SEO analysis is the process of reviewing a website to identify opportunities for expansion. It involves conducting content, technical, backlink and competitor analyses.
Tools such as Found allow you to easily track Google rankings of your pages and identify any issues. Furthermore, you can get comprehensive reports regarding website health and performance.
What is SEO?
SEO is the process of getting more visibility and traffic from search engines through on page and off page seo ranking factors.
What is an SEO Analysis?
When we become interested in something, our natural tendency is to turn to search engines as our first stop and perform a quick search for it. Most often we will not go past the first page of results which match our query; therefore if your site is buried deep within SERPs then chances are it may go unseen by potential customers and clients.
Conducting an SEO analysis on your website is an excellent way to identify where improvements need to be made in terms of content, technical, backlinks and competitor analyses. There are various free and paid tools available that can assist with performing an analysis – use those which you feel most appropriate!
SEO analysis tools that are particularly effective include competitive analysis tools, keyword tools and site audit tools. These can be helpful when looking for new keyword ideas, assessing seo competition or spotting errors on a website.
An analysis of your competitors can give you valuable insight into their SEO strategies and the types of content they are publishing online, providing a starting point for creating your own content strategy and devising plans to improve your own ranking.
Keyword tools can help you select and track the ideal keywords for your own content and monitor their performance over time, while simultaneously discovering top-performing keywords among competitors and making adjustments accordingly. Furthermore, BrightEdge also offers numerous helpful SEO analysis tools including backlink checker, keyword tracker and on-page optimization tool – these all can be found within one platform!
What is an SEO Assessment?
An SEO assessment is a report about your website’s overall health, top rankings and possible improvements.
4 Steps to Perform an SEO Analysis
1. Meta Data and Information Page & Content Quality
An effective SEO analysis should include an in-depth examination of various information on your website, such as meta data and keyword usage, to give a holistic picture of its current visibility and identify any areas needing improvement.
As part of on-page SEO, it’s essential that your page titles are optimized for search engines. They should feature your main keyword near the beginning, be no more than 60 characters long and feature click-bait language that draws people in. In addition, ensure your meta descriptions contain keywords optimized specifically.
An essential aspect of on-page SEO is analyzing which keywords your site does not rank for. This provides insights into which search terms your target market is typing into Google but that are currently outranking your website. Undergoing this analysis can allow you to create new content targeted towards these search queries and ultimately increase traffic and visits.
Internet Marketing Ninjas provides several free SEO tools that you can use to compare your web pages against those of competitors and optimize them for certain keywords. Furthermore, this tool offers competitor analysis capabilities so that you can gain a better understanding of which pages your competitors rank for so that you can better understand which keywords work for them and how they optimize their pages. Lastly, Internet Marketing Ninjas’ site crawl feature detects broken links, redirects, and XML sitemaps on websites to provide valuable data insights.
2. Internal Link Structure
An internal link connects two pages on your website, enabling visitors to navigate easily while search engines discover new content. While not as powerful as backlinks, internal links do provide some ranking power by telling search engines which pages are more important.
Internal links should be carefully considered and managed, both in terms of number and placement. Aiming for maximum effectiveness by strategically placing links is best. These should be placed where they add real value for visitors; placing them within blog posts or news articles would provide better user experiences than placing them in sidebars or footers, for instance.
An intuitive website structure is also key to SEO success. A clear structure makes the site easier for search engines to index pages more quickly, cutting indexing times in half or even less. WebSite Auditor’s lower screen shows you the number of internal contextual links pointing at specific URLs – an invaluable way of checking internal link structure.
Within this same menu, you can also access a list of broken internal links. This is an effective way of quickly identifying any pages which have not been properly linked or lack an important link – enabling you to fix these errors or redirect visitors directly to their intended destination page.
Content Gap Analysis can also be an invaluable asset, showing which search queries your competitors rank for but which you do not. This provides an ideal opportunity to discover high-value keywords that you could target with additional SEO. Ahrefs or Semrush provide this functionality; for budget conscious users Mangools offers an economical alternative that also includes backlink monitoring.
3. Server Response and Configuration
Search engines use an algorithm to analyse content of each webpage to assess their relevance based on both keywords that were searched, as well as aggregated user engagement data. Some pages will rank lower due to content or technical restrictions; conducting SEO analysis allows you to identify these and determine why they’re not appearing higher on searches.
Though there are various tools to assess SEO, you should begin with the fundamentals to get an overall view of your site’s current health. Start by checking how many pages Google indexes against published pages – this can be accomplished using either Search Console or free tools like Found.
Google Index will give you an idea of which pages are not being indexed by their crawlers and help identify any issues with site structure or content. After doing this, use Ahrefs Site Audit to check your technical SEO; this will ensure nothing is blocking Google from indexing properly your website.
Once you have an understanding of your website’s SEO status, you can begin making recommendations to enhance it – ultimately leading to increased traffic for your site and business leads for you! For more information on how BrightEdge can assist in conducting an in-depth SEO analysis of your website request a demo today!
4. Backlink Analysis
Backlinks remain one of the key ranking factors when it comes to off-page SEO, making analysis of both your own and competitors’ backlink profiles essential. A backlink analysis tool will provide metrics such as total number of backlinks, new and lost links over time, referring domains, domain authority score and more – providing insights that may lead to opportunities for improvement and competitive edge.
As part of your backlink analysis, pay careful consideration to unique domains, link types and anchor text – this will help identify spammy links or even negative SEO attacks that are impacting your search visibility and rankings. Aside from finding potentially harmful backlinks, an analysis could also uncover opportunities for outreach: for instance if competitors are utilizing certain link building techniques you haven’t tried yet that might give you an opening to reach out and build relationships with those sites.
Backlink analysis can also be a great way to uncover keywords your competitors are ranking for but that you are not. This type of “content gap” analysis provides an excellent opportunity for off-page SEO by targeting these high-performing search queries with outreach efforts.
