Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is essential for any website. Proper utilisation of SEO practices is how a site becomes visible for search engines, boosts its rankings, and becomes available to audiences online.
Despite the usefulness of SEO practices, learning the best ways to apply them to your company website is not always apparent. Before you can improve your website, you first need to know how the site currently performs. You can create an effective SEO strategy by performing an SEO analysis. By the way, if you are feeling lost already,
Going into SEO blindly without the best tools and tactics at your disposal will negatively impact your business site’s search engine rankings and performance. Below, we have a guide about SEO analysis to help you enhance your business’s online visibility.
What Is SEO Analysis?
SEO analysis is a type of audit or status report. It’s a way to help you know the effectiveness of your SEO strategy at any time.
The audit will tackle several essential data points for thriving websites, such as domain authority, organic traffic, and page load speed. It also examines the efficiency of your content strategy, keyword usage, and competitor rankings.
With an SEO analysis, you’ll have the information necessary to boost your on-page and off-page SEO factors, including technical errors that hinder site performance. It will identify opportunities to optimise the site to become more attractive to search engines like Google. By uncovering your biggest SEO obstacles and successes, you’ll know how to improve your online ranking.
Why Is SEO Analysis Necessary?
Some businesses don’t understand the importance of performing a routine SEO analysis. As a result, their sites don’t have high rankings, meaning they don’t show up at the top of SERPs (search engine results pages) and aren’t as visible to people online as top-ranking websites.
However, an analysis provides detailed insights into the technical and content-related aspects of a website. You can use the information about the errors and take advantage of improvement opportunities to make the site more pleasing for search query visitors to explore and more accessible for search engine bots to crawl through and rank.
Implementing changes stemming from SEO audit insights will drive organic traffic, boost your search engine ranking, and broaden your company’s audience reach. SEO analysis is vital to developing a valid SEO strategy and making informed decisions about your site’s performance. Without the information provided by the report, improving your online ranking is impossible.
What Are the Benefits of SEO Analysis?
Performing an SEO analysis comes with several benefits, including the following:
- Improvement to the Site’s Overall Performance: A solid website with optimal performance levels is highly favourable to Google. The more the search engine likes your website, the higher your site ranking will be on Google.
- A Stop to Archaic SEO Practices: Optimising your company site once is only a temporary measure because SEO practices continuously evolve. Old or irrelevant links will damage your rankings, so regular audits are necessary to expose outdated practices.
- Details About Keyword Rankings: Keyword research is essential because you want to include valid query terms within your site so that it shows up on SERPs. An SEO analysis shows you the keywords your site ranks for so you can optimise content more efficiently.
Factors to Consider for an SEO Analysis
There are several factors to consider when analysing your website’s performance, such as:
- Website Traffic: Traffic analysis should include checks on referral, organic, email marketing, paid search, social media marketing, direct traffic, and other channels that attract visitors.
- Content Strategy: Content should positively influence rankings by addressing your target audience’s pain points through each stage of the buying process. Your content should position your site as an authority in your field.
- Keywords: Keywords will help drive your content. An SEO analysis will show you everything from the terms you currently rank for to the phrases that underperform.
- Competitor Rankings: Competitor rankings provide a blueprint for where your site needs to be in terms of rank. It also gives you an idea of effective keyword and content strategies and weaknesses within your industry.
- On-Page SEO: On-page SEO is the practice of optimising web pages to generate relevant traffic from search engines. Keyword strategies, internal links, logical content organisation, and correct H1 and H2 header usage improve on-page SEO.
- Off-Page SEO: Off-page SEO refers to anything outside the website that affects its ranking, such as external links, backlinks, and spam scores.
- Technical Errors: Technical issues like 404 errors, duplicate content, and broken links are red flags to Google and other search engines, so their bots won’t rank you highly. Top-ranking websites are usually free of errors and technically sound.
How to Perform an SEO Analysis
Below is a brief explanation of key steps to perform during an SEO audit.
1. Check Your Search Engine Visibility
Because Google is the leading search engine globally, you need to know how your company’s site ranks on it. Begin your analysis by evaluating all of your web pages and understanding where they rank on Google.
2. Evaluate Your Site’s URLs and Meta Descriptions
Google prefers URLs that are about four or five words and effectively describe the content on the web page. Unnecessarily long URLs or URLs containing irrelevant words make it harder for search engine bots to understand the page’s content. See our meta length checker tool for more info.
Meta descriptions are HTML tags that further describe the web page content. It’s the information that appears beneath the title of the page on SERPs. Optimise meta descriptions by including a concise summary with primary and secondary keywords.
3. Review Titles and Subheadings
Headings also affect Google rankings and visibility. Every page should have an attention-grabbing title that isn’t clickbait. You want to entice query visitors to click on your page, but you do not want headings to be overly complex or irrelevant to the content.
It also helps to ensure that your titles and headings make good use of the right SEO keywords for the web page.
