Is Your Company Getting Found On Google? How To Tell If Your SEO Sucks In 5 Seconds

Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) can be one of the most valuable internet marketing tactics for any business. SEO is the process of affecting the online visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s unpaid results – also known as organic results. As a Toronto digital marketing agency, many of the websites we see receive as much as 50% of their site traffic through organic Google searches; yet SEO and its importance for showing up in Google is often downplayed or ignored.

Implementing your SEO should be treated like any other marketing strategy rather than just being seen as an optional marketing component. When it comes to SEO, a site can be partially optimized, it can be optimized for the wrong words, or it could follow no SEO best practices at all.

Below are two quick and easy tricks for you to tell if your website’s SEO sucks in as little as 5 seconds. But before we get into the details, let us explain title tags and keywords.

What Are Title Tags and Keywords?

The title tag is the headline of your business in a Google Search. It is the HTML element that specifies the title of your website and should be an accurate and concise description of what your website content is all about.

Keywords are ideas and topics that define what your site content is about. In terms of SEO, they’re the words and phrases that customers enter into search engines.

Now let’s get into the details of how to tell your SEO sucks:

Step 1: Check The Title Tag For Keywords

Surprisingly, we see websites all the time that use just ‘Home’ or ‘Welcome’ as the title tag. This is the first and easiest way to tell if your SEO sucks. When implementing your SEO, there can be hundreds of Google ranking factors to consider that all have varying levels of importance. The title tag is one of the most important SEO tactics, and one of the easiest to optimize. So as a general rule of thumb, if the title tag was neglected, chances are, so was everything else.

Also, since your site’s title tag works as the heading of your Google listing, a poor tag can hurt your credibility and relevancy, ultimately decreasing your chances of conversions and leads from your website.

How Do I Find My Site’s Title Tag?

You can find the title tag in your internet browser when you hover your mouse over the tab at the top left corner of your screen. This is also what shows up in search result pages. Below are two examples of a poor title tag and a strong title tag.

Step 2: Is The Title Tag Using The Word/Phrase Customers Are Actually Using?

When implementing SEO, finding keywords to describe your business in the language your customers use is extremely important. For example, our company The Marketing Garage, targets the phrase Marketing Company vs. Marketing Firm. This is because through various methods of keyword research, we found that the phrase ‘marketing company’ has a search volume 125% greater than the phrase ‘marketing firm’. This means that this is how most customers would refer to and search for our business.

Here at The Marketing Garage, we follow a 12 point checklist so we know which words your consumers use, rather than you having to guess.

Next time you question why your website is not getting found, try looking for these simple things that will make a drastic change to your search engine rankings.

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The Marketing Garage is an award-winning Toronto digital marketing agency that has extensive experience in cultivating effective digital marketing strategies. We help businesses in many different sectors across North America fix their online marketing and branding. Our data-driven mix of SEO and digital marketing process is like no other.