SEOatSea

Several critical issues were found when we audited your website. Some of these issues are impacting your search engine ranking abilities and should be resolved as soon as possible to prevent further damage. We also found a lot of opportunity for improvement and suggest reading each section in detail.

• The IDX iframe coding uses meta noindex tags causing serious conflicts.
• SiteLock.com blocking some bot access to your website

You can reach more about these errors and our other findings using the triangle navigation links above. Each factor of this audit has been scored on a scale of 1 through 10 and is summarized below:

Website Accessibility: 1/10
Website Indexation : 3/10
Domain Level Analysis:  4/10
On-Page Search Engine Ranking Factors:  7/10
External Trust: 3/10
Competitive Analysis:  2/10
Social Media Presence:  4/10
Website Usability Testing: 5/10
Keyword Reach and Opportunity: 3/10
Page Speed Findings: 4/10

We ran into two major problems when trying to access your website with our ‘bots’.  The first was being blocked by a site called sitelock.com.  It prevented us from accessing the website without first entering a security code. It appears as if the search engines are able to bypass this block at times, but regardless it is problematic.

The second problem is caused by the IDX plugin and using it as an iframe on your pages. Buried within the iframe coding is an NOINDEX tag, that is conflicting with your other meta tags that allow indexation.

These two major issues should be easy to resolve and once done, will allow for a much more accurate audit of your website. Fixing these issues will also result in greater search engine access and trust.

What is Indexation?

Addressing the above accessibility problems will allow the website to be fully indexed, or “cataloged” in the search engines. Indexability is the process of determining which pages are actually included in the search indexes and what is needed to improve the number of pages listed to 100%.

Indexation Summary:

Our research into your indexation rates indicated that there are some serious problems with what the search engines are finding AND ignoring vs. pages that you are hoping will rank and listed in your sitemaps.  Having clean and accurate sitemap files is one of the easiest ways to communicate with the search engines and yours is sending mixed signals.

You can see in our FINDINGS section, that there are major inconsistencies between what is listed in the sitemap files and what Google and the other search engines are including in their index.  This was especially apparent with Yahoo and Bing which seem to be ignoring most of your web pages and images.

Addressing your indexation problems will ensure that each and every web page and image have the opportunity to rank for keywords and generate site traffic.

The website domain analysis looks at your site from a holistic, bird’s eye view which includes all pages, images, css files, javascript and both the www and non-www versions of the website indicated several severe problems to address.  Response speed and content that is blocked to robots are two if the bigger issues currently causing problems. These issues, in part identified during the ACCESSIBILITY section of your audit, contribute to the holistic view of your website and are factored into this section of the report.

It is important to note that some of these results on the Domain Level report may contain false positives / false negatives, due to the accessibility issues mentioned previously.

Search Engine ranking algorithms look for specific coding and optimization techniques in order to determine how related your web pages are to user search queries. Optimization of your on-page content involves matching the context of your website content with other pages and ensuring that not only do your web pages target the right keywords, but more importantly – that your pages do not steal ranking authority from each other.

Our research indicates that your site passed most on-page optimization tests and is in a position to receive any positive link value or reviews from the internet. The only problem with your on-page review was a distinct separation from the keyword research and the on-page keywords used.  More is detailed in the Keyword Research section of your audit.

Off-Page Trust factors are used to determine how authoritative your website and it’s pages are compared to other sites who are targeting your same audience and keywords.  The more people who talk positively about your website and services, combined with healthy inbound links and positive reviews on social sites, all contribute to an overall “trust” value.   Our findings conclude that there is a distinct lack of inbound trust signals from other websites, leading to a reduced ability to directly compete with your competition.

Our findings conclude that there is a distinct lack of inbound trust signals from other websites, leading to a reduced ability to directly compete with your competition. In fact, other than accessibility and indexation concerns, your lack of website authority is the single most impacting factor reducing your ability to rank.

After investigating some of the top competing websites in your industry, we have found that websites ranking in the top 10 positions have extremely high inbound trust signals and link value when compared to your website.  Social campaigns are active for at least 5 of the top 10 websites and a very aggressive trust-building campaign will be needed in order to obtain some of this market share.

The good news is that you should be able to focus your efforts on your local area only, as national links and trust signals will do very little to help you rank for local keywords. In addition, the competing websites locally are much more obtainable than some of the national level websites like Zillow or RealEstate.com

Social Media is one of the primary methods of engaging potential site visitors the “legit” way. Most other methods of obtaining visits and links are usually seen as internet spam. Stated differently, is search engine rankings are all about trust, reputation, and links – then trust, reputation, and links, are all about social engagement.

Often, search engines will check your new links against a social media ‘backdrop’ to determine if the link is real or fake. While only one of the many factors that they consider, social media engagement is a great way to reduce the risk of link penalties.

A web user’s experience while on your website is one of the key factors which determine how often he/she will return to your website and that has an impact on your site’s rankings. Our focus group, consisting of our staff and up to 15 volunteers,  reviewed your site in detail and found several issues that made them want to look for other pages or other websites to address their needs.

It is difficult to compete with some of the other real estate websites that have million dollar + budgets to work with.  Still, the functionality and ease of use with sites like Zillow and RealEstate.com should be adopted as much as possible.

Having ‘assigned keywords’ to each page of your site is critical. This allows users and search engines to easily determine the difference between page intent from one section of your site to another. However, our team has identified over 150 directly related keywords that COULD be targeted within the search engines but currently do not have an active page utilizing them.

Consideration should be given to creating local pages with multiple keyword opportunities (Alexandria condos, homes, foreclosures, etc.) rather than just one generic page for each location.  More information about this can be found in the FINDINGS section of this report.

Your website is performing adequately but could benefit from proper page speed optimization tactics.  This is especially important on pages that are image heavy or those making use of the IDX plugin.   The lack of site speed optimization IS leading to a severe hindrance in your website’s ability to obtain new rankings within the search engines and is causing a poor user experience.

The suggestions in the Page Speed Recommendations section of this report will detail some of the most effective methods to resolve your speed issues.