SEO Analysis
What Is an SEO Analysis?
An SEO analysis sheds light on all the opportunities on your site that you can address to improve your ranking potential in search engine results pages (SERPs). It involves auditing your site and identifying where you can optimize for search engine bots.
With an SEO analysis, you can find what aspects of your SEO strategy are working and what your biggest obstacles are that are preventing you from improving your site ranking.
Without a thorough SEO analysis of your site, it’s pretty much impossible to make informed decisions for improving your site’s ranking in SERPs.
Why Is SEO Analysis Important?
The insights you gain from an SEO analysis give you direction on where you can improve your site’s content and technical aspects to deliver a better experience for visitors and to show search engines context and relationships between your content and the search query visitors are using.
To put it simply, an SEO analysis is a must for you to rank higher, expand your reach, drive traffic, and hit your business objectives.
With an analysis, you’re not taking shots in the dark; you’re making strategic decisions, which reduces time and resources spent.
With an SEO analysis, you can find what aspects of your SEO strategy are working and what your biggest obstacles are that are preventing you from improving your site ranking.
How to Perform an SEO Analysis of Your Site in 10 Quick Steps
Here are 10 key steps you should take when performing an SEO analysis.
1. Check Your Visibility on Google.
How does your website rank on Google? What’s is average position in the SERP?
When beginning your SEO analysis, it’s important to start at a bird’s eye view. Identify how many of your website pages are ranked in the search engine, and get a better understanding of your overall website visibility on Google.
2. Check URLs and Meta Descriptions.
URLs should be shortened down to about four to five words that describe the content that’s on the page. For example, our article “How to Use Google Site Search to Crawl Your Entire Website” has a simple URL of “how-to-use-google-site-search.”
If your URLs are long or irrelevant, you can choose to optimize and edit them so search engine bots better understand what’s on the page. But, be warned, this can affect the link juice of the old URL.
You can edit meta descriptions as much as you want, however. Your meta descriptions should include primary and secondary keywords and properly sum up what your page is about.
3. Analyze Titles and Headings.
Titles should be attention-grabbing and encourage users to click on them. In both your titles and headings, ensure that you are using the proper keywords for your page.
Keep in mind that high search volume keywords can be difficult to rank for, so try to find a long-tail keyword that is a little less competitive and will improve your chances of showing up on the first page of a SERP.
4. Evaluate Incoming Links.
Inbound links, also referred to as incoming links or backlinks, are links to your site that are hyperlinked on another site. Backlinks can act as indicators to search engines that your website is a trustworthy source, so they can really impact your SEO ranking for the better.
Analyze the incoming links to your site to help you see who is linking to your business and give you a better understanding of what you need to do to improve your search rankings.
5. Analyze Your Spam Score.
Your spam score can increase if you have a lot of incoming link from low-authority websites. Therefore, as you’re analyzing your inbound links, try to eliminate any “bad” inbound links.
To remove bad backlinks, you can try to contact the webmaster and ask them to remove the link from their page, or you can surpass that step to disavow the link.
6. Check Your Internal Links.
Internal linking is a practice that involves adding links to other pages on your website to help visitors navigate to different pages.
Internal linking is actually a great SEO tactic to help improve your rankings in the search engines. Plus it can improve the user experience.
Go back into newer and older website pages and add internal links to other relevant pages on your site. Keep in mind keywords and anchor text best practices.
7. Investigate For Broken Links.
Broken links affect user experience and can negatively impact SEO, so be on the lookout for any broken links on your site.
To fix broken links, you can correct them by ensuring proper spelling, or you can complete a 301 redirect to a different yet relevant URL.
8. Analyze Your Website Content.
Content plays a huge role in the SEO of your website. Check for any duplicate content, which is an SEO red flag, and de-index or remove it if necessary.
Also, ensure that your content is high quality and error-free. Start with your most popular pages, then work your way down to smaller posts and pages.
9. Audit Your Images.
Because search engine bots can’t crawl your images, it’s important that you optimize your images with proper alt text to describe the appearance and function of that image.
Another image optimization tip to follow is to compress your images to reduce their size, which can help improve page load speed. One tool we use at Bluleadz is ImageOptim.
Speaking of loading speed…
10. Check Your Page Speed.
Your page speed actually can influence your website’s SEO and overall user experience, so you should be keen on consistently analyzing your load speed to ensure your website is running quickly and efficiently.
For a quick page load speed test, you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.