4. Review Incoming Links
Incoming links or backlinks are links to your business website that a different site hyperlinks. The inclusion of backlinks makes the search engine bots view web pages as trustworthy and credible. They are necessary aspects of the web page content that impact rankings.
Evaluate your business site’s incoming links to learn who connects their sites to your business. Reviewing backlinks also helps you understand which steps to take to improve your Google rankings.
5. Check Your Spam Score
A spam score is a figure that determines the percentage of websites containing similar features that Google bans or penalises. Your site can achieve a high score if it has a lot of backlinks from sites without much credibility or authority.
You might discover your site has a high spam score during an SEO analysis. You can take several steps to remove the bad link, such as requesting a link removal from the offending website or using a link disavow tool.
6. Examine Your Website’s, Internal Links
An internal link is a hyperlink you include within your content to help visitors navigate pages on your website. Internal links are as important as backlinks for improving Google rankings. These will enhance the user experience and also trigger search engine bots to raise page rankings.
7. Analyse Site for Broken Links
Sometimes links can break, which hurts SEO. Scroll through your links and ensure that they are correct and fully functioning. To address broken links, you can either submit a 301 redirect to another URL that corresponds to the content or correct the link spelling, if necessary.
8. Audit Website’s Content and Images
Content is king for search engine optimisation. However, duplicate content is no good. Google prefers original content, so remove or de-index replicated materials.
You also want the content to be relevant, high in quality, and free of errors. Be sure to check all of your content, starting with the most popular pages and working your way down to the least popular options.
Images are a form of content, so they also need optimisation. Unfortunately, search engine bots cannot crawl images, so you should include an appropriate alt text to describe the image and its function.
9. Examine Page Loading Speed
Loading speed affects the user experience. Your SEO analysis should always include a page speed check. Faster speeds are ideal for visitors navigating the page, which influences Google rankings.
Best Free SEO Tools
Here are the top five SEO tools with free options.
Moz
Many people regard Moz as the best free SEO analysis tool, thanks to its 30-day free trial. After the free period, the monthly plan prices start at $99, but the tools the service provides are worth the investment.
Moz is excellent for anyone looking for ways to improve their search engine rankings. The service includes tools to measure, monitor, and grow your website’s keyword performance in one location. The tool lets you boost on-page optimisation, discover high-performance keywords for your industry, and crawl the site to generate a comprehensive SEO report.
Majestic
Majestic is a paid SEO tool with several exceptional free options to help users measure their site’s search volume. Its reputation stems from its ability to produce reports on backlinks, which heavily influence page rankings with search engines.
Majestic’s tools include a backlink history checker and a clique hunter, which finds domains with links to at least one competitor. Majestic also has a search explorer tool that examines page titles containing a specific keyword. Using this SEO tool will improve your backlinks, so search engines like Google will boost your ranking, making Majestic the best tool for free SEO ranking.
Google Search Console
This SEO analysis tool is one of the best options to use and is entirely free. The service focuses on Google’s analytics because it is the most used search engine.
With Google Search Console, you’ll see your website through the same analytics Google uses. Use it to monitor the site’s performance and uncover errors that could negatively impact user-friendliness and online rankings. Google Search Console also inspects URLs and links within your domain to ensure that they are crawlable, user-friendly, mobile-friendly, and more.
Found’s SEO Audit Tool
Another totally free SEO tool to consider for your company’s site comes from Found. To use Found’s SEO audit tool, type your domain name into the site and watch it uncover everything you need to know about your website’s performance. It will break down the website to show you everything from performance errors to technical successes.
Some of the features of Found’s SEO audit tool include keyword analysis to evaluate your site’s 10 leading keywords and canonicalisation to ensure that your URLs are working correctly. You can also use the Moz analysis tool to identify your domain and page authority with search engines.
HubSpot’s Website Grader
If you want to see your company site’s strength, consider using the website grader from HubSpot. Though it isn’t the most comprehensive SEO tool for analysing your site, the service is free and provides a lot of valuable information. For instance, after you enter your website and email into the tool to receive your scores, you’ll receive reference articles to answer any questions you may have.
HubSpot’s website grader breaks sites down into several sections, including performance, mobile, SEO, and security. The first three options have scores ranging from 0-30 while the latter range from 0-10. Use the scores from the grader to determine how strong or weak your website is in each category.
Improve Your Website’s SEO Ranking with Perth Digital Edge
Perth Digital Edge is a leading digital marketing agency in West Australia. Our expert marketing team provides clients with innovative marketing solutions, including ethical white-hat search engine optimisation in Perth. Whether you operate a small business or a major corporate brand, our lead generations, SEO practices, and digital marketing tools will help your business grow online.
At Perth Digital Edge, we specialise in comprehensive approaches to SEO and we understand how to conduct a thorough SEO analysis to enhance your website. If you’re ready to learn more, contact our team and let us help you find your digital edge today.
