SEO Audit Checklist

When evaluating a business's current SEO performance, we suggest conducting an SEO Audit to determine to what extent the webpage is following SEO best practices from a structural, design/content, and technical perspective.

Note: Pages built by Yext's Services team will incorporate each of the items on this checklist automatically as part of the Pages build process.

Structure

• Consistent Citations and Backlinks
• Configurable URL Scheme
• Directory Pages
• Breadcrumb Links
• H1 Tag
• Title Tag
• Canonical tag
• Meta Description
• Structured Data (Schema.org)
• XML Sitemap

Design and Content

• Prioritize Above the Fold Content
• Responsive Design Framework
• WCAG 2.1 Level AA
• Alt Image Tags
• Favicon

Technical

• HTTPS
• Content Delivery Network
• Automatic 301 Redirects
• HREFLANG Tagging (Multi-language support)
• Robots.txt
• Page Speed Optimization
  • Image Compression
  • Minify Resources
  • Remove Render Blocking JS
  • Optimize CSS Delivery
  • Minimize HTTP Requests

Key Elements of SEO

In the checklist above, many factors are listed. Below are some of the most important elements, including some that Google has explicitly highlighted the importance of over the years.

Citations and Backlinks

Search engines take cues from other sites that reference your URLs, as well as the consistency of the information you're providing across the web to verify the validity and authority of your website.

Consistency in Citations

Making sure that your critical content (Name, Address, and Phone Number) is consistent across credible listings publishers (Google, Facebook, Apple, etc.) helps influence your rank and domain authority. Search engines need to be sure that what they find is correct — or they risk returning the wrong information. Yext's Listings product focuses on this primarily, ensuring that content in the platform is accurately syndicated across the Yext Knowledge Network.

Backlinks

The more credible sites that link out to your URLs, the more search engines will trust your content. A critical part of your Listings strategy should be to syndicate your Yext Pages URLs across your citations as well, thereby increasing the number of backlinks to your hosted site.

On-Page SEO (Meta Information)

The content of your site and the way that content is provided is a key component to search. Meta information is content marked up in your site's HTML, used by search engines to understand the content and main intent of your pages. This not only helps search engines determine the relevance of your content, but also influences the titles and descriptions that appear on SERP.

Meta Title — Should succinctly summarize the content of the page, including location-specific content where relevant (e.g., the address of the location). Keep it around 50–60 characters. This title appears in your user's browser tab, and may appear as the title of the content in SERP.

Meta Description — Adds additional context about the content of the page. Keep it between 50–120 characters. This is an opportunity to insert keywords that you'd like your pages to rank for. These descriptions often appear as the description for the link on SERP.

Structured Data (Schema.org)

Structured data is a way to markup and define content on your page that allows search engines to easily understand the information you're providing, and then surface that to users. Schema.org provides a catalog of these attributes you can add to your pages.

To test structured data on your pages, use Google's Rich Results Test and enter your URL.

In the example above, the location is identified with a schema type of LocalBusiness, and additional attributes like address, telephone number, and opening hours are marked up — just a sampling of the attributes Yext tags for webpages.

Page Design

Search engines and users alike will prioritize content that is immediately visible on landing — referred to as above the fold content. It's critical that you place important information about the entity, as well as prominent calls-to-action, above the fold. This not only helps the user get the information they need faster, but drives clicks on your key calls to action. Consider the mobile experience as well, as many users will be visiting your site from their phones.

Robots.txt and Sitemaps

Every site should have a robots.txt file (e.g., https://brand.com/robots.txt). This file tells site crawlers what content they can (and can't) explicitly crawl, as well as provides the sitemap to crawlers.

You can use it to block certain bots from your site (reducing server strain) and make sure in-journey or login site sections don't appear in search results.

User-agent: *
Sitemap: https://domain.com/sitemap.xml

User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder
Sitemap: https://domain.com/sitemap.xml

Sitemap files list out every URL on a domain, providing an easy way for crawlers to understand all the URLs of a site, as well as when new URLs are added or old URLs are deprecated (or 404). Yext's sitemaps dynamically update to reflect only pages that are currently live.

Disallow statements indicate that the content within a folder should not be crawled and indexed — useful for any pages you do not want to surface in SERP.

Page Speed

Page speed has been cited by Google as being important in their ranking algorithms. Slow page load speeds can increase user bounce rate, and search engines care about providing a great experience to users — if they return answers on slow sites, that reflects badly on everyone involved.

You can use the Google PageSpeed Insights Tool to test the speed of your web pages on both mobile and desktop.

Yext Pages are designed to provide customers with effective landing pages that perform out of the box.

Common culprits that decrease page speed:

• Large images
• Excessive scripts (analytics)
• Dynamically loaded widgets (e.g., social media widgets)

Page URLs: Subdomains vs. Subdirectories

A subdomain is a domain that is part of the larger domain. For example: locations.yext.com or news.google.com.

A subdirectory is any folder that exists beneath a domain. For example: google.com/maps or apple.com/iphone.

