5 POINT ON-PAGE SEO AUDIT EXPLANTIONS

The title tag is an HTML code tag that allows you to give a web page a title. This title can be found in the browser title bar, as well as in the search engine results pages. It's crucial to add and optimise your website's title tags, as they play an essential role in terms of SEO organic ranking. In your title tag you should include at least one keyword and stay within a 60 character limit (going over will mean not all your title will be visible). Characters include spaces. 

Score results -
4/4 - The title tag uses BOTH a primary keyword and a secondary keyword and stays within 60 characters
3/4 - The title tag uses a primary keyword OR a secondary keyword and stays within the character limit
2/4 - The title tag is over 60 characters but may use a relevant keyword
1/4 - The title tag is over 60 characters and doesn't include the primary keyword

Your meta description is the  short, relevant summary of what your page is about just below your title tag in a search engine search.  Try to make this like a pitch that convinces the user the page is exactly what they're looking for with a call to action so they click on your link. 

Score results - 
4/4 - The meta description is between 120-158 characters and includes a primary keyword, secondary keyword and a CTA (Call To Action)
3/4 - The meta description is between 120-158 characters and includes a primary keyword and possibly a CTA
2/4 - The meta description may be under 120 or over 158 characters and include a relevant keyword but no CTA
1/4 - The meta description is off-topic or doesn't properly reflect the subject matter

Your URL is your web address. Ideally it should contain a keyword, gives an insight into what your website is about and have no filler words (eg and ...)

Score results - 
4/4 - The URL uses no filler words (eg, and). It includes the primary keyword and gives Google a key into the page subject matter
3/4 - The URL uses no filler words and includes either a primary OR secondary keyword
2/4 - The URL may use a primary or secondary keyword, but may use filler words and doesn't necessarily describe what the page is about
1/4 - The URL doesn't include the primary keyword and includes filler words

Internal links help Google find, index and understand all your site pages. Used strategically, they can send page rank to important pages and should be used for any site that wants higher rankings in Google and thoughtful use of internal linking can help Google and site visitors quickly get to important content. Internal linking is key for any site that wants higher rankings in Google.

Score results - 
4/4 - 3-6 internal links are included and anchor text accurately represents linked content
3/4 - 2-4 internal links are included but could better represent the linking subject matter
2/4 - 1-2 internal links are included but anchor text doesn't match subject matter well enough
1/4 - The URL doesn't include the primary keyword and includes filler words

A target keyword is one word or phrase that best summarizes your page. This is what you hope people will type into a search engine to find the page.

Score results - 
4/4 - The target keyword is used frequently (5-8+ times) throughout the page in a relevant way that's useful to readers (never keyword stuff)
3/4 - The target keyword is used a few times (3-5 times) throughout the post in a way that's useful to readers
2/4 - The target keyword is used a few times but may not be relevant to the sentence or seem "stuffed" into the content
1/4 - The post doesn't have a strong subject matter that relates to the primary keyword or idea

Google’s technology examines billions of URLs each day looking for unsafe websites. Every day, they discover thousands of new unsafe sites, however many of these are legitimate websites that have been compromised. When they detect unsafe sites, they show warnings on Google Search and in web browsers. We use their tools to check your site to ensure it hasn’t been compromised. There are a number of error messages which can appear it has such as this one below.

Moz is an SEO software suite that provides tools and stats to help improve search engine visibility. There are a number of checks we undertake that can be helpful for your search engine rankings.

Score between 1-100: Domain Authority is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engine result pages. Scores range from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to greater likelihood of ranking. For a small business an acceptable score is between 18-30. It's not easy to change your DA score. It's not something you can do on your website today and see the increase in domain authority immediately. DA is based on a logarithmic scale. It's important to note Google doesn't use Domain Authority as a ranking factor so it isn't a metric that will improve your SE rankings but it is a good indicator to help you assess your website performance relative to competitors.

Backlinks from other websites that point to your site are known as referring domains. In simple words, backlinks are hyperlinks, and referring domains are the websites that generate these links. Regardless of how many backlinks you receive from a site only one referring domain is considered for your site.

This is the total number of backlinks to your website. It differs from the referring domains as there may be more than one link on a specific domain that links back to your website. This is the total score of all backlinks to your website.

The term “organic” (or “natural”) traffic refers to the number of visitors coming from search engine results (as opposed to a paid source of traffic). Organic traffic is a metric enabling you to measure how many visitors came from searches made on a search engine.

