What is Site Health Assessment?
When you sign up for a Marketing Services plan, our Site Health Assessment tool checks your site health and functionality, which are important for search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines like Google prioritize your business in search results based on unique factors in the images, text, and links on your site. We look for improvements to help you rank higher.
What we look for, and how we make improvements
When you first sign up for your plan, and every three months after that, our tool scans the backend of your site's code, searching for errors and areas to improve. Each error needs to be fixed before the checkpoint is marked "passed" in our system. These are the types of things we look for on your website:
Content and keywords
- Keyword volume in your site content: Keywords help search engines match your website to your audience. It's important to have keywords in your headings (H1, for example), body copy, and in any other text on your site where it makes sense.
- What we do to fix it: We'll add keywords to your site content.
- Missing H1 headings: Usually a title, a Header 1 or "H1" is the largest type of heading on your website. Search engines rely on them to know what your site is about.
- What we do to fix it: If your content needs them, we'll add H1 headings for you.
- Incorrectly-sized HTML: If the HTML on your site is too large, it can affect your ability to show up in search. Our tool looks for HTML that's sized over 2 MB total.
- What we do to fix it: We'll reorganize modules on your pages to make the HTML fit best practices.
Site descriptions and title tags
- Descriptions with invalid characters: Search engines are sensitive to invalid characters. Your site description shouldn't include non-alphanumeric characters like @, #, $ and so on.
- What we do to fix it: We'll remove non-alphanumeric characters.
- Description tag length: The best page descriptions are between 50 and 155 characters. We check to ensure that your site description length is meeting best practices for SEO.
- What we do to fix it: We'll rewrite descriptions to fit the character count.
- Missing or duplicate title tags: Crucial for SEO, a title tag is the title of a page that you click in search results. It's also important for title tags to be unique for each page. If title tags are the same on multiple pages, it can hurt your SEO.
- What we do to fix it: We'll add title tags to any pages that need them, and remove or replace duplicates.
- Missing keywords in title tags: Because title tags are what people see first in search results, it's important to include keywords your audience will be searching for in the title itself.
- What we do to fix it: If your title tags need keywords, we'll add them.
- Title tags with invalid characters: As with site descriptions, your title tags shouldn't include invalid characters since search engines are sensitive to them.
- What we do to fix it: We'll remove invalid characters from your title tags and rewrite as needed.
Images
- Images without alt attributes: Adding alt attributes helps provide non-visual cues for your website content and helps search engines "read" your website.
- What we do to fix it: If an image on your site needs an alt tag, we'll add one.
- Broken internal or external images: This means that an image on your site isn't loading correctly. An internal image is one you've uploaded to your site. An external image means the image is hosted externally (like on Instagram, for example). You can either replace it or remove it.
- What we do to fix it: We'll remove broken images.
- Image too large or too small: Certain image sizes are problematic for SEO. We'll check to see if any of your images needs to be enlarged or reduced to fit guidelines.
- What we do to fix it: We'll resize any image so it fits the guidelines.
Links
- Broken external links: A broken external link means that a link to an outside source (like social media pages, online ordering sites and so on) is written incorrectly or no longer exists. The link is no longer clickable.
- What we do to fix it: We'll look for and then edit or remove broken links.
- Missing internal links: Internal links are connections from page to page within your website, like the links in your menu (Home, Products, Services, Contact). Broken internal links are bad for your SEO.
- What we do to fix it: We'll check for broken internal links and add/repair them where needed.
Meta descriptions
- Missing or duplicate meta descriptions: A meta description is a summary of a particular page on your website. Each meta description needs to be unique to match the page contents.
- What we do to fix it: We'll check each page for its meta description, edit meta descriptions so they're all unique, and add a meta description where needed.
- Missing keywords in meta descriptions: Search engines read your site's meta descriptions to learn what's included on each page on your website. That's why it's especially important to include your keywords in this content.
- What we do to fix it: We'll add keywords to your meta descriptions.
