What Is A Website Teardown?

A website teardown is a digital marketing term that defines the process of analyzing a website, pointing out its faults, and improving it to be more competitive in its designated niche.

What Is the Teardown Experiment?

Teardown Experiment is an exercise in website teardowns for small businesses’ websites in different industries. I created this Teardown Experiment to help small business owners understand SEO for their local business. I selected three real websites at random using Google’s Search Engine Results Page that could use some improvements to help them compete. I’m not associated with any of the websites we select.

I will try to feature different locations and industries.

Since I’m targeting small businesses, these campaigns will focus on Local SEO.

(Local SEO is a battle between On and Off Page SEO.)

I used a stripped-down version of the process we developed at Notimpo and selected the most basic elements to optimize these websites.

Why Is The Teardown Experiment Important To Business Owners?

The number one position in Google gathers 32% of the market share when people search. My focus is constructive feedback and key takeaways that can be implemented on a website.

HomeAdvisor’s average roof installation cost for 2017 is pegged at $7,057, while some of the larger projects can cost as much as $30,000. For the sake of simplicity, let’s just peg this amount at $7,000.

The search term roof repair kansas city has about 880 searches a month in Kansas, according to SEMrush. This is a buying keyword, which means that the intention to purchase services is there. If your website were in position 1, you would get about 32% of this. That would be 281.6 qualified leads per month. Let’s assume that only 2% of these leads will convert into sales. That’s 5.6 inquiries. Let’s round this down to 5.

This will translate to $35,000 of sales per month.

If you’re a business owner, this is what matters. Of course, this is potential gross profit. You still have to calculate for potential net profit.

For consultants, this is what you have to tell your prospect client.

What Niche?

It was a raining when I conceptualized this series, and I thought about what industries thrive when the weather is horrible. I was thinking that the roofing industry must make a lot of sales before the rainy season, and once I decided on the niche, I decided to research where this industry is most relevant.

I chose Kansas.

Here’s the data that convinced me.

(…but in truth, I was just thinking of the Wizard of Oz.)

Kansas was hit by five of the worst storms according to an article by Kansas.com. Kansas experiences hail, rainstorms, floods, and tornadoes. This creates opportunities for the roofing industry all year round.

As I write this, Kansas has already experienced more than 12.73 inches of rain, which is more than double the amount of 6.23 inches it experienced this time last year.

Meet This Week’s Guests:

I selected three random websites from the key term search of roof repair kansas city. I then scrolled down to the 10th page of the Google SERP for these terms and chose these websites at random.

The websites I chose were:

First Impressions and Mobile

Eaton Roofing

First impressions: The website looks nice. Responsive, mobile ready, WordPress-powered, clean design, nice images, and it’s also got the accreditations displayed. If online marketing was more like traditional businesses, where you can sometimes say…”If you build it, they will come,” this website should do well. But it isn’t ranking. They rank nowhere near the top page of searches for their niche. Position 100+. (Actually, when I started researching them, they were on page 10 of the SERP, but now they seem to have dropped even further.)

KC Roofcare

First Impressions: If the company’s website is KC Roofcare, why does it say Elite Roof Systems? It’s responsive but has some loading errors. They have accreditations displayed and customer reviews, but these could have been leveraged more efficiently. This site promotes the web developer/SEO provider. Could use a site update. As of this writing, it is currently on page 9 of Google’s SERP.

Update: The contact plugin doesn’t work. It keeps rejecting my email tests. and upon further review, I answered the question I had earlier why it’s named something else. It’s a duplicate site of http://www.eliteroofsystems.com/. Could be a strategy of theirs to rank multiple websites in the same space. I see that only the homepage is ranking, which means that they must have de-indexed all the other pages. If this strategy worked out for them in the past, good for them. It’s clearly not doing them any favors now.

Priority Roof

First Impressions: Responsive, but has loading errors. Looks nice. Very clean design. Accreditations, and invites you to check their reviews. 7th page of Google’s SERP. It has the best rankings of the three websites I selected.

Freshness

All the websites seem to be lacking fresh content. Eaton Roofing and KC Roofcare don’t have blogs, and Priority Roofing’s blog only has 3 posts, with the latest post being made in April 2014.

Freshness is something that search engines and people consider when evaluating a website. Because if a website doesn’t publish anything new, what’s the point of going back to it? It’s basically an online calling card. People who create a website merely for the sake of having one aren’t taking advantage of the opportunity to bring in more business.

