kilobytes of HTML code. Recommendation is up to 3000. This makes a lot more sense now as we talk ourselves through it. Sorry about that. We are well within average and on the lower end. of our competitors for the HTML size. So we can see here as we're going through this report that any load times, things like that for our site, we're gonna look at the JavaScript and the CSS, some of our coding. We definitely either have some plugins or some unused aspects of that coding that we can purge to make our page load a little bit quicker. Not really having any problems with the text or the HTML, things like that. Next section here, looking at the website in general, the page loads via HTTPS protocol. means we're secure right we don't have a security issue there page can be found in the websites sitemap.xml file it definitely got have an XML file we had a previous episode one of our first episodes talking about XML XML files how to create them how important they are things like that this page our home page is in our sitemap service IP address matches the page ease target region SSL Further down here, I'm just going to read these off a bunch of green check marks, things that's looking for. Page contains a favicon or a favicon. Viewport meta tag is configured correctly. Page has a mirror url with or without www. Something important. Sometimes people don't have that set up properly and if somebody just types in your website www.localesiotactics.com or just goes localesiotactics.com. You want it to get to the to the home page either way, right? And you got to make sure that that works both ways. Very important, page contains the REL equals canonical attribute. Frame elements are not used on the page. Flash elements are not used on the page and the safe browsing feature is enabled. Just kind of some standard security and not trickery things it's looking for there. Here it's assessing our media files that are loading on the page. It's doing a few things that's showing us the URL for the images, what the alt tags are, status, things like that, type, size, and it's gonna be flagging and giving us a summary here for any issues. So we can see here that we have some images that we do not have an alt tag, an alt tag input. We wanna definitely do that. Definitely wanna have an alt tag with every image. That's a chance for you to input your keywords, but also where you give... you know, an actual description, right? Or caption, if you will, right? To that image, that makes sense for anything that comes through maybe scraping that content or accessibility, you know, ADA type situations where somebody's blind and they're having the text read, that alt text, right, is gonna help describe what that image is if you can't see the image. So a couple of reasons that's pretty important there. From our end on SEO analysis, this is a spot for us to put related or the actual keyword kind of give some context to the image when Google reads it. Alt and title attributes, this is the next item here, alt and title attributes in the image tags are unique. All images are compressed, do not exceed 600K in file size. Images are added in the recommended file formats. Page doesn't contain media resources, underscores, and the file names, and keywords are used in the alt and title attributes of the image tag. So green checks on all those. Again, not every image was correct. We got a couple, we got a fix with alt tags, but it's saying that our keyword was in the alt tags. So we're good there. Indexing, so this is, is this page in Google? Is it indexed in Google, right? So yes, this page is indexed. The title tag in the HTML code and search snippet, it's showing us that down here. It says here, the page is not displayed among the top 100 search results, snippet not found. That's not true. Must be some kind of error or a little bug there when I ran this, because it should be, if anybody does a search, local SEO tactics. I bet you're finding that as a top or top two results, that's usually the number one result. Again, kind of cheating. It's our domain exact match and we've been out for a long time. So definitely in the top 100 results there, same for the HTML code and search snippet there. All right, next one down, the robots.txt file contains the page and works correctly. Not gonna dive into maybe how to create those or manipulate those, but you probably have a robot.txt file on your website. If not, that's something that you're gonna wanna look into and you can reach out to us if you need some help on that.

