Today we’re using the SEM Site Audit Tool to review the SEO for a Squarespace website.
Video Transcript – Meredith: [00:00] Oh, that’s so awesome. [Hello.] Hi, how are you doing? [I’m good. Yeah, that’s nice, isn’t it?] Oh, I love it.
Meredith’s Husband: [00:10] So we’re looking at we’re going to do a website review. And right now we’re looking at the front page of Danielle Beede photography icon.
Meredith: [00:19] Oh man, it’s so great.
Meredith’s Husband: [00:20] It’s a gorgeous photo. Gorgeous. I love it. I hope I am pronouncing that right, Danielle Bead Photography The first name is DA and PLL. Now, I haven’t seen that before, but I like it.
Meredith: [00:35] Yeah. Anyway, what a gorgeous shot.
Meredith’s Husband: [00:38] Yeah, it’s an amazing photo. I love the color. Yeah, I love so many things about it. But the color is amazing.
Meredith: [00:46] Yeah, it’s so great. The connection. Oh, love it.
Meredith’s Husband: [00:52] But Danielle has asked for a. She has submitted her site for a for a review. I took a look at this. This is a Squarespace website. Uh-huh. So it’s going to be one of the advantages of Squarespace. It’s going to be very fast. You know, Squarespace will take care of a lot of technical SEO issues and any recommendation that I could make my, you know how I might say, Oh, let’s move the call to action around or change the layout or something. Squarespace can be, depending on the theme you choose, can be limiting and what you can do. So, OK, what I might recommend in those areas may not be possible. So. Ok. And besides it, it loads. It loads beautifully. It’s super fast. I think all the I think it’s really charming looking. I like the site as a user. But what I thought we’d do instead since. A lot of those things are taken care of or might not be able to be changed. We’ll take a look at the SEO SEO look at the OK, great. The SEO of this site. So I’ve already loaded this into SEMRUSH. Mm-hmm. And I just started a new project, I literally just cut and pasted the name of her domain, put it in, let it run came back a few minutes later, and this is what we have. This is what we’re going to look at. Ok. Ok, so there is a video component, it’s kind of optional. I don’t think you’d necessarily need to be looking at this. But if you find this interesting and kind of want to do this
Meredith: [02:22] Kind of interesting, did you just say, if you find this list interesting, you’re starting to talk like me?
Meredith’s Husband: [02:30] Yeah. If you find this of most interesting interest to you, then I encourage you to look at the video to be in the show notes, but you don’t need to. But what we’re looking at is the home page of a project in SEMRUSH. So this is a new project for Danielle. And you can see there are some things here that there are many tools here. The site audit is one of them. That’s the one we’re going to be going over today. There are other tools that SEMRUSH offers. Yeah, go
Meredith: [03:02] Ahead. When you said the project, does that mean anything else other than what it is?
Meredith’s Husband: [03:09] That’s just what SEMRUSH refers to. When you log in to SEMRUSH, the first thing you’re going to do is you’re going to need to create a project and that project is just going to be your website. Ok. So my own SEMRUSH account, I have many, many projects for every client, right? Ok, thank you. As the end-user, you’ll just have one and there just be you’ll see a blue button that says Create Project on almost every page anyway. So I’ve done that. You can see there are other tools. There’s position tracking. This would be where you enter your keywords. So then you track your progress and where and where you get ideas for new keywords. There’s a link-building tool. There’s an on-page SEO checker. There’s a social media tracker where you track your own social media and compare it to your competing websites, your competitors. There’s a backlink audit. There’s all this other stuff. The only thing I have done is this site audit, and that’s the thing. That’s what you want. That’s your on-site SEO. That’s what we’ve covered before, and that is what we’re going to talk about today. So once, once you have done this, go ahead and you’ll click on the site audit. And this is going to take us to the front page of the website audit. And on this page, we’ll see. First Line says the site health score is 88 percent, right? That’s pretty good. And a lot of that is because Squarespace SEO will take care of a lot of the technical things for you, so their scores will typically be pretty good. And then we see there are three big numbers at the top of page one for errors in red, one for warnings and orange, and notices in blue. The errors are going to be the first ones that will want to get those. Those will be the biggest things bringing this website score down. So clicking on that, we see there’s only one problem, but it occurs 11 times, and that’s that the pages have duplicate meta descriptions.
