It’s challenging for your clients to draw traffic to their websites and their latest online marketing content. Using good SEO practices can greatly enhance your client’s position on search engine results pages. Unfortunately, many business owners falsely believe they are search experts. If you're trying to sell a new prospect your SEO services solution, review their site for the following common problems. Then, make your pitch.

Headings

SerpStat, which audits and reports on website page design deficiencies, notes that misuse of the H1 HTML markup code is common. All too often, the H1 markup duplicates the TITLE tag.

What does this mean? Originally, developers used the H1 HTML code to indicate which text was the title, and therefore, the largest text on the page. Then, codes on pages grew more complicated when CSS (cascading style sheets) came along. SEO experts recommend placing only one H1 text string on each page. If you already have text that is clearly marked as TITLE, you don’t need more text marked as H1. Why confuse the search engines when the goal is to get your client’s page routed to the top of search results pages? 

Nofollow Attribute

Should you or shouldn’t you use the Nofollow attribute? First, your client should understand what the attribute is all about. Long ago, Google encouraged website designers to use multiple links on their pages and rewarded the behavior with higher placement on SERP. Of course, people got carried away with the practice. They aimed for quantity instead of quality. 

Google developed a solution to the problem of the ridiculously high number of links on pages. They encouraged people to use the tag <rel=”nofollow”> for links that should be ignored. The search engine would include all other links when building its results list. Experts suggest that designers use the Nofollow attribute for specific page links. These include pages or data you paid for, advertising pages and user-​generated content which has a high likelihood of being spam.

Load Times

If a previous contractor has charged your client by the page for the company’s website design, you might encounter a site laden with images and JavaScript. These design elements slow down page loading. Research indicates that 25% of common SEO-​related errors on websites stem from loading time issues. A site that’s slow to load is a site that’s never seen by visitors. They’ll quickly move on to the next option on the SERP.

Improving a site’s load time is one sure way to improve the visitor experience. To get an idea of what’s happening with the speed of your client’s site, run a Digital Audit on them. The tool is available at AdMall from SalesFuel and will give you a speed score and suggestions on how to improve performance.