Most studies and SEO specialists agree that subdomain vs. subdirectory has no meaningful impact on SEO. At Yext, a subdomain approach to services pages is recommended for these reasons:

1. Performance, Scalability, and Reliability — Yext-hosted Pages are served from a global Content Delivery Network (CDN), with the most recent and up-to-date version of every local page accessible from multiple points of presence across the globe. CDNs are part of a distributed network with no single point of failure.
2. Convenience — Setting up a subdomain for Yext Pages requires little more than a few minutes of work. Setting up a reverse proxy to serve pages from a subdirectory can be a more complicated process requiring significant work from IT.
3. More Opportunities to Rank in SERP — Google's index and algorithms understand the relationship between a root domain and a subdomain. Though URLs on a domain and URLs on a subdomain are indexed separately, they often appear interwoven together within SERP Rich Results. Google understands that subdomains are part of the "primary" domain and that URLs on either are effectively part of the same website.

Content Strategy and Design

Building Content for Search

One of the most important components to effectively optimizing your SEO is the actual content that you build. It is critical to expand what search engines know about you so that they are confident in how to interpret that information, and when to surface it.

For example, a traditional SEO expert might object to having a vegan menu page for every location because it's "duplicate content" — except, in the context of a user looking for a vegan menu in that specific location, it's exactly the right answer to their question in that moment of space and time. The Yext Knowledge Graph, Search, and Pages products are all built to enable this content expansion to answer the specific questions consumers are asking.

Content and Structuring Best Practices

Place important information about the entity and prominent calls-to-action above the fold. On the page below, you can see that the address, contact information, hours of operation, and important CTAs (Log in, Choose a Specialist, Get Directions) are immediately visible on landing.

Other popular CTAs vary by industry but can include: Order Pickup, Book an Appointment, Click to Call, Order Delivery, Sign Up Now, and more.

Content Recommendations by Industry

Food

• Restaurant Information: Display address, phone, and hours prominently. You can display multiple hours for your store and drive-thru hours.
• Call-to-Actions: View Menu, Order Online, Make a Reservation, See Limited Time Offers.
• Menu Offering: Feature menu items or specials with images displayed in rich cards.
• Coupons or Promotions: Add a CTA or image gallery to display coupons.
• Nearby Locations: Add information from other location entities to list details and contact information for your other locations.

Healthcare

• Facility Information: Display address, phone, and hours prominently. You can display multiple sets of hours (walk-in vs. appointment hours, regular vs. emergency hours).
• Staff Information: Patients want to know the doctors or medical staff — include bio, headshot, education, certifications, and specialties.
• Call-to-Action: Book an appointment, get directions, etc.
• Services, conditions treated, and insurance accepted: Critical information for patients looking for a physician who accepts their insurance. Add bulleted lists or images for your various departments.

Financial Services

• Brand Information: Display address, phone, and hours prominently. You can display multiple hours for ATM and branch hours.
• Service Offering: Services offered, languages spoken, branch details, etc.
• Call-to-Action: Book an appointment, get directions, check your credit score, apply for a loan, make a payment.
• Staff Information: Include picture, areas of expertise, and relevant contact information for staff members.
• Nearby Locations or ATMs: Add information from other location entities to list details and contact information for your other branches and ATMs.

Overview of Schema

Schema.org and Structured Data

Schema.org is a joint effort (through collaboration of the search engines) to improve the web by creating a structured data markup schema. Many search engines use Schema.org as a framework for what Structured Data to index into their algorithms — though not necessarily everything defined in Schema.org. For example, Google explicitly tells developers which types they are looking for, including:

• Local Business
• FAQ
• Job Postings
• Products
• Events
• How-tos

For each Type, Google outlines the required and recommended Schema.org Properties.

Marking your pages with schema does not guarantee that Google will feature your content or boost you to the top of the SERP, but it gives you your best shot.

Schema Types and Properties

Schema.org uses multiple inheritance for its typing, meaning a given Type can be a child of one or more Types and inherits all of its parent Type's properties, plus adds its own.

For example, Event extends the Type Thing. Therefore, all of Thing's Properties are also Properties of Event. Event also defines additional properties specific to its Type, like startDate and endDate.

Google has three required Properties and additional recommended Properties for Event:

You only need to include Schema.org markup for the properties that matter to search engines. Include the ones required by Google — but not necessarily all the ones specified by Schema.org.

Over time, Schema.org best practices will evolve. It is critical to stay up to date on schema updates, and/or work with a partner who will do this on your behalf.

Schema on Yext Pages

Schema and Google structured data changes all the time. Yext Pages technology makes sure that you have Schema.org markup on your pages whenever possible.

• If your pages were created via Custom Development, reach out to your Account team or Engagement Manager for help on how to update your schema.
• If your pages were created via Page Builder, you can view and manage the Schema.org markup for each Page Builder Template directly from the platform.

For more information, see Google's guide on enabling rich results with structured data and their general structured data guidelines.