MONTHLY WEBSITE CHECKLIST

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1 WEBSI TEMOT

2 Page 1 of 4 MONTHLY WEBSITE CHECKLIST SPEED, RELIABILITY & RANKING CHECK OBJECTIVE RESOURCES / GUIDANCE RESULTS Page Speed Provide brilliant UX Use Web Page Test (choose a test location that is representative Create an excel spreadsheet and record the data each month. Improve rankings of your users) and Google Page Speed Insights on the home page, a couple of deep pages and a couple of popular pages. Monitor these pages month in, month out. Watch for trends; is speed going up or going down? Can you If the trend is in the wrong direction, you need to look to your hosting Improve Time To First Byte? company or your developers to improve. Improve load time Minify resources Reduce image size Monitor Uptime Be a really useful resource Use Pingdom Monitor home page, a couple of deep pages and Create an excel spreadsheet and record the downtime data each month. for Google a couple of popular pages. Monitor these pages month in, month out. Watch for trends; is downtime increasing or decreasing? If the trend is in the wrong direction, you need to look to your hosting company or your developers to improve.

3 Page 2 of 4 Ranking Check progress predict Using Advance Web Ranking monitor the site s position for a few Ranking info for the brand name(s), and plenty of generic search phrases. problems on brand phrases (those containing your company s name or For small sites this might only be 20 or so for bigger sites, this can get product name(s) and a few generic phrases (those which don t into the hundreds / thousands. contain your company name but which your prospective customer might search). Using Rank Tracking to predict problems is like using a barometer to tell you if a storm is on the way. If everything drops one day, it s normally an indicator of a serious issue and it will give you precious hours to get your house in order.

4 Page 3 of 4 CONTENT, CRAWLS & LINKS CHECK OBJECTIVE RESOURCES / GUIDANCE RESULTS Sitemap(s) Submit good content to Create, upload and/or check sitemaps regularly. Use Screaming Minimal errors and warnings in Google WMT search engines Frog or Yoast for WordPress to create them and check they re being rendered correctly by logging into Google WMT and If your errors are climbing, you need to check each URL that is failing. browsing to Crawl / Sitemaps Google crawl vs Check that the search In Google WMT go to: Crawl / Sitemaps and check that the You and Google can see the same pages your crawl engines are picking up all the content you want them to number of ULRs being indexed is similar to the number you can crawl using Screaming Frog If Google isn t spidering some of your content, make sure you have set up any noindex / nofollow rules correctly and you haven t accidentally disallowed stuff in robots.txt Crawl errors Great site health indicators In Google WMT go to: Crawl / Crawl Errors and check them against what you see on the site. Fix anything you find by fixing the actual problem on your site, don t just mark as fixed You have a low number of errors. If your errors are climbing month-on-month, either your CMS is generating them procedurally, you are retiring content without setting up relevant redirects, your users need training or an external site is creating broken links. All of these are down to you to fix and it s best to fix the source(s) creating the errors, rather than keep repairing them.

5 Page 4 of 4 Content Ensure Google In Google WMT go to: Google Index / Content Keywords. Do The top 20 content keywords on your site are broadly on topic with what you sell Keywords understands the content of these look right? Are you seeing words like more, info, click, here, and who you are as a brand. your site cookies? If you are and your site isn t about this stuff it normally means Google is crawling something that it shouldn t or your naming convention for CTAs is being misinterpreted. If they re not, it s not the end of the world but it does mean Google is misinterpreting your content. Fix it by finding the instances of these words on your site and changing them or changing the code. Links Watch for suspicious We use Majestic, but Moz is just as good for this. Monitor the You are confident that quality links are being acquired by your amazing content. activity number of external links which point at your domain. Is this number climbing naturally? When there are spikes, is there a similar spike in activity on social media and a similar spike in branded search volume? If there s a spike in the number of links, it needn t be suspicious sort your linking domains list by number of links pointing at your site. You ll often find that someone has done a sponsorship deal with a local sports team and they ve added a banner to your site on every page. Easy to fix with a bit of nofollow. Linking Watch for suspicious As above, but watch for a spike in the number of linking domains, If there s a spike in links that looks suspicious, it could be that someone in your Domains activity in addition to the number of links. company has helpfully purchased some SEOs from one of those shitty s that comes through every 5 minutes. Be quick to isolate the source, bribe the SEOs to stop and throw chairs at the person responsible internally.

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