The Sherry Phillips Group

A mobile-responsive website is even more important than a mobile-friendly site, as more than 60% of global web traffic comes from mobile devices. Because of mobile popularity, it’s important that your site responds and adjusts to any sizing, layout, or proportion. If your site isn’t mobile-responsive, visitors are likely to leave, resulting in a higher bounce rate. Plus, it is unlikely you will rank in mobile search results.

Having an SSL certificate on your website acts as a symbol of trust for site visitors. An SSL certificate is not only the difference between HTTP and HTTPS in your URL, but HTTPS also provides a mechanism to guarantee authenticity and protect any information being transferred over the internet. Google views having an SSL certificate as a lightweight ranking factor, as most websites on the Internet have them nowadays.

Most websites have a file called robots.txt that tells the “web crawlers” what they can and cannot crawl on your website. We will be checking to make sure your website is allowing all crawlers to access it in order to properly read your coding, and show your website to searchers. If they cannot access the coding of your website, it will be difficult for your website to rank.

If the pages of your website aren’t being indexed (appearing in search results) by Google, then the crawlers are not seeing any updates you make. We will check to make sure that all pages are accessible to Google and are being indexed to show in the search engine results pages.

If your business has more than one website with the same information, there is a good chance you will not perform well in searches. Search engines like Google want to see consistency and anything that may confuse them becomes spam, negatively affecting indexing and rankings. The best practice is to have one website that is well-optimized, and any other domains should have a 301 redirect to your main website.

An XML sitemap is a file that helps make sure that any web crawlers can easily navigate your entire website. XML sitemaps also help create structure and hierarchy for larger websites, which is important when lots of pages need to be indexed.

For local SEO, it is important that your business name, address and phone number are consistent, prominent, and clickable across your website. We recommend that your business name & phone number should be in the header of your website with a clear call-to-action, and your entire name, address and phone number should be in the footer.

Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager allow you to understand your audience’s location, how they found your site, what pages they viewed, and more. Having this knowledge allows you to target your audience more effectively to get more relevant users to visit your site. Ensuring that we have access to Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager on your website is crucial for gathering data relating to your website’s traffic. If we do not or cannot access the Analytics or GTM, we can add the tracking codes to your website.

Search Console offers valuable insight by finding errors and malware while also giving an overview of how Google sees your website. This, along with Google Analytics, is a powerful tool to help better understand your audience, and keep your site secure.

Similar to Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools helps website owners monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot their website’s performance on the Bing search engine. With Bing Webmaster Tools you can gain valuable insights into your site’s visibility and any potential technical issues that may arise.

A proper redirect should be set up on your website so that whether a visitor types your domain with or without the “www,” they will be taken to the same place. If this redirect is not set up, the search engines will see two live versions of your website, which runs the risk of being penalized for duplicate content. The same goes for https vs http if you have an SSL certificate.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires certain business websites to make accommodations for people with disabilities. Web content should be accessible to the blind, deaf, and those who must navigate by voice, screen readers, or other assistive technologies. This can be achieved through website edits, add-ons, and plugins.

Broken links (404 errors) can occur when the server can’t find what you are requesting. This happens when URLs are changed on your website and redirects (301s) are not put in place. This can cause Google to index dead links, in turn hurting your rankings and providing a poor user experience.

Meta keywords are an outdated tactic that were once used to help the search engines identify your keyphrases on the backend of your site. As of 2009, Google does not use meta keywords anymore to determine ranking and now can be considered spam.

Your page URLs should be no more than 115 characters and should describe the corresponding content. For example, the URL for the Services page should be www.domain.com/services. Not only do shorter URLs rank better in search results, they are also better for user experience.

Structured data, or schema, is coding that can be placed on the website to signal to search engines that the information highlighted is important. Local business schema includes on your business name, address, phone number, hours of operation, and other items (such as social media links) that a local searcher would be looking for. Schema may generate rich snippets in search results, which can help improve local visibility.

A visitor-facing sitemap does all of the same things as an XML sitemap (such as allowing Google to more effectively and efficiently crawl the website), but is visible on the front-end of your site. A visitor-facing sitemap help users find pages, navigate through the site, and creates internal linking opportunities.

Ensuring your images are properly sized and compressed is important to keep your overall page speed and site speed optimized. Large images can bog down loading time and push potential customers away from your site.

Incorporating image alt tags into your website’s images is important in order to help search engines recognize what the image is depicting. Remember, search engines are unable to see images like humans do, so image alt tags help explain the content of the image and can provide textual information if the image fails to load for visitors. When an image pertains to a product or service, the alt tag should include a relevant keyword. For more generic images, the alt tag can offer a description of the scene depicted in the image.

Using schema markup to highlight job postings, menu items, blog posts, FAQs, etc. helps to give search engines more information about the content. This makes it easier for search engines to index, read, and display search features directly in search results. We will identify if there are any new or additional opportunities to add relevant schema types to your website.

From time to time, broken links or clickable elements, image issues, and other design and layout issues can pop up on your website. We will take stock of any noticeable issues that need to be corrected on your website while assessing the other SEO elements from this section of the roadmap.