Adster's website Audit clearly uncovered 'why' our site wasn't performing in the search engines - and helped us understand just how important re-developing it was.

As a small business owner, there is nothing more frustrating than finally having the confidence to commit to a website - only to find that months later it has done NOTHING to improve your bottom line.

What's even more frustrating is that getting to the bottom of why your website isn't performing likely has to do with all sorts of 'invisible' factors that are almost impossible to spot with the untrained eye. (maybe that $49 website on Kijiji wasn't such a great deal after all?)

Now, there's all sorts of 'software' and other tools that you can plunk your site into and have it spit out an array of interesting data - but what the heck are YOU as a business owner supposed to do with it?

Adster's 'Human' Site Review

Adster's Human Website Audit is based on over 14 years of online experience and the 'reverse engineering' of our road-map to online success. Most importantly, each Audit is done MANUALLY by one of our SEO and Website experts.

What is boils down to is this: Your site broken down into 5 key areas - and a clear explanation of everything that's good (and bad) about your existing website.

Area 1 – Website Content (50%)

From the mouth of 'Big G' (which is Google, for you non-nerds), Your website's content will have the most dramatic affect on your rankings and Search Engine Performance. The uniqueness and originality of your web content are paramount, as is its call to action and value proposition (what message are you trying to get across to your visitors and what makes you so darn special!). Secondary elements such as grammar, spelling, and overall readability are also important. Quantitatively, based on your competition and how competitive your business vertical is, the total amount of content (articles, product info, videos, photos) may be an important factor. Also important is how ‘fresh’ your content is, and to a lesser but still important degree is how easily can your site be updated and accessed in a dynamic capacity.

Area 2 – Design and Coding Efficiency (20%)

The invisible (and pretty darn important) stuff. We're shooting for pure 'Semantic' markup here, and that means a clear separation of 'presentation' from 'content' (tables and frames are sooo 1999). Plus, we want to make it easy for search engines to efficiently crawl your site, so it should be 'mostly' free from html errors and warnings as dictated by w3 standards. Regarding the optimized coding and description of website content, H-tags, page titles, 'clean' URLs, and meta descriptions are essential optimization factors and must be used properly and efficiently.

Area 3 – Visual Presentation (19%)

Your Website's professional and visual appeal is a subjective opinion by one of our experienced staff based on a comparison to your competition, and other leaders in your vertical. Given Google's new focus and 'weighting' on user experience and visitor 'engagement' factors, a professional design that instills trust and confidence along with a solid UI (user interface) is more important than ever. Also, with the wide array of devices that individuals consume their content on these days (laptops, desktops, touchpads, mobile devices, etc), it is important that key information and Call to Action appear above the fold (the area where the user must begin scrolling horizontally), and without major errors.

Area 4 – Additional Factors (11%)

There's all sorts of other Goodies involved in on-site optimization; these may include:

• the usage of an html and/or xml sitemap
• a custom 404 page
• A Robots.txt file
• 301 redirects and page-rel=canonical for duplicate content or URL changes
• Tracking visitors behavior by using Google Analytics or similar to analyze and improve user experience
• Your Domain name value includes multiple factors, namely: the year the domain was registered, top level relevance (.com/.ca), length of characters in the domain name, and relevant keywords (if any) in the domain name.
• Inlinking Hierarchy and keyword rich linking of related areas of your website
• alt tagged logo images, and other secondary optimization factors
• a ‘www’ resolve file
• secondary meta factors to describe language, encoding, and doc type.

Area 5 – Detrimental Factors (-90%)

These scores mostly refer to areas of your website that do not have a great deal to do with increased optimization as it is assumed that these factors are all in order. Your website's lack of speed, the unneccesary use of Flash along with the use of frames, or other 'deceptive' website practices may have a detrimental effect on your site and can create issues even if factors listed in other areas are in perfect order; therefore, any issues in this area only deduct points from your website score.

'Off Site' Factors

Of course, 'on page' SEO is only half the battle; Getting your site ranked for a competitive search phrase will require more than just a great looking website with killer content.

So of course...once we've got your site cleaned up, you'll probably want to head over and check out our Online Marketing services.