How to Perform an SEO Analysis

A website without traffic is no use at all. And because a lot of your traffic will (hopefully) be coming from organic searches, that makes search engine optimization really important. But if you’re not a SEO professional, it can be difficult to understand where you should even get started.?

Before you dive into optimizing content for feature snippets, fixing keyword cannibalization or other advanced tactics, you need to check out the fundamental SEO health of your website. And that starts with an analysis.?

?What is an SEO Analysis?

?Before we dive into the process of performing an SEO analysis, let’s first explain exactly what we mean when we use that term. An SEO analysis simply means looking at the content of your website to develop an understanding of how it’s working from a search perspective and identifying areas where it can be improved.?

Simple enough, right? Now let’s talk about how it’s done.

Analyzing Your Site for SEO

This is the point where some #seo experts would expound at length on on-page, off-page and technical SEO, diving into the process on a granular level that some people will have a hard time following.?

Though those are important parts of SEO, I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to give you a quick and easy, 6-step process you can use to gather an understanding of where your site is performing well from a search perspective, and where it could use some work.

Step 1: Check Your Current Ranking

Every SEO analysis should start with a few Google searches. First, look up your website’s name. You should rank at the top for this. Next see how many pages Google has indexed by searching by typing “site:yoursite’sname.com” into the search bar.?

This is also a good time to perform searches for your main keywords. This will tell you how your site is performing compared as well as give you insight into the competition.

Step 2: Check Your URL Structure and Meta Descriptions

Your website’s URL, or web address (e.g., Evisio.co), should indicate the content of your pages to both human visitors and search engine crawlers. Yours should be readable, sharable and most importantly, short. Identify any pages with long URLs and shorten them, if possible.?

Meta descriptions are the small blurbs of copy that appear underneath a website title in a search results page. These tell Google what your site is about, as well as entice visitors to click on the link.??

Keep yours to roughly 160 characters in length (including spaces), and make sure they contain both your keyword and a well-written description of the page’s content.?

Step 3: Study Your Traffic

At this point, you’ll want to figure out which of your pages are getting clicks and attracting visitors and which ones are falling short. Ideally, you’ll want your main product or offering page to be one of your most visited.

You can check your traffic using a number of tools, including Google Analytics. There are a number of reports you can run to determine not only how many visitors you’re getting, but also which sites are referring to them, which country they’re coming from and even the devices they’re using .

This data should help you get a good idea of what’s working on your site – and what isn’t.?

Step 4: Evaluate Inbound Links

Incoming links, also known as backlinks, are an important factor in determining where your pages will rank. To see who is directing traffic your way, use Google Search Console and navigate to “Search Traffic.” Then select “Links to Your Site.”

You’ll want to look at two main things from each one: the anchor text, and the quality of the linking page and site. Ideally you want anchor text that either uses your brand name, contains your keywords or has a clear call to action like “click here.”

From a page and site quality perspective, you’ll want to see how relevant and authoritative the referrer is. The more relevant the site and the higher its quality, the more “juice” it will pass on to your page.?

For example, if you sell moon rocks, an incoming link from NASA is a lot more valuable than a link from Joe’s Wholesale Carpet Outlet.

And links from link farms are downright harmful and should be disavowed. But that’s a more advanced topic for another day.?

For now, you should just examine who is linking to your pages and use this to develop a further understanding of what needs to be done to improve your search ranking.?

Step 5: Make Sure Your Internal Links Work

If clicking on a link within your site leads to a 404 page or is otherwise broken, it’s going to hurt your search ranking. This is because it causes a bad experience for human visitors, while not allowing search engine bots to navigate within your site.

Using your Google tools, identify and fix broken links, either by correcting the URL or by using a 301 redirect to permanently send traffic to a valid web address.??

Step 6: Take a Close Look at Your Content

Content is incredibly important to SEO. Carefully check yours for relevance and keywords, while identifying any duplicate content for removal. Make sure your pages are of high quality, accurate and error-free.

You should also optimize your images at this stage, ensuring each has relevant alt text. If your images are too large, they could negatively impact page loading speed, so consider compressing them, particularly if they are larger images.?

Don’t Have the Bandwidth? Evisio Can Help

Performing a basic SEO evaluation is not a particularly difficult task, but it can be time-consuming. And you probably already have enough on your plate.

That’s where Evisio comes in. Simply typing your website’s URL will trigger an in-depth analysis of your site. Then you’ll be presented with a list of step-by-step plain English instructions to follow to fix your outstanding issues and help ensure you’re ranking as highly as possible.?

See it for yourself. Contact me for a free trial.?

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