At Results Communications and Research, we often use two distinct website diagnostic tools to run website diagnostic reports for existing clients and prospective clients. These reports include:

• Google Lighthouse Reports – these reports provide feedback — both an overall score for each category as well as detail on website factors, features, issues, etc. that contribute to the overall score — on the four broad categories below:
  • Performance
  • Accessibility
  • SEO
  • Best Practices

• Site Auditor Reports – similar to Google Lighthouse Reports, these reports provide an overall score (but just one), but also give you all the behind-the-scenes detail, so you know what needs to be adjusted on your website, and why, to improve your score. What we love about this report is that it reports factors/issues that should be addressed into these three categories, so you know which ones are most important to address first, i.e., those that are most likely most contributing most to your site not ranking as well as it could in search engine results:
  • Critical – these should be addressed immediately
  • Error – these should be addressed after the above
  • Warning – these you can slowly chip away at

Why Run Website Diagnostics Reports?

If you’re a follower of our blog or a frequent visitor of our website, you know that our Boston digital marketing agency has an expertise in SEO (search engine optimization). We are super passionate about helping organizations be found on search engines for appropriate terms in relevant geographies. There are an extensive list of factors that can influence how likely Google or other search engines will be to serve your website up in search results. Ultimately, search engines want searchers to find what they need and have a good “user experience” when they visit a website that the search engine serves up in search results.

The two reports mentioned above can help you determine both SEO challenges and opportunities. We like to say, “they help you both identify issues with your website that are likely causing search engines to “ding” it and make them less eager/more reluctant to serve your site up in relevant search results, and identify missed opportunities related to being found on search.” The latter category reflects items that search engines aren’t necessarily dinging your site for, but if your website employed best practices related to them, your site would likely rank better in appropriate search results.

Examples Of SEO Challenges and Opportunities Revealed By Website Diagnostics Reports

There are a large number of factors and issues on which the above two diagnostics tools report, so the following list is far from exclusive. But, some examples of critical SEO challenges and opportunities that are revealed by the reports include:

Factors/Features That Likely Cause Your Site To Be “Dinged” By Search Engines:

• Slow Site Load Speed – search engines do not like to serve up websites that are slow to load.
• No Image Alternative Text Tags (Alt Tags) – search engines want site visitors to have a good “user experience,” as we mentioned above. If a site is not accessible, i.e., not able to be read by screen users used by those with visual impairment or other physical disabilities, how can the visitor have a good experience? Incorporating alt tags when you include an image on a website page or in a website blog post is just one of many factors to be addressed to ensure your website is accessible.
• Pointing to internal or external website pages that have an http:// (non-secure) vs. https:// (secure) address. Search engines do not like to send visitors to insecure websites.
• Broken links/missing pages – often pages to which website content links are removed/taken down — whether the links point to internal pages/posts or to external ones. Search engines see this as neglect and not keeping an eye on your website and will view this negatively.

Missed Opportunities That Cause You To Miss Out On Ranking Well In Search Engine Results:

• Not employing SEO meta page/post title tags: we always call these “your most important piece of SEO real estate” as they are crawled by search engines and tell them for what topics/search terms to index a particular page or post on your website.
• Not completing SEO meta description tags: while it’s unknown for certain how directly these tags influence how your website ranks, they indirectly do, at a minimum, since they let potential visitors know what a page of your site is all about when it is served up in search results. Ultimately, this causes your pages to have a higher click-thru rate, and Google and other search engines view sites that have more website visitor traffic as more credible ones, and therefore, ones they are more comfortable serving up in relevant searches.
• Publishing duplicate website content: we won’t re-create the wheel since our most recent blog post speaks to the downfall of having too much duplicate content, but the takeaway is this: when you repeat the same or very similar content in numerous places on your website, search engines get confused and they may not serve up those pages in relevant search results, nor index that content to begin with!
• Publishing content that is too short or that doesn’t contain enough true crawlable/indexable content: As we expressed in this blog post about an important Google Core Algorithm update, Google and other search engines do not like to serve up low-quality, unhelpful content. They want to serve up meaningful content that allows visitors to take action to address their particular concerns. In addition, search engines can’t crawl/index pdfs, so if a lot of a page’s content is housed in an infographic or image, that is content that search engines will not serve your site up for. Sure, you can tag the image on the back end, but it’s unlikely your tag can incorporate everything an infographic or an image with a lot of content, or a pdf, has to say.

Not Sure How To Run, Interpret, Or Respond To Website Diagnostics Reports?

As SEO Consultants, we can help you with all of the above, so reach out to our team of search engine optimization consultants today to schedule a complimentary discussion.