Meredith: [05:09] What does that mean?
Meredith’s Husband: [05:10] So your meta description, when you do a Google search, you’ll see a bunch of results. The first line for each website will be a big, bold, bold blue font.
Meredith: [05:20] Uh-huh.
Meredith’s Husband: [05:21] Then there’ll be a little bit of paragraph text beneath that. That paragraph text is the meta description. Ok, does that makes sense?
Meredith: [05:30] Yes.
Meredith’s Husband: [05:30] Yes, it’s actually. So it’s actually used to be a very important factor for SEO. It’s no longer a ranking factor for Google, so I hesitate to. I wouldn’t keep this if I were SEMRUSH. I wouldn’t keep this in the error category. I would move it to a warning because this is not actually going to harm your ranking, but it’s going to harm your click-through rate. So you don’t for every page of your website, you don’t want to have the same paragraph showing you want to have a paragraph describing what that page is about, because if that page is displayed in Google, somebody wants to know what page that is about before they click on it. So that’s your opportunity to say, Hey, this page is about whatever it looks like. 11 pages here all have the exact same meta description.
Meredith: [06:21] Ok, so spring, many sessions, then I’ll be photography spring mini sessions, then I’ll be
Meredith’s Husband: [06:28] Photography, yeah. So you’d want to change up. Yeah. So these might be old pages that could come offline. Maybe they might be pages that you don’t even want to have on your site anymore. First, you got to decide, do I want to have these pages here, right? If you might, you might find a way. I didn’t realize that was still online. I got to take that off, right? And for any page that you leave online, you want to have, make sure that it has a unique description and you don’t need to worry about putting your keywords in your description. Ok. You just need to entice people to click on yours. On your link, go to your from Google and go to your website. So that’s step number one. I would definitely do that. So let’s go back out to the overview of the SEO issues.
Meredith: [07:21] Yes.
Meredith’s Husband: [07:23] And the next category warnings. So let’s take a look here. There’s more of these. So the first one, says there are 44 issues with unmodified JavaScript and CSS files.
Meredith: [07:34] So this is yeah, this is kind of Typekit. What does that even mean on minified mini minified? You make everything, Leontyne.
Meredith’s Husband: [07:43] Yes, that’s exactly what it means. You take. So JavaScript and CSS files have a lot of code, and what it’s literally doing is just taking all the spaces out because the space is going to be there. Yeah. So on Squarespace, you probably can’t change this, to be honest. Could you change it if you had a WordPress site, you could change this thing or plugins you can use on WordPress. You could if you wanted to. If you have a site on Squarespace and you’re getting this issue, you could write to their support and tell them. I don’t know how responsive they would be, but you would ask about this feature. Maybe they would release something, maybe they something they could do internally, but this is something you won’t be able to do on Squarespace. The plus side is that it’s not terrible, you know, it happens a lot. It happens, you know, there are many instances of this, but it’s not going to drag you down if you can get rid of these other errors. It’s fine to leave this the way it is.
Meredith: [08:40] Ok? Do you click on why and how to fix it?
Meredith’s Husband: [08:44] You can that’ll give you a description. I’ll say, hopefully, kind of what I just said, but you can understand what, yeah, you can click on that. It will open up a little oh, about this issue, how to fix it?
Meredith: [08:56] How about that?
Meredith’s Husband: [08:58] But this won’t know that you’re on Squarespace, so it will give you a more generic. It’ll give you a very technical explanation of how to fix it. So the next issue is 22 URLs with a temporary redirect. So a redirect is when you are on a website and you click on a link and it goes to another page, but that page has been removed or something, and for some reason, it links to another page.
Meredith: [09:22] Oh, so you get probably for
Meredith’s Husband: [09:24] No, not a four or four. You probably never noticed this as a user. The only thing that would happen is that it might seem a little slow for a page to load. But what this is is doing is it’s kind of sending Google and anybody who tries to access this website on a little bit of a wild goose chase unnecessarily. So. On the. So we see on these pages, I’ve now clicked through and I’m looking at the 22 URLs with temporary redirects. And it looks like there’s a few columns of text here. One The first column shows the page where the link is located. The second column shows where that link is going, and then the third column shows where that link is ultimately ending up. So where it’s being redirected to. Ok. So in this case, it looks like there is a link to the portfolio page or what used to be a the portfolio page. And then it’s redirecting to the kids families page.
