You may think you are done with your website, but are you really?
Imagine walking into a store where the lights are on, a clerk is behind the counter, but the shelves are empty and signs say, “opening soon.” You’d probably be confused about whether the store is open or not.
This confusion is like what happens when website owners neglect to address placeholder content and default template designs.
These half-finished website designs and features are an automatic turn off for customers. They reflect a lack of care and attention and hurt not only the perception of potential customers but also Google as well.
This translates to a direct cost in visitors, rankings, and money.
Most websites will start out as some kind of template built from asses to create the final design. These templates are premade look and styles for your website that are intended to be easy for those that are not technical or design savvy to create a good-looking website easily.
Fill out some details about your website and boom you’re done.
WordPress, Wix, GoDaddy, and many other website hosting, and management services offer these pre-made and easy to customize templates.
These are great for getting started and building out a design and the functionality of your website.
The design of Heartless Bastard Digital Strategies started with various assets and was built using template blocks from Elementor, a WordPress design tool, and then extensively customized to create the final design.
However, a full design document, style guide, assets, and more were developed before work on www.heartlessbastardseo.com website began.
For those that are just trying to get their website up and running and not spend weeks developing a full website design document, it’s easy to overlook parts of the template that you are using.
It's the little things that are easy to overlook
Of the many small websites that I have looked at over the years, I find some common things that are not up to snuff.
The first is broken social media links. These often come up as little placeholders or social media widgets that get added to your website’s template, but the owner has not bothered setting up the profile on that platform yet, changed something and broken the link inadvertently, or the widget is simply out of date and no longer functions like it should.
Other common ones are broken contact forms, missing images, poorly formatted pictures that don’t load correctly, and more.
It’s easy to think that these broken or placeholder elements don’t affect your website’s perception.
However, Google looks for these kinds of broken links and other placeholder content and negatively interprets them as marks against your website. But, perhaps more importantly, this detracts from the user experience.
If I gave you two different websites, one that was beautiful and functional across all devices and gave you good quality content, and gave you a different website that had all the same quality information, but was visually broken and difficult to use, which would you use?
Sitting down and doing the work
For your website, there are a number of tools that you can use to automate the process of checking for issues. But for smaller websites, a manual audit is perfectly feasible and can help you to make sure that everything is operating as expected.
Below I’ll go over a step-by-step process for auditing your website for functionality and useability. For this you’ll want to grab something to scribble down some notes as you go.
- Start with your normal web browser, if its Chrome, FireFox, or something else.
- Go to your website and start with the home page.
- I recommend doing this while not logged into the management system of your website so that you can see the website how a regular user would.
- Do the following for each page on your website.
- Look for anything that looks wrong, is not loading properly or does not work.
- Test any features that are on the website
- If you have one, does the contact form work and send you messages?
- Do menus for pages work properly?
- Do buttons behave like you want them to?
- Do image galleries display your images properly?
- Do product pages work?
- Can you add items to the cart properly?
- Can you complete a test check out if applicable?
- Can you search for something and get results if you have a search function?
- Click on all links on the page.
- Do they go where they are supposed to?
- Use any social media link icons.
- Do they go to the correct social media page?
Checking Mobile Compatibility
Now do the same but look at your website on your phone, taking the same notes about any issues that you find.
- Look for any layout problems when your website loads on a phone.
- Do all the same features work when you are viewing the website on your phone
- Does anything break or become too small to use when you are looking at your website on your phone?
- Note all the issues that you find and look for ways to correct them.
- Fix any incorrect settings for things like contact forms.
- Change image sizes so they display correctly in image galleries.
- If something breaks when you are using it on your phone are there any mobile version or similar settings that you can change?
- Does anything break or become too small to use when you are looking at your website on your phone?
- Remove any unused links to social media profiles
- Remove or rewrite any pages that placeholders or have default text like “hello world” or “Lorem Ipsum”
Going above and beyond
- You can test alternative browsers to make sure that they all work in the same way.
- Major Browsers.
- Chrome – includes Microsoft Edge, Brave, Chromium, and others, while they all work much the same way since they use the same underlying technology, there may be small differences in how these browsers handle webpages.
- FireFox
- Opera and Opera GX
- Multi-Platform & Browser Testing – Test Grid
- Text Based Browsers.
- WebbIE
- This is to test the accessibility of the web website and see if you can still understand your website in a text only format.
- WebbIE
- Major Browsers.
Making sure your content is useful
Another, more difficult to identify issue is that of low-quality content.
I liken poor quality pages to this.
Imagine walking into a grocery store, only to find plastic bananas and wax apples instead of real produce. You wanted food, not fake food.
It’s the same when your content doesn’t help visitors or sounds unnatural. This is yet another thing that Google will penalize you for.
