Conducting an SEO analysis of your website provides you with deep insights into the areas that may need some improvement. You will also learn what changes you can make to keep your website up-to-date. It is important to perform an SEO analysis on a regular basis since the industry keeps evolving so quickly. Lastly, it will help you stay ahead of your competition. Isn’t that the name of the game at the end of the day anyway?
Now that we’ve established the value of SEO analysis, let’s look at what it is. Better yet, let’s help you master the craft. An SEO analysis involves analyzing your website using a checklist. This allows you to figure out what you need to fix. An SEO audit tells you more about the current state of your website. It also generates a list of improvements that you should take into consideration.
Let’s shift gears and explore what exactly an SEO analysis entails.
Kickoff your SEO analysis by checking your visibility on Google
This is without question the most important step to check when starting off your SEO analysis. You should check your website’s ranking and position on Google. One of my favorite tools for this task is Ubersuggest. The best part about Ubersuggest, besides the wealth of analytics it provides, is that your first project is free! You should also make it a point to see how many pages of your website show up on Google’s SERPs. The easiest way to do this is to type “site:example.com” in the search bar.
Analyze your URLs and meta descriptions
The next leg of your SEO analysis adventure involves your site’s URLs and meta descriptions. URLs and meta descriptions are two essential elements of any respectable SEO strategy. However, many often overlook their worth. Your URLs should provide a clear idea of what each page is about in no more than 4-5 words. Furthermore, you need to take the time to optimize your URLs if you haven’t already done so. This is vital because you want the search engine bots to have an easy time identifying and categorizing your website. Your meta descriptions should also have adequate keyword usage and should be attractive to search engine bots. A well-written meta description can help drive users to your website.
Do your due diligence and analyze your titles and headings
Every title and heading on your website should contain relevant keywords for which you want to rank. If the keywords in your headers and titles are high ranking, you should consider developing a new SEO campaign. There is typically a lot of competition for high volume keywords, which makes it difficult to rank. You should also strive to produce attractive and enticing titles so that users simply cannot resist clicking through. When conducting your SEO analysis look for less than stellar titles and headings and spruce them up a little!
Check your website rankings
This should be a no brainer, but you need to check your website’s global and national rankings. This is especially true in terms of keeping tabs on the number of inbound visitors. This is a great way to measure your website’s position with respect to competitors and all other websites. You can also gain insights into the bounce rate and average time spent by visitors on your site.
Any effective SEO analysis will analyze incoming links
You should make it a point to check the inbound links at some point during your SEO analysis. This will provide an idea of how much work you have ahead of you in order to improve your rankings. You can check the inbound links by using the “link:command example.com” on Google. Similarly, on Yahoo, you can use “linkdomain:example.com” to see all of your links.
Check your spam score
Your spam score plays a big role in terms of your website’s rankings and domain authority. Your score will suffer if your website has a lot of garbage inbound links from low authority websites. You can find your spam score and then eliminate all of the less than stellar links as you see fit. This is an important step since low-quality links can damage your site’s authority.
Check for broken links whenever you conduct an SEO analysis
Broken links lead to an awful user experience for anyone who ventures onto your site. They can also prove to be damaging to your site’s SEO, so you should fix your broken links ASAP. You can use Google webmaster tools to seek and destroy your broken links by creating 301 redirects to other valid URLs. When all is said and done, repairing your broken links creates a much friendlier user experience.
Audit and optimize your images
Images are great because they make your site more attractive and easier to digest. However, images are data-heavy and can work against your SEO efforts if you do not optimize them properly. It is vital that you assign appropriate titles and ALT tags to your images since search engine crawlers cannot crawl images. Image titles need to describe the image and ALT tags should include keywords. Lastly, it is critical that you compress all images. Compressing images entails reducing their size with the aim of improving your site’s loading speed. I’m personally a fan of WPMUdev’s Smush Pro and the entire WPMUdev lineup.
Check your internal links during every SEO analysis
Internal linking within your website is an awesome practice since it can help boost your search engine rankings. Furthermore, it improves user experience and helps users find related pages on your site. You can create internal links by using relevant keywords as anchor text and then linking to the desired page.
Analyze your content
Content is one of the most important elements you need to review when analyzing your website’s SEO. Check out this post on what makes for a great blog post if you need a quick refresher. One of the biggest content downfalls is duplicate content. If you come across any, de-index or remove it ASAP.
Speed kills
Analyzing the loading speed of your website is an essential factor that you simply must take into account. A light webpage that loads quickly makes for a great user experience. Dense and heavy webpages, on the other hand, are unflattering and will likely make your bounce rate skyrocket. Page load time not only impacts user experience, but it is also a major factor that influences your site’s SEO ranking. You can test your page speed from the PageSpeed Insights tool by Google.
