Small businesses looking to launch a website need to consider the benefits of an SEO site audit in Ottawa before they hit the launch button. There are a few boxes that need to be checked before any new website goes live.

Here’s a few of the must haves all entrepreneurs should consider.

Tracking and Services Features 

A site audit is looking for these critical components:

• Web and Social Profiles. Setting up these before you launch any new website is important. The reason is simple. You don’t want anyone to take the name of your Instagram profile or Facebook page. The same goes for your company YouTube platform. Some business owners argue they aren’t using these social media podiums right away. However, it’s best to set them up and prevent someone from taking them. It’s the efficient way to secure your brand.
• These are an important part of any SEO site audit in Ottawa. It’s important to ensure that whatever analytics platform you use is loaded on each and every one of your pages. The most popular by far is Google Analytics.

Those are just a few of the factors that will need to be checked to start. If you’re working in e-commerce, having an SSL certificate installed makes transactions smooth. These are important for making sure that any data that passes between a browser and a Web server remains private. It’s a critical function if you’re handling customer data for privacy .

Best Kind of Certificate

Small businesses need to determine which kind of certificate works best for them. For example, if the content you’re hosting is on separate domains or subdomains you might need various SSL certificates.

However, it’s good to know that most e-commerce sites can get away with the standard version.

While there are quite a few different boxes to check, some items are extremely critical when it comes to a functional website.

It stands to reason that accessibility should be at or near the top of a site audit list. One of the things it needs to be looked at are robot.text files. It’s important to make sure that these files aren’t accidentally blocking crawlers from accessing the website.

Another important element of any SEO site audit in Ottawa are the robots meta tags. These are important to let search engines index pages and follow links.