This costs you yet more visitors to your website and yet more money.
Useless pages on your website don’t do anything for readers, it doesn’t solve a problem, it doesn’t answer a question, it doesn’t fulfill a need, it doesn’t have a unique opinion. Look at your articles on your website and ask yourself.
Does this do something for someone else?
Actual SEO Garbage
Going past useless, there’s actual SEO garbage.
These kinds of pages on a website are often the result of shoddy SEO work that “targets keywords”. In SEO this is called Keyword Stuffing, where an exact search term such as “Los Angeles Handyman” is used multiple times across a single page without regard to how it would be used naturally.
I want you to read this example so you can see what I mean,
“Chiropractor In Los Angeles CA Explains Stretching”.
Does that sound natural to you?
Like a headline that you’d want to click on? This is an actual post title that I found on a website, and the rest of the content was not much better.
Such pages on your website can quickly lead to penalties, not manual actions against your website by Google employees, but negative remarks that hinder your website’s ability to rank in the search results.
Every page, article, and tool on your website should serve a purpose. Ask yourself, what does this page or article do for a visitor? Could it fulfill that purpose better?
For those creating regular content for their audience, ensure it serves a purpose and meets visitor intent.
Visitors want content that helps them, whether it’s learning, purchasing, or entertainment. Think about what is useful to others, what value you can provide, and what unique experiences or perspectives you can offer. What problems can you help solve?
Create content around these ideas. Don’t worry about your niche or industry being “oversaturated”. Focus on creating website pages that fulfill the reason that your visitor came to the page in the first place.
You want content that people will want to share and link to. Look for gaps in others’ content—do they skim over important details or miss critical points? By covering these aspects, you can stand out.
If you create valuable content that meets your visitors’ needs, you won’t be disappointed by your traffic.
So how do you fix bad content?
Next, we’ll go into the step-by-step process of tweaking and fixing your content to improve it for your readers. With these steps complete you’ll have much stronger and effective content that will actually help your website to perform and not just push up daises.
- Start by looking at each page of your website and actually read it.
- Ask yourself does the content sound natural if you read it out loud?
- If not rewrite it so that it does.
- Ask yourself, what is the specific purpose of this web page or article?
- Is it giving information about a specific subject?
- Can you expand on that subject more and provide more information about that subject?
- Are you answering a specific question?
- Is there more detail that you can give to expand upon that answer>
- Is it for a product?
- Are there more details that you can give about the product
- Is it giving information about a specific subject?
- Is the page for a category of posts, products, or other section of your website
- Can you add more details about the pages, products, or section of your website that the category page links to?
- Can you better describe the category or content on the page?
- What could you do to better meet the needs of someone reading your article and trying to get something from it, be that information, answers to questions, unique perspectives, or something else?
- What are others doing better than you for similar content.
- Imagine you are trying to find your web page from Google, what would you put in to search for it?
- Find the results that rank highest and look at them.
- Do they talk about things that you don’t on a web page with similar content?
- Do they leverage images or videos to better get their point across?
- Rewrite your content based on the gaps that you find between the following things
- What your web page talks about compared to what others, who are ranking highly, web page is doing.
- Can you add more information that is related to, and useful to, the purpose of the web page compared to others that are ranking higher than you?
- Can you make your writing clearer and easier to read?
- Use a tool like Flesh Kincaid Calculator to check the readability of your text
- Flesch Kincaid Calculator – Flesch Reading Ease Calculator
- Aim for a 60-70 score or an 8th/9th grade level to keep your writing easy to read and digest.
- Leverage multi-media.
- Create video content that helps to answer questions or provide information about your business, your products, and services.
- Think about what questions your customers might have as they start from having a problem to trying to make a purchase
- Highlight your customer success stories, with their permission
- Talk about industry or niche, news. Discuss common questions that customers or clients might have.
- Create images that help to share information.
- Often called infographics, these give information in a condensed, visual format.
- Post these to your website with detailed information that further explains the infographic and what it talks about.
- Podcasts
- You can often take your longer video content and turn it into a regular podcast.
- Create video content that helps to answer questions or provide information about your business, your products, and services.
Wrapping up
Hopefully you found this guide useful. Now, more than ever, it is important to have high quality content for your website. In today’s age of the “High Quality Content” update from Google, making sure your text is up to snuff is even more important than ever.
If you want to see more, then take a look at our SEO Sins guide below. In it, we give you 12 reasons that your local SEO efforts might be failing. Check it out in the link below.
SEO Sins: Guide to Local SEO
Learn how to avoid the most common SEO mistakes that will cost your business big money. This comprehensive guide shows you everything you need to know to get started with the basics of local SEO.
