Not all websites are created equal. Your website might look nice, but under the hood, most DJ websites are NOT coded properly for the most important viewer of all…. Google.
Since I’ve been speaking at various mobile-entertainment shows and expos since 2016 (including DJX, the longest-running such show in the industry), there’s always an important aspect I like to point out to mobile DJ companies with respect to their websites. That is, there’s a huge difference between a website designer and a website developer (here at Digitera, we’re both, by the way).
You might hire a website designer and get a fine-looking website that humans will respond to. However, unless you have a proper website developer taking a look at your site before you publish your new site (or at least before you adjust your site to be viewable by Google through the meta value doindex), the under-the-hood aspect of your website will get you penalized by Google, and result in lower rankings. And in this day and age where a Page 1 Google rank can result in tens of thousands of dollars of extra business per year, that’s no small thing. After two years of COVID, your DJ businesses cannot afford to have a piece of that extra business.
Let’s go over two aspects of how to spot these errors. First, let’s discuss some basics that you should watch out for, and then second, let’s go over a few tools to use to spot these errors.
ONSITE SEO ASPECTS TO WATCH FOR:
- Title Tag – This is a huge weight for Google when it’s doing your SERP calculation, and seems pretty obvious. You’d be surprised, though; we’ve seen more than a few DJ sites without a Title Tag defined (usually from sites done in one of the so-called builders out there).
- Meta Description – Again, an important weight in Google SERP calculations; not only must this be defined, but the length of the description has to be of a Goldilocks Effect (not too short, not too long, but just right).
- Meta Keywords – Yet again, an important weight in Google SERP calculations; most DJ website designers forget to even define this value.
- Heading Tags – Each page can only have ONE tag of the H1 variety, and no more than 3x H2 tags. Putting too many of these tags in your pages will result in big penalties, because Google thinks you’re doing Keyword Spam.
- ALT Tags – The code for every image on your website has a space to type in a short description of what the image is all about. In the DJ industry, I’ve observed empirically that approximately 90-percent of DJ websites don’t take care of defining these ALT Tags, which is a lost SEO opportunity.
- SEO-Friendly URLs – Remember, your choice of page URLs is very important to how a page ranks in Google. Get rid of your own preconceptions… put yourself into the mind of the user who’s doing the actual search. Try to focus on location combined with service name.
- Robots.txt file – Google likes it when you tell it how to crawl your site, and a well-written Robots.txt file tells it how to do exactly that.
- Load Speed – The faster, the better.
- Page Size – This is not commonly known, but Google will simply stop crawling your site if a page goes over a certain size. It’s called the “crawler budget,” and you’ll take big penalties if a page goes over this budget limit.
- Image Format – PNGs are too big, and now JPGs are also a thing of the past. The new format you should all be using is WEBP – smaller image sizes, loads faster, etc.
- SSL-Enabled – Believe it or not, we still see a lot of DJ websites that are HTTP. Your site should be HTTPS, or you’ll accrue a Google penalty.
- Sitemap.xml – Not only should this be defined, but you should also have your site connected to Google Search console, and have uploaded your sitemap.xml file to there.
There’s a lot more, but these are the basic ones. Watch for my future article where I outline the 199 Point SEO Onsite Inspection.
Now, let’s go over some tools that you can use to help you identify if your site has some of these problems, so that you can either fix them yourself or at least have enough knowledge on what to tell your current web person.
An industry standard, you can do one inspection for free per day… after that, they will try and charge you.
Free to use, forever. This tool was written by us here at Digitera, so it’s very reliable. No limits, no costs… and an active roadmap for future features to be added.
A more comprehensive set of tools, of which some are SEO-specific. We use the Backlink and the Meta tag tools here.
Again, a comprehensive robust tool, of which the Website Auditor serves to identify the above problems.
Very similar to what SE Ranking above does; check out the Site Audit Tool to source out code problems.
There are many such tools online that will help you identify problems on your own site, these are just five of the ones we use here at Digitera. Use any of these five, or search for others. The big three tools in the SEO world also do site audits – look for names such as Moz, SEMrush and Kissmetrics… but keep in mind that those are at the top of the industry and will cost you at least $200 a month just to get started.
DJs, remember this always: Your site has to not only look good to your visitors, but most importantly it has to look good for Google itself. Whoever you hire to make a new website or manage your current one should be both a designer AND a developer. Without paying attention to your under-the-hood code, you’re losing out on new opportunities.
Jordan St. Jacques is the President/Lead Digital Marketer at Digitera.Interactive in Ottawa, Ont., Canada.