I thought it’d be fun to dive in a bit and see what kind of issues some of the sites I’ve been reviewing are having. I’ve compiled a small list of topics that I’ve often noticed while auditing a websites organic SEO. These were not, in most cases.. anyways; the most important things to fix in those sites, it’s just that a lot of people seem to be doing them wrong.

404 pages

  • It baffles me in how many sites get this wrong, so few people spend time making a proper 404 page… Instead of showing an oops page offer a solution.

Subscription options

  • We very often find that people are missing out on lots of subscribers by not having good subscribe widgets or even altogether lacking an email newsletter.

Responsive & UP-TO-DATE websites

  • If you’re serious about being on the web, whether to make money or to inform, you need to think about the different devices people will use to access your site, your content, your products. Not every website can be relevent however it should be capable of being accessed on someones phone or tablet. If you are still using flash on your website 

Internal Search

  • Internal search often left a lot to be desired. In a way, this isn’t that surprising: WordPress internal search just plain sucks and most other CMSes, including Magento, don’t exactly shine in that area. On the other hand: setting up a Google Custom Search Engine is not that hard…

Keyword usage and internal linking

  • The last thing that I find we often make remarks about is the usage of keywords. Now these remarks go in all directions, but one thing is clear: simple principles like the “Cornerstone Content” principle are often misunderstood. Quite a number of the sites we made remarks about in this area had the keyword they wanted to rank for in the title of over a dozen pages. Think to yourself: how would Google decide which of these pages to show as the top result? Are you making that clear?

Call to Action

  • Very often we find sites that do, in fact, rank rather well for certain terms, but make hardly any money from that fact. This is often true because they lack a clear call to action.  Having a call to action on your homepage is a good example of the kind of advice we tend to give.