Meredith: [10:28] How so would you want to just have it go straight to the kids family page?
Meredith’s Husband: [10:33] Yes, exactly.
Meredith: [10:34] So and how do you do that?
Meredith’s Husband: [10:36] Well, you would go into there’s you know, you find this link on the page. It’s probably in the navigation or something, and you just have it instead of going to portfolio and having a 302 redirect, which is, I’m sorry, that’s a temporary redirect. There are two. Let me clarify there are two types of redirects temporary 302 is the number and permanent 301. You pretty much never want to have a temporary redirect. You never want to do that. The only time you want to have a redirect is for the purpose. Let’s say you have a page on your website and you take it off. You remove it. For whatever reason, you want to use a permanent redirect from that URL to some other URL. So because there might be links from other websites coming into that page that you just removed, right? And if you remove that page, you just lost that the value of that link. So that’s the reason for 301 redirects, but you don’t want to use real redirects internally, right? Because that would be well, like I said, you’re sending Google on a wild goose chase.
Meredith: [11:44] Imagine so imagine really wild geese. Yeah, there are wild geese. But do you ever run after geese? Are there goose chases? There must have been goose chases
Meredith’s Husband: [11:55] At some point? I guess so. Yeah, we’ll look into that next podcast.
Meredith: [12:01] The next podcast: The Wild Goose Chase this.
Meredith’s Husband: [12:04] This would kind of be, let’s say you are a doctor and a patient comes in and they say, Hey, I have this problem. I got this thing. I want to have checked out and you’re the doctor and you say, I know just the guy to look at your thing. You go to his office over here and you send them over there. But you know that that doctor that you sent him to is he’s retired. He’s out of business, right? And so when the client goes to that doctor or tries to, they’re just going to be sent to another doctor that you also know. So why would you tell him to go to the first doctor if the first doctor is no longer there? You just, yeah, that’s what you’re doing.
Meredith: [12:40] The second doctor is always there.
Meredith’s Husband: [12:43] Yes, she’s very dependable. Yes, that’s what you’re that’s essentially what you’re doing. You’re telling Google. Take over here to this page. That page isn’t there
Meredith: [12:52] When I went over there.
Meredith’s Husband: [12:54] Yeah, yeah. Okay, so that’s what that’s that’s what a redirect is. And like I said, there is there are situations where you want to have a permanent three or one redirect, you don’t want to use it internally. So what Danielle needs to do here is go find the links that lead to this portfolio page and change them so that they link directly to the kid’s families page. Great. And this looks like to me, it’s in a navigation menu. Just this is the pattern. So probably if you fix this in one, you just make one change. You will fix twenty-two errors. So wow, that’d be nice. Yeah, yeah. So let’s back up and we’ll take a look at some more. We’ll look at the other ones. Ok, there are twenty-two pages and I’m just guessing by these no patterns that there are twenty-two pages on the site. This is twenty-two. You were also three to forty, twenty-two and forty. Exactly. So the next issue pages have low text to HTML ratio. Now I don’t I don’t like this because it’s there’s another issue that I think is more direct. If we just look down this page a little bit further, nine pages have a low word count. That’s what the issue is. There are just not enough words on these pages.
Meredith: [14:08] Whoa.
Meredith’s Husband: [14:09] And the low text to HTML ratio is is a more technical way of saying that. But the problem you want to focus on is just the low word count. So we would look at these pages. It looks like the home page, commercial page, the contact page, a whole bunch of pages. They just don’t have enough words. And if we click through, it’ll actually tell us how many words are, Oh my gosh, and what you want, what you want to do. If you want to have a page that shows up in Google, you’ve got to aim for, I would say three hundred and fifty words minimum. Okay, so she’s short on words she needs. She needs more and more words now.
Meredith: [14:44] Things like in these nine pages
Meredith’s Husband: [14:46] And these pages are now pages like the contact. Fine, you know, you’re not going to. I wouldn’t worry about that, obviously, but the other ones, yeah. The more important you think a page is, the more words you will want to have on there. Probably most important here would be the home page. Right? So those pages, so that’s an issue. And tackling that issue, as I said, is going to tackle two different issues the low word count and the low text to HTML ratio, right?