Number of keywords the site ranks for in Google

GT Metrix is a website performance analytics too designed to analyse the performance of your website and provide you with a list of actionable recommendations to improve it. The GT Metrix Grade is an aggregate representation of:
- Your visitors' page load experience
- On how well your website is built; and
- Actual performance of the site.

The GTmetrix Grade is a weighted average of the two percentage-based scores:
- The Performance Score (70% of the score) is how fast your site loaded for a user; and
- The Structure Score (30% of the score) is how well your site is built

Results: You will be awarded a grade and 2 percentage scores as above. For the grade you should aim for a B or above which is good.

Core Web Vitals is a set of metrics introduced by Google that aim at helping you measure the quality of user experience on a website. The metrics themselves are a part of a larger set of metrics, Web Vitals, and are defined as the three most important metrics to measure the quality of user experience. In order to pass the Core Web Vitals assessment, you need to score “good” for all three Core Web Vitals which are -

- Largest Contentful Paint: This measures how long it takes for the largest content element (e.g. a hero image or heading text) on your page to become visible within your visitors' viewport. (aim for an LCP of 1.2 seconds or less).
- First Input Delay: This quantifies the experience users feel when trying to interact with unresponsive pages - a low FID helps ensure that the page is usable. We all know how important it is to make a good first impression. (aim to get this 100 milliseconds or less)
- Cumulative Layout Shift: This calculates the shifting of elements while the page is being downloaded and rendered. It is an important, user-centric metric for measuring visual stability because it helps quantify how often users experience unexpected layout shifts - a low CLS helps ensure that the page is more user friendly. (aim to make this 0.1 or less)

PageSpeed Insights is a tool from Google that evaluates the loading speed and behaviour of a page on both mobile and desktop devices and, depending on the results, provides concrete suggestions for improvement.

Results are reported as -

- Performance – Score based on First Contentful Paint (the first thing that loads for your site) - value 10%, Speed Index (how fast this loads) - value 10%, Largest Contentful Paint (largest item to load on your page) - value at 25%, (Time to Interactive (he point in time when the last Long Task finished and was followed by 5 seconds of network and main thread inactivity) - value at 10%, Total Blocking Time (the total amount of time that a page is blocked from responding to user input) - value at 30% and Cumulative Layout Shift (calculates the shifting of elements while the page is being downloaded and rendered) - value at 15%
- Accessibility - These checks highlight opportunities to improve the accessibility of your website
- Best Practices – This gives you a score based on web best practices which include guidelines such as customer-centric design and making sites accessible and mobile responsive. Also, consistent branding and using the right colours, fonts, and white space are some of the best practices website owners need to implement to create an uncluttered, user-friendly design.
- SEO - These checks ensure that your page is following basic search engine optimization advice.

Result Scores: 0-49 = Poor, 50-89 = Needs Improvement, 90+ = Good

Rich results are experiences on Google surfaces, such as Search, that go beyond the standard blue link and can include carousels, images, or other non-textual elements. Formerly known as rich snippets. This test lets you know if there is content on your page that is eligible to appear in the rich results spot at the top of Google search.

This result lets you know your website's score in terms of mobile responsiveness.

If this test is a fail, then test the site yourself on a mobile device. If it works fine it probably is. There has been an bug reported in Google Search Console so this may be the issue. It is unclear if this would affect any Google rankings. Apologies for the lack of clarity on this.

Structured data is a standardised format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content to make it more readable by search engines. Schema is a language used by Google (and others) to read the structured data. This test checks Schema based structured data embedded in web pages. Schema markup informs the search engine precisely what your content is trying to convey on your web page and converts unstructured data into structured data. Adding schema will help the search engine crawl better, raising your websites ranking while keeping other best practices of SEO in mind.

We test a number of keywords for you with our keywords tool and offer results as follows - 
SEO Difficulty: This tells you how difficult it is to rank at the top of Google for this search query. (The higher the number, the harder it would be to rank)
Off-page Difficulty: This gauges the backlink equity of the top 10 pages that rank for the search query. A high value here means that you will need to gain more domain authority via backlinks from reputable sites to compete (you want this to be as low as possible)
On-Page Difficulty: This gauges how optimized the content is of the top 10 pages that rank for the search query. When most results have their content optimized, this value will be high; in such cases, link metrics (or brand value) will be the decider. The higher the number the harder to rank for.