Onpage Metrics

*SEO Metric*	www.kcroofcare.com	priorityroof.net	eatonroofing.com
*Meta Title*	Commercial Roofing Company Kansas City, Topeka, St Joseph – Elite Roof Systems	Priority Roofing \| Kansas City Roofing Company	Eaton Roofing & Exteriors Eaton Roofing & Exteriors – Wichita Roofing & Remodeling
*Meta Description*	If you need a commercial roofing company in Kansas City, Topeka, St Joseph or nearby areas, call us! Commercial roof repair and roof coatings. Free quotes!	Reliable, on-time, quality roofing services for the Kansas City metro area. Learn how we can help you file an insurance claim to repair your damaged roof.	Eaton Roofing & Exteriors is here for the life of your home. Serving familes and companies in Wichita, Salina, Topeka, Lawrence and the state of Kansas.
*Canonical*	Yes	Yes	Yes
*ALT text*	Not Found	Yes	Not Found
H1	Yes	Multiple	Not Found
*Robots.txt*	Yes	Yes	Yes
*XML sitemap*	Yes	Yes	Yes
*Google Analytics*	Yes	Yes	Yes
*AMP*	Not Found	Not Found	Not Found
*SCHEMA*	Yes	Yes	Yes

Google loves structured data and provides Webmaster Guidelines to help websites gain positions for the most relevant terms.

Meta Title – Allows webmasters to place their keyword/s for their target industry. That being said, you must avoid keyword stuffing at all times.
Meta Description – These are click-through factors that help influence would-be-visitors to click on your website by providing information about a page.
Canonical – Link attributes that inform Google which version of the page to serve. This allows opportunities for redirects and also gives you the chance to avoid duplicate content.
ALT text – Google cannot read images but has the ability to read image properties such as titles and alt text. This creates an opportunity to place keyword variations to influence Latent Semantic Indexing which drives more relevance for a certain topic or niche.
H1s – These are tags used to define Headers for HTML files. Most web designers utilize headers for font styling. H1s are important since the Google bots read code top to bottom, left to right, and the H1 tag is positioned in the top left part of your code. This tells Google bots what the general topic of the page is about.
Robots.txt – This file gives directives to web crawlers telling them which pages to crawl or avoid. This file also gives you the opportunity to include your Sitemap URL if you used a different naming convention for the URL.
XML sitemap – A sitemap is a form of structured data. Google loves structured data and by providing an HTML sitemap for users and XML Sitemaps for Web crawlers. Sitemaps give you the chance to include the most important pages of your website. Each website is given a crawl budget and the limit of your XML sitemap is 50,000 pages so use it wisely. (For large sites.)
Google Analytics – Installing Google Analytics on your website allows you the ability to track and analyze customer behavior. This tool will show your traffic and help you solve conversion issues. Google Analytics allows you to create funnels, goals, and conversion reports.
AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages are pages meant for mobile search. This format allows you to serve content fast by delivering just the content instead of loading the entire webpage. This is an open standard for any publisher. You may access AMP via Google Search Console.
SCHEMA – SCHEMA.org was a collaboration between Google, Bing, and Yahoo. They created a standard that each search engine can read. SCHEMA is a form of structured data primarily used to notate objects on your website. This lets Search Engines read and understand each element found on your Web Page.

You know that saying, “Knowing is half the battle?” Well, a competition analysis is something like the chart above but you’re analyzing your website and the top websites in your niche. You can evaluate what your competition is doing, and what works for them and what doesn’t. You can see opportunities for your site and do what the top competitors are doing. You can also see what they aren’t doing correctly and start implementing things they aren’t doing yet.

TL;DR

If the notes I shared here on this edition of Teardown Thursdays were applied to these Kansas roofing companies’ websites, they could climb the SERPs efficiently. It would probably propel them straight to the second or third page of the SERP for their keywords. Getting to the first page, and first in the searches is a different matter.
Dominating this niche is worth about $35,000 a month.
Blog posts are important to a website. The lack of fresh content tells people and the search engines not to bother checking back with your site.
All you have to dominate a niche is find out what your competition is doing and do it 10 times better than them.

This is a Teardown Experiment. This covers the basic SEO to get a website in shape to start competing for key terms properly. I plan to cover more advanced website situations (and even problems) that we face in our day-to-day lives as search consultants.