What a Website Health Check can Tell You

Everyone needs a website, or so we are told. When the world wide web started to take off back in the nineties the consensus was that every business needed to be online. This was only partially true. The small mom and pop businesses probably didn't need that flash website to wow their customers but its easy to feel like your business is missing out if everyone else is doing it and you're not. It's the same thing we're seeing now in regards to twitter and facebook. Businesses are aware that they should be interacting but they're not sure how.

The case of businesses buying websites just to reinforce their brand is still a common one. They know they need a site but some don't know how to quantify whether it's a success or not. I've come across quite a few businesses which have sites but are unaware of how successful they are. Either they have an analytics package which counts every search engine crawler that hits their site or they have no analytics at all. The first step in having a successful site is knowing how it's performing.

A website healthcheck tells you how your site is doing so you know which steps to take next. There are companies who will provide these for free and there are some who will charge a lot of money for it.

A healthcheck should look at a number of things to access how well your site is functioning in regards to SEO. The first thing is the appearance. How well does the look and presentation of the site convey the message of the business. If it's an ecommerce cart are the products presented in an attractive way, easy to find and clearly explained. Then there's the code that makes up the site. Is there anything in it that could block search engines from accessing the content. Is there enough text content within the site. These things can be assessed by an seo company to tell you what chance your site has against the competition.