If you want to develop the perfect small business marketing strategy, SEO is bound to be at the forefront of your plans. However, in order to make sure you get the best possible outcome, you need to conduct an audit of your website. Without the solid foundation in place, every pound you spend on marketing is swallowed up by other factors, such as weak content and broken links.
This is a 16-step checklist that you can use to help you understand the best way to conduct an audit specifically designed for your small business. These are among the essentials you need to know that will help move the needle in 2025, and it is essential to try to implement these as much as you possibly can.
- Check Page Speed
Core Web Vitals are crucial for success because slow pages can cost your rankings and conversions. Try to ensure key pages load within 3 seconds.
- Fix Mobile Usability Issues
Over 60% of traffic for small businesses these days comes from mobile traffic, so you need to make sure you're fully mobile optimised, and that you target the top issues.
- Ensure all Pages are Indexed
Carry out a Google search to see if your key pages are appearing. If they aren't, you have an indexing problem that needs immediate attention.
- Review Your URL Structure
Your URLs are actually more important than you might think, so this is why you need to try to achieve clean, descriptive, and hyphenated URLs, as these tend to perform better.
- Remove Duplicate Content
Duplicate content can have a negative impact rankings, because if you have duplicate service pages or repeated blocks, this can cause confusion with search engines. Combat this with canonical tags where necessary.
- Check for Broken Links
404 errors can really damage authority and hurt UX. So you should consider using tools like Ahrefs in order to flag everything as quickly as possible.
- Optimise Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
Every page needs to have a unique, keyword-focused title and description. This is one of the most effective and powerful ways of being able to improve click-through rates very quickly.
- Review Your Heading Structure
Heading structure is also a key part of being able to make your site better, but it's also something a lot of small businesses overlook. Think about heading and subheading structure to make each page look better.
- Audit Content for Search Intent
Think about it from the customer's viewpoint - do your pages solve customer pain points? If not, you need to rewrite and approach differently.
- Improve or Add Schema Markup
Schema is essential for helping Google understand your business website, and this includes essential elements such as product, FAQs, and article. This is something that can boost results and visibility.
- Check Internal Linking
Your best and most important pages should have the highest-number of internal links in order to help ensure that Google prioritizes them.
- Review Your Image Optimisation
Try compressing large files to ensure every image has descriptive, SEO-safe alt-text.
- Analyse Backlink Quality
Having a few strong and relevant backlinks is better than a lot of low-quality ones.
- Evaluate Local SEO Signals
In order to help with this, you have to ensure your Google Business Profile is completed, and collect regular reviews.
- Check Sitemap Health & Redirects
Making sure you submit your XML sitemap to GSC is important, and you also need to ensure redirects don't create loops or chains.
- Verify Conversion Tracking
Before spending too much, you need to make sure GSC is connected, key actions are tracked, and Google Analytics is configured.
Making sure you carry out the right SEO audit to enhance your business and improve your website is essential. Once you assess and address these 16 essentials, there are so many benefits that will make your business better, and your marketing budget can start to work better for you.
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