The 5 Minute SEO Prospect

In an ideal world, client prospects would be knocking on your proverbial Internet door begging for you to help them with SEO. Money would be flying at you from all directions. You would have your choice from amongst the best, most prestigious jobs available. Mayors and Governors and the President of the United Nations would be dying to meet you (undoubtedly so he could get your advice on how to get his lolcats blog ranking higher). The CEO of Google would invite you to lunch so that you can have a friendly chat about their ranking algorithm and how they can fight spam better.

Unfortunately for most of us, this ideal world will forever remain lost in the ethereal realm of fiction. The same place that Bill Gates, pro athletes, Tom Sawyer, and Elvis all live. Gaining clients often times takes hard work. We have to hit the streets and do the door knocking, rather than the other way around. There’s a lot of rejection, constant scoffing, being ignored, and worst of all, the “I have a company in India that gets me 10,000,000 links a month for only $0.99 and promised I’d rank #1 for ‘laptops’ in two weeks – why the heck should I pay you $1000 a month?” Needless to say, it takes a lot of prospecting before finding a good client. You can’t waste a half hour clicking around their website before deciding they aren’t in need of SEO services.

With the exception of freelancers, it isn’t usually the SEO Specialist himself who does this prospecting. It’s the sales department’s responsibility. While they probably understand the basic concepts of SEO, they aren’t nearly as clued in as someone who works on it all day long is. Here is a quick 5-minute prospect website check to decide if they are in dire need of your SEO services:

The First Minute: Canonical Checks

Duplicate content issues have seemingly been given a heavier prominence with Google lately. There may not be a “penalty” as many once believed, but it can still hurt your website in a lot of ways. If the same blog post can be found at www.sillykitties.com/drummerkitty.html and at www.sillykitties.com/musicalcats/drummerkitty.com, there’s a problem. If 2 websites link to the first address, and 3 to the second, you’re splitting the value between the two. If there was only one URL, it would have the benefit from all 5 websites linking (and the subsequent higher ranking for “drummer kitty”). To check for proper canonicalization and redirects, follow these steps:

1. Visit each of these URLs (with the domain you’re checking, of course!):
   1. www.sillykitties.com
   2. www.sillykitties.com/index.html (or /index.php)
   3. www.sillykitties.com/
   4. sillykitties.com (without the www)
   5. sillykitties.com/index.html
   6. sillykitties.net
   7. sillykitties.org
2. Find a subdirectory, subcategory, or however they structure their website and do the same check as above.
3. If possible, quickly find a product or blog page that fits into two categories and see if the URL is different for each instance of the same page. Note if their blog is located off-site, on a subdomain, or as it should be – in a subdirectory.

No page should be found under more than one URL. If you do these checks and find five different addresses to access their homepage, they probably need a little help. If you want to get little bit more advanced, take a look at their source code for the pages (View Source) to see if they have a in between their tags.

The Second Minute: Going to the Source

This minute is devoted entirely to looking at the source code. Don’t be intimidated. You don’t have to understand everything that is going on there to do these checks. For this part, I recommend a coder or more advanced SEO who is comfortable with HTML help out the sales team if they’re uncomfortable looking at the source. Most of these checks are simple existence checks using the search feature (Ctrl-F typically).

Take a look at the source of the page (View Source), and check it for these things:

1. Google Analytics – most websites will use Google Analytics to track their website visitors. It is installed on every page using a Javascript code, either just before the end of the Body section (old Analytics script) or at the end of the Head section (new script). You can find its existence by doing a quick search for “UA-” (without the quotes). Check the home page, and two or three interior pages, along with their blog.
2. Alt, Headings – Search the code for “alt” and “h1”, “h2”, etc. Are they using them to describe the content?
3. Meta Description – Meta descriptions may not help you rank, but they play a pretty big role in helping get visitors from the search engines to your site. Search for “description” to make sure it is there and has some good relevant content. Check multiple pages to see if they use the same description on each page, or that it really describes what the page is about.

The Third Minute: Titles and URLs and Headlines, Oh My!

It’s all about being descriptive. Minute Three is a quick run through of the website. Click through to various sections at various depths. Monitor their categories, product pages, blogs, etc. Does their page structure make sense? Does it flow naturally? Can you navigate with ease? Look at Title Tags, URLs, Headlines. Are they consistent? Are they descriptive? Are they keyword rich?

Keep an eye out for common mistakes and oversights.

• Title Tags
  • Wrong: Company Name | Boring Page Title
  • Right: Catchy Keyword Rich Title | Company Name
• URLs
  • Wrong: www.domain.com/?p=23
  • Right: www.domain.com/keyword-rich-description
• Headlines
  • Wrong: Undescriptive or Overtly Clever Title
    • e.g. “Yule Procession”
    • e.g. “Record Precipitation in Valley”
  • Right: Descriptive & Catchy Title with Main Keyword
    • e.g. “Christmas Parade Features New Floats”
    • e.g. “Record Rainfall in Phoenix Breaks Dry-Spell”

The Fourth Minute: Media Mania

People love media. It’s difficult to capture an audience with a page full of boring, unformatted text. Visitors want images, videos, flash. They dig media. Search engines know this, but they’re not very good (yet) at understanding what the media is all about. This minute is quick and easy.

Early in the life of the Web we didn’t have all the fun design toys that are available today. CSS was limited and not yet popular. Javascript wasn’t widely supported. HTML5 was barely a dream. So web designers made do with what they could. This usually meant images for navigation, Flash banners, or even (ugh!) entire websites made in Flash. This is bad for search engines. They might be able to figure things out, but you’re better off not leaving it for chance.

So the check is simple. Is their entire website or a large portion Flash? Right click and see if the Flash menu comes up. Are the navigation links images? Again, right click and see if the Image menu pops up?

The Fifth Minute: Search It Up

Presumably, since you found the website, it most likely exists somewhere in the search engines. There are special cases though where the webmaster can mess something up and stop it from being accessible. To find out, visit Google and search for “site:domain.com”. This should find you nearly every page on their website that is indexed by Google.

Also, it might be useful to see how many people are linking to the website. If it’s highly popular already, the approach to SEO will be different than if it’s a new or unknown site. In the same manner, do a search for “linkdomain:domain.com” on Yahoo!. You can scroll through these search results to see what sort of websites link to them. Do they look seedy? Are they popular sites? Are they directories?

These checks might take a little bit longer at first. Once you get into a rhythm you should be able to blow through them in five minutes or less, or your money back! These 5 minute SEO Prospect checks are available in a simple checklist form on my blog, Ecunu. Doing them will give you a pretty good idea of whether or not they have had any SEO work performed on their website before. It will also present you with some speaking points when you decide to email them.