Meredith: [15:18] Ok, so next, there are yeah. No, no, no, keep going, you go.
Meredith’s Husband: [15:23] So there are 12 pages that don’t have an h1 heading. So an h1 heading? Yeah. So an H1 Heading is just the title of a page. It’s not the title tag, but it is it’s the headline that you would see as a user. Imagine if you open a, you know, any sort of report or paper, there’s going to be a heading at the very top right. So let’s … I’m just going to click on one of these. This is the commercial page and the text that we see. We see the logo, the navigation, and then there’s a paragraph of text and some images. So there are no headings. Yeah, there’s no heading to this page.
Meredith: [16:00] Yeah, right, right.
Meredith’s Husband: [16:02] Like as a user, I’m looking at this and I’m thinking, remember, think of your users as dummies because they don’t want to have to think, What am I looking at? What is this page? Why? What am I looking at? Now you probably clicked on the word commercial to get here. A very good heading for this page. I would assume be commercial photography.
Meredith: [16:22] Right?
Meredith’s Husband: [16:23] The sentence the first sentence, by the way, says commercial clients include Babies R US, Some Infant Blue Cross and Blue Shield of NC, and VCA Animal Hospitals. Please contact me at the email address for commercial rates. Now, also absent from this is any mention of photography, right? When you add a heading an H1, that’s where you want to put your keywords. That’s really the only place that I would say you want to think about how to fit your keywords into the page, right? So in this case, have a have it have heading headings are typically two to three words. They’re not usually more than that, but they can be, let’s say, just be careful if you’re going beyond four or five words, but commercial, I would make, you know, a very obvious one, just like I said, commercial photography or. Commercial photography clients. Or something like that includes commercial photography.
Meredith: [17:21] I love her photography.
Meredith’s Husband: [17:23] It’s really nice. Yeah, it is really good. It is really good. Ok, so let’s go back over, so that’s H1 headings, there are 12 pages that don’t have those. Ok? So again, go through those, even though it looks like the home page needs one. And it might be. Yeah, I would I would put something on the home page like, you know, what is this? What am I looking at? I do like this quote. There’s a quote here. It’s one thing to take a picture of what a person looks like. It’s another thing to make a portrait of who they are. I like that it’s a quote, but I would say there needs to be some sort of heading like, what is this page that I’m looking at? What is this website?
Meredith: [18:09] Right, right? Right, right?
Meredith’s Husband: [18:12] So let’s back up to the other warnings. The next on the list is the low word count, which we’ve already addressed. The next is seven pages have too much text within the title tags, so that means your title tags are just too long. And you need to think that the reason is when you do a Google search and you see all these websites listed again, that first line in bold blue font is the title. That’s the title tag. And you only have so many characters there. You have about 60 characters, so you don’t want to make your title tag more than 60 characters. Right? And this is another place where I would say you want to have your include your keyword somehow, right?
Meredith: [18:57] But so le’ts… Like a first one. If someone’s not watching the video, it says quirky mom, boss, prankster lover of art, and outdoor shower enthusiast and now beat photography.
Meredith’s Husband: [19:09] Right. So that’s the that is the title tag. That’s about page. Yes, that’s the about page. Yeah, it might be that the home page has something similar, but it’s just not too long. Again, this report is just telling us the ones that are too long. Ok, so they need to be shortened to 60 characters or less. Now a quick way to do this. A lot of times you can you can take out your brand name at the end and they’ll be photography. You can remove that. That’s probably going to make it short enough right there
Meredith: [19:39] So you shouldn’t have your own name in those.
Meredith’s Husband: [19:42] You can’t. If it fits, I think you can, and you definitely should be on the home page, right? Fact on the home page, it should be the first. It should be at the beginning of the title tag. Ok, that should be the first thing mentioned. Now my other thought here on these titles is. She needs some, some keywords in here. Right? I am certain, you know, I can, I can. I can identify with outdoor shower enthusiasts. Those are fantastic. I love those. I would click on this just based on that. And it’s very cute. I really love the personality in this title tag. I really like it. But as a user, if I’m looking for, you know, a family photographer, this doesn’t mention anything about photography, right? You need to mention what this page is about. Got it! Title tags are some of the most important things in SEO. So you want to include what does this page about? Just give people an idea as best you can about what they would be clicking on if they saw this? And imagine, again, that they are dummies, they don’t even remember what they just typed in what they’re looking for. They’re just seeing these. They imagine they have a memory span of zero. The fishbowl, not a memory span.
Meredith: [21:13] You have a memory span, a memory span.
Meredith’s Husband: [21:16] They can remember exactly seconds ago. I don’t know. They don’t. They don’t have any memory. Like me. Ok. Yes. So let’s back up. Ok, so you had seven pages that were too long, make them shorter and get some keywords in there. What are those pages about? There are next on the list, last on the list of website warnings, two images that don’t have alt tags. So when you hear about, yeah, these are all tags, those are all tags. Ok. These are when people say, tag your images, these are the. Yes. So there are two images here that don’t have all attributes now on Squarespace. I believe when you load a photo, if you don’t give it an alt tag, it will create an alt tag from the name of the file. Oh, so it will create it’ll create these for you so you don’t have to worry about it, but then you do have to worry about how you name your files. All right. Now, in this case, there are two. There are two images without all tags, and I can tell by looking at this. They are on the contact and one of them is a mini session page. I can tell by the image URL, it’s going to honey books. So this is an image hosted on Honey Book. It’s got to be some sort of calendar booking system. I would imagine. And what’s happening here? I bet money if I knew I didn’t click on one of these. This is a tracking pixel. Yeah, so I don’t know if you can see on my page, there’s just there’s one white pixel there. What that is is that honey book gives you some code
Meredith: [22:58] That you put on. Your book is like, like 17 hats.
Meredith’s Husband: [23:02] Ok, yeah, something like that. So it’s a tracking code. There’s no there’s nothing bad about this. They just give you a bit of code. And in that code is a pixel, a single pixel. And when that pixel is displayed to somebody, that’s how they track it. They can know that their one-pixel image was displayed and that’s how they track it. However, they haven’t given it any alt text. In this case, this is not something you’re going to be able to adjust o on
Meredith: [23:28] Squared, but it’s not anything that’s going to hurt
Meredith’s Husband: [23:30] You. I don’t think so. It’d be very minimal, very minimal. And on WordPress, you would be able to edit this and things like this, which is one reason I like WordPress, and you can do more with it and get better results. But on Squarespace, you can’t do this. But again, yeah, you’re right. I wouldn’t really worry about that. Hmm. So that’s all for the warnings, let’s take a look at the final category notices. Sometimes these are important and sometimes they are not. So let’s take a look. There are a few things here. There are five different issues. One says pages are blocked from crawling. That could be bad and it could. It might not matter. We’ll have to look at it.
Meredith: [24:14] Yeah, I was going to say, what does that mean?
Meredith’s Husband: [24:16] Well, it means that Google, you’ve told Google not to look at some set of pages, some pages for some reason now that now sometimes it’s a login page, sometimes it’s a cart page, sometimes it’s a page just for your clients. So there are certainly reasons to do that. Kelly, and yeah, we’ll click on it. Ok. Yeah, OK, so we’ll do that, we’ll do that first. So let’s look at these.
Meredith: [24:43] Conduct doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo. Ok. Cart cart
Meredith’s Husband: [24:51] Cart. So the first one is the cart. Yeah, you don’t need to worry about that. You don’t want your cart to be displayed in search results.
Meredith: [24:58] And the cart is if you order something right
Meredith’s Husband: [25:00] Now, if you add something to the cart, and then you want to go look at your cart to see what you’ve ordered. Yeah, you know, that’s that URL, so it’s always going to be different. So there’s no reason to put this in Google or have this displayed in Google and these others. I don’t know if you can see this, but these URLs all have a question mark. So they have a URL and then slash events slash something else and then the question mark and then some, some extra characters. When you see your URLs like this question the question mark. You can ignore them. You can ignore them. Ok. Technically, you’d want to be careful of this, but again, Squarespace spaces, this is going to be something they’re doing automatically on their end. So I would say all of these you can ignore these are probably not harming, harming great harming rankings at all. Now the next one, the next issue in the notice is category 10 orphaned pages in site maps. This is surprisingly important. Orphan Page, yeah, Orphan Page is so let’s say you have a page. This is the way this happens most often. You have a page on your website. Yes. And you’re using that page, and all of a sudden, maybe you redo it or maybe it just gets old and you no longer link to it. Mm-hmm. So your other, it’s still there, but the rest of your website just doesn’t link to it. That’s an orphaned page. Nobody’s linking to it. Oh, so yeah, very sad. So those pages are still on your site map. So when you are either on WordPress,
Meredith: [26:41] Ask them what is a site map again?
