There are seemingly endless factors that help or hurt a site’s rank. This is mostly due to the complexity of the Google algorithm, and the fact that it is ever-evolving. If you have a website for car dealerships, then hiring an internet marketing agency to do regular website audits makes a lot of sense. They will be familiar with the long list of ranking factors that Google and other search engines judge as important. In the initial meeting with your new SEO company, when you talk to them about your vision for promoting your brand, you should be familiar with some of the on and off-page factors that they will most likely want to discuss with you.
An SEO company will want to analyze your site URL and make sure that it is user-friendly and concise. They will want the URL to use subfolders rather than subdomains. They will most likely want to find and eliminate URL-based duplicate content. They will look to each of your pages to make sure that they have the right targeted Meta description and Title tag. They will want to spend some time on content analysis. Emphasis will be placed on whether all of it is valuable and substantive. If any of it isn’t, it will be modified or eliminated. Pages that don’t add value to your site are lowering it instead.
The company will also most likely want to know if your images contain ALT tags that are optimized by the inclusion of keywords. They should be indicative of the content to which they are attached. They’ll look for any evidence of black hat SEO, like spammy content or any variation of keyword stuffing. They’ll take a look at your backlink catalog and make sure that you’re only connected to reputable websites. They’ll also study your niche and see what search terms are bringing the best results, and they will check to see if those terms are included on your most visited pages.
If you speak to an SEO company and they aren’t knowledgeable regarding all of these matters, then it’s a sure sign that they aren’t the best choice for the job. These are optimization basics about which any company should be intimately aware. It’s to your benefit to know about them at least a little as well. Even if you’re not going to be the one overhauling your website for SEO, you should be familiar with a bit of the terminology, and what it is that helps your site rank.