All right, wrap up in the last areas here. We have backlinks, number referring domains, linking to a page. We're subpar compared to a lot of our competitors here. We only have 33 domains that are reported are linking back to us. Going after, creating, manipulating backlinks or outreaching for backlinks isn't something we've ever done for this show and for this website. So that's not surprising. but definitely shows where we are behind the curve compared to a lot of our competitors. This one here has 182 backlinks. I'm sorry, domains referring to it in the form of backlinks and we're at 33, right? So we definitely have some work to do. The next section here. Oh, so that was referring domains. This next one is backlinks. So we had 33 domains. giving us 71 unique backlinks. Our primary competitors here, again, we're under their average. We've got 230 it looks like, I'm sorry. Well, that's gonna be 3,230 backlinks. This other one is, what is that? 865, a little bit cut off. So hundreds and hundreds of backlinks where we're at 71. So getting and creating some backlinks is something that's gonna be important for us going forward that we'll pull off of this audit as well. Number of next section is number of referring domains linking to domain. We are, what is this? 383. Yeah, we've got. Tens and hundreds of thousands for some of our competitors. Definitely a lot of our competitors, um, either working at PR machine, creating backlinks, just doing a lot of stuff to, uh, and we have a lot of large companies, obviously that we're competing against for this term. So it's not surprising. Number of inbound domain links, we have 2000. We have again, just. Tens hundreds of thousands for our competitors. Number of inbound page links from dot gov domains. That's always something that everybody puts a lot of value on in the SEO space is getting linked to from a dot gov. Just because that's very controlled, you can't just go buy or manufacture that right. Definitely prove a lot of legitimacy if you're getting linked to from a government website. None of us competitors alike have that So if you've got that showing up in your report, you're doing something good there Next section number of inbound page links from edu domains dot edu just like the gov right? Those are pretty hard to manufacture pretty hard to be artificial. So if you have those that's a good thing We don't have any we only have one competitor that has some and they have three At least in the top five competitors that I found through this audit domain age is the next section You know, I'm not sure What this is referring to is that number of months, maybe? I don't know, but we're at a 143. I'd say we're okay. We're a pretty average compared to some of our competitors as a few that are older. We're not the newest kids on the block, but we're not the oldest either. So that's not surprising. Any much you can do about that, right? From a tactics and tricks standpoint, but good to know. Website age according to web.archive.org. Same thing here. We're on the lower end of that curve. Looks like on this one. But not a concern there, nothing we can do about it. Domain expires in less than 30 days. Ours doesn't automatically renews. Page trust score is lower than that of your competitors. They have a lot more backlinks. As you look at this report, the people that have more domains, more backlinks coming in, are probably naturally through the Google algorithm, gonna have a little bit higher score here. For page trust, they're gonna rank better things like that. It's kind of all built in the same same concepts here for this report So as we would get more backlinks and get more exposure out there I would expect this score for us to go up But we are similarly kind of behind the curve compared to some of the competitors that it's analyzing us against here Our value is 45 according to this metric. Recommendation is up to 84. And that's because that's the average. And so we're behind the curve there. We got to get up. You can see we're at 45. Got other people in the nineties really, right? Organic traffic forecast, no data found for the page. Not sure why that is exactly. That's another one we got to look back to and revisit. Internal links. This is very important for SEO. You want to link to your content. get it spider-able, get it navigable by Google, and also helps kind of roadmap and silo your content. I'm gonna scroll through this pretty quick. It's pretty long on the page, just showing all the different links that we have. What is this, the anchor text, and then the status. Is it a redirect, is it a natural link, whatever it is. So that's just kind of giving you a summary of what I discovered there. Not a whole lot of actionable stuff, unless you see something you wanna change. Number of internal links is within the recommended range. We have 57 up to 400 is recommendation. Our competitors have up to 246. Top five average is 149, so we're a little bit under that. Again, that goes back to the amount of content on our page too, as we add more content, we can link to other things, find more opportunities for that. So I'd expect that to go up as well. Page doesn't link to error pages on the website. So we're not linking to pages with errors or having... broken links, things like that. Page contains links, I'm sorry, page contains internal links without anchor text. We do have some of these links that don't have anchor text. Anchor text would be, it's like, if you have a link to something, maybe it's text that says learn more, right? Learn more would be your anchor text for that link. If we don't have that, or maybe it's a button without something identified, right, or just a naked link, that's something to look for. The page linked. page doesn't link to redirected pages. We got a green check on that. You don't want to link to something and then have that redirect, right? Just link to that redirected page instead, kind of skip over that. We have nothing to report there though, we're good. Now we're looking at the external links. It's kind of showing the same thing. What's the anchor text? What's the status? What is the page? We have 200 external links, up to 400 as recommendation. Competitors have up to 148. Average is 49, we have 20. There again, we might want to look for some opportunities to link out to external websites, referencing them, information that may be relevant to the page, cite the source, things like that. Our page does not link to any error pages on other third party websites. We're good there. And here we're finally getting towards the bottom to our warning. This page contains external links without anchor text. So we do have linking out to Apple podcasts, YouTube, things like that, right? In a lot of areas without any anchor text, we're reporting quite a few on the page. These are likely our icons that we use the link out to YouTube and things like that. So we'll have to get in. And see what we can do about fixing those. Not a huge error here from an SEO standpoint at all. Another warning, the page links to redirected pages on third-party websites. Looks like we're linking out to our Google, our GBP page, and also our Apple podcast page. Those are getting redirected by those resources. Then it's showing SERP features. So are there site links or people also ask, right when the keyword that we input at the beginning of this audit. are there these features that are showing up when people are searching for that in Google? And if it is, it's kind of giving you that information here, which is great to know. And then last but not least, at the very end, it's giving you a checklist of the action items that you should be doing for your homework, right? The errors and the warnings. What are some things that you have to do there to clean it up?

So there you go. Maybe not the most exciting content to go over, but if you are using our free SEO audit or you want to, this can be a good guide for you to understand. What is each section about? How do you stack up and what's important, what's not? If you like this content and if you like what we're doing, we'd love for you, I'll mention it one more time here, go out to localeseotactics.com and we'd love to get a review from you. This is how we know we're doing a good job on this show. This is how we know we're reaching you, providing good content and kind of our feedback mechanism. If you haven't left us a review, we'd love to hear from you. Go to localeseotactics.com, scroll to the bottom, click the button for reviews. There you'll find buttons for Apple Podcasts, Facebook, LinkedIn, like whatever, whatever it is, wherever we can get a review, click there and we would love to hear from you. If you do leave a review, we'll read it on the show.

Here on this show, we wanna give a shout out to a review we have from Apple Podcasts. This is user John from Florida. John says, excellent podcast. I owned a small business, I'm sorry. I owned a small web development business until about 2012 before giving it up for a corporate job. I never lost my passion for coding and SEO and started up a new website design company this year to make extra money on the side. Jesse Bob and their team have provided me with desperately needed refresher on all things SEO. Things have certainly changed since 2012. Yes, they have. And they always will. Uh, things have certainly changed since 2012. And the information they provide has been invaluable. It's both insightful and sound. If you're a local business owner, you absolutely need this podcast included in your marketing arsenal. Awesome, John, really appreciate that review and kind of championing that. This is something that we always try to do in the podcast is give actionable advice to business owners, marketing managers, and anybody working on an agency to write it's actionable for you as well. So glad you're getting some value, John. Thanks for the review. Everybody else. We'd love to hear from you as well. Thanks for tuning into this episode a little bit long, a little bit dry, hopefully helped you out. We'll check it on the next one. Take care.