Meredith’s Husband: [26:43] A sitemap is literally a map. It’s I’ll show you. It’s just a bunch of code that you send to Google your website sends to Google says, Hey, here are all the pages of my website. Here’s where you can find everything.
Meredith: [26:55] And this is like Mr. Robot Code.
Meredith’s Husband: [26:58] Yeah, it’s code. It’s HTML code, OK? It’s nothing fancy about it. It’s but this is that’s the first thing that Google looks at when they one of the first things when they visit your site is they want to see where all your pages are because Google doesn’t want to follow the actual links. It just wants a list of all your pages first. Ok, then it’s going to compare that list to how your web website links. Now, in this case, you’re submitting a sitemap to Google that has pages in it that are no longer linked to the rest of your site.
Meredith: [27:29] Yeah, they’re all alone.
Meredith’s Husband: [27:31] So no, no users can reach these pages, but you’re giving these URLs to Google. This starts to look like those doorway pages that I told you we talked about in a previous episode. You don’t want to do this if you don’t, if there’s a page on your website that you’re no longer linking to it, chances are you’re not linking to it for a reason. You got to take it out of your website, delete the page, take it out of your site map. Most likely, when you delete these pages or maybe turn them into draft mode, they will be removed from your site map.
Meredith: [28:03] Ok. How do you do that?
Meredith’s Husband: [28:05] Well, in Squarespace, I’m not sure exactly, but I’m sure there’s an option where you can when you’re on a page editor just, you know, either turn it to a draft or publish it or delete it or something so that it’s not live. Ok, that’s a fairly important one, also, if I were choosing where to put these pages, that would be a warning and not just a notice. Ok. The next notice, four pages only have one incoming or internal link, so this can be important if you have a page on your website that’s important and it has only one link to it. Essentially, you’re signaling to Google that it’s not an important page. So why would you? Similar to orphan pages, why would you have a page on your website if you’re not going to be linking to it, Google it because Google is going to take that as an as you suggest, Hey, this page is not very important. So I would look at these pages, Hey, are these pages important? Should they be on my website? If they are important, I should probably get a few more links pointing to them if they are not important. Yeah, I can either delete them or I can, you know, turn them into draft mode or something like that. Ok. And in that case, you would want to also make sure you then place those 301 redirects. Squarespace will probably do that for you automatically so that you if anybody else links to these pages, you want to make sure that you maintain those links. The next issue on the notices in the notices section, one page has more than one h tag. You don’t have to worry about this anymore.
Meredith: [29:48] Each one tag.
Meredith’s Husband: [29:49] Yeah. So this is the heading. Remember, we talked about the heading of a page. So this is a page that has more than one heading on it. This used to be an issue. Google has come out relatively recently and said, Hey, this isn’t a problem anymore. Don’t worry about it. I’m going to go ahead and take a look at this. It’s on the events page. Yeah. Yeah, this looks like a pretty bare page, anyway. It looks like this page might be able to come offline anyway, so yeah, I think about that. But it’s not a problem. If you have more than one page take, that’s good. And then there the final issue in the notices they’re one link has nondescript,
Meredith: [30:29] So incredibly thorough. It’s incredible.
Meredith’s Husband: [30:32] Oh, and this is all I remember. Like this. This takes like 60 seconds to get and it’s free. It’s very free. Maybe there is a link on the school’s page. All right. There is a link on the school’s page that doesn’t have a descriptive anchor text, anchor text are the words when you see a link, you know a text that’s underlined and in blue that you actually click on to go to another page. That’s anchor text. In this case, the anchor text says here. That’s all it is. So it probably said the sentence around this probably says something like if you want to do x y z, click clear, Yeah, you want to avoid this because that the word here itself is not descriptive. So again, remember users are, you know, treat them like dummies. If if I just look at an open up a page and I see a link that says, here, I don’t know what that link goes to, I got to read the rest of the sentence. That takes me a fraction of a second, and I don’t want to spend a fraction of a second. I just want to know what this link is. And so Google, Google’s reason is is kind of following. You want to describe what a link is. So if this link goes to pricing for school sessions, you want to say, Hey, if you want to check out our pricing school sections and that’s I’m sorry, you’re pricing for school sessions. That’s the link. Click here. You want to include the keyword. What it is. You’re linking to all
Meredith: [32:08] Of the blue
Meredith’s Husband: [32:11] Underlying. Or you could say like check out our. Pricing for school sessions and the pricing for school sessions would be linked. You don’t want to say you want to you want to avoid making saying things like, click here.
Meredith: [32:26] Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. But in your website, but in emails and stuff, that’s OK.
Meredith’s Husband: [32:32] Emails are fine. Although I would I would tend to follow the same rule of thumb. You know Google is doing this because they know their users’ behavior and they know that people don’t like to click on things that say, Click here. Oh, I always think about, think, think about, think about the spam emails that you get that say, Hey, there’s this super important document. Click here, which you click on that. No, right? You know, just so just in
Meredith: [32:59] General, I’m learning so much.
Meredith’s Husband: [33:02] Yeah, yeah. Just in general, be very descriptive. Always, always be very clear where your users are going when they click on different things. Awesome. So let me just back up, I’m going to go out to the home page of this audit, so that’s the site audit. As I said, there are other tools that you can do here. The only other thing that I want to check out when you run a site audit, it will also do some backlink auditing. Ok, I want to just take a look. So backlink auditing is just looking at the number of websites that link to yours. Ok, so in this case, there are seven referring domains. That means there are seven websites that link to Darnell’s. There are three-point one thousand backlinks. Now that’s pretty. That’s pretty extreme. So you have seven websites across those seven websites. You have over three thousand links, so you have some site-wide what they call site-wide links on those somewhere in these seven domains. That’s little that’s a little suspicious. Like, that’s a little odd. So I’m just quickly going to look at these at the referring domains. Sure enough, right here. Number one. Danielle Bidco, there are 20 there are almost 2500 links from Danielle to DBD photography, that’s unusual. And if we go so it’s a. So my guess is what happened here is this is her old domain. This is a domain that she used to use and it has. She’s chosen a new domain. So she’s gone from Danell LBC’s to DBD. And somehow that has created all these links. What you want to do when you change your website name. You want to. You want to forward the entire domain with just a 301 redirect that looks to be like not what has happened here.
Meredith: [35:12] Yeah, because it says it was first seen in February. Twenty eighteen.
Meredith’s Husband: [35:18] Yes. And I would be curious. So I’m just going to I’m going to copy the name of this. Domain, her old one. I’m going to go to Google, I’m going to do that my I’ve mentioned this before. If you want to see all the pages that are indexed for a website, you type in site city colon and then the name of the website with a dot com and we see this website is indexed. So this leads me to believe that there once was a website here and it’s been moved. We just need to make sure that’s a 301 redirect if somebody did this for you. Ask them if that’s how they did it, that that’s important. The other websites look fine. There are links from other websites and notice there’s only one. The website has 29 links, so maybe it’s in the there’s a link in the footer or something. It’s on every page and then these others have just one, two, or four that look more normal. Interesting. And the next step would be to look a little more into link building. And how can you get more links? But that’s this is a start. That’s how you get started with your SEO for this site.
Meredith: [36:30] That’s great. That’s a lot.
Meredith’s Husband: [36:32] Thank you. Yeah. So, yeah, try it out. Go to SEMRUSH. Go to the resources below or on Meredith’s husband. You can get a free SEMRUSH trial. Try this on your own site. Let me know if you have any trouble. No, let me know if you have questions.
Meredith: [36:48] I’m always going to let him know if there’s trouble. Yeah, thank
Meredith’s Husband: [36:53] You. Thank you. Bye-bye, everybody. If you’d like to have your own website reviewed, use the link in the show notes or go to Meredith’s husband. Come?