If you’re constantly looking for ways to improve your agency’s website and the user experience it provides (and you should be), then a website audit is a great place to start. In this three-part series, we’ll explore the main areas of your website strategy that you should evaluate and improve, starting with meta data and content.
What is Meta Data?
Meta data (or meta tags), are particular html elements on your website that tell Google and the other search engines, as well as your audience, what your website pages are about. Meta data serves as a way to help the search engines determine where you belong in the search results and help market your agency to your audience.
For your website audit, you should look at your title tags and meta descriptions. These items are crucial to ensuring you are accurately describing and marketing your website pages. Every page on your website should have a title tag and meta description; these are shown in the text you see when your website comes up in the search engine results pages.
You do not, however, need to worry about the meta keywords tag. Matt Cutts, Google’s Head of Webspam, has said that Google does not use meta keywords in ranking websites. Furthermore, if you’re using the WordPress platform, the creator of the highest-rated SEO toolset, Yoast, does not include meta keywords by default.
What Content Does Your Agency’s Website Need?
Depending on the layout of your website, you will most likely need page content for:
- Product pages (insurance coverage pages)
- Customer service pages (claims pages, carrier information pages, etc.)
- About the agency pages (company history page, staff page, location pages, etc.)
The amount of content you have on your website depends on the products and services you offer, as well as what is relevant to your audience. Remember that you don’t need a page for anything and everything you provide. Make sure to include pages that center around your core product offerings, as well as service and company information that your customers need.
In addition to your website pages, you also want to make sure you’re producing regular blog posts. Blogging is a great way to get more in-depth information to your customers, talk about your community, and continuously provide fresh content, which the search engines love.
Quality Guidelines for Meta Data and Content
There are three major quality guidelines you want to account for when evaluating your meta data and content:
- Uniqueness (Quality)
- Length
- Character Restrictions
Above all else, your website’s page content should be unique to your agency. Not only is duplicate content something that the search engines (especially Google) frown upon, but it also does not provide a high quality user experience to your audience. Make sure your content is exclusive to your agency and accurately describes the products and services you offer and who you are as a brand.
Your content should also be of a certain length; most recommendations you’ll find will land between 300-500 words per page. The more in-depth your page content, the more opportunities the page will have to attract search queries, because the content will fulfill the searched topic. While you don’t want to overload your website visitors with too much information, you want to make sure you have covered at least the basics of the page topic.
Title tags and meta descriptions have strict character restrictions, based on how they display in the search results. A title tag should be no more than 70 characters, or 55 pixels (wider letters will cut down on your character allowance). Your meta descriptions should be no more than 156 characters. A properly formatted title tag and meta description will appear in the search engines like this:
If you go over your character count on a page, it would look something like this:
You don’t want to lose out on getting your marketing messages across to search users, so stay within your character restrictions!
Have questions on auditing your website’s meta data and page content? Leave your inquiries in the comments! Stay tuned for part two of our series on running a website audit, in which we’ll cover design and usability.