Almost everyone these days knows the word SEO or heard about Search Engine Optimization, even if they know little about what it really is. The purpose of SEO is to make your site more visible in the search engines, making it show up on the first couple of pages when someone searches for a particular keyword. Search engines analyze text on websites and look for what the internet user searched for; when the keyword is found, the site is returned by the search engine, so the user can check it out and get the information they need.
SEO is also about improving the site’s rank and raising awareness of the brand and before one can start improving a site’s SEO, they need to conduct a deep SEO analysis. A professional expert is going to conduct a free SEO Audit before even quote a price for the optimization project.
A complete SEO Website Audit report is needed to evaluate the site because each website is different and you can’t know just by looking at it. This is only one of the reasons why it’s important to conduct the analysis.
What is an SEO Analysis?
There are two main reasons to conduct an SEO Analysis: before you conduct a SEO campaign and after it. First, before you establish a SEO strategy you need to know which areas of your site need improvement and how they can be improved. After you’ve implemented a specific strategy, you want to know how it performs. This is the best moment to conduct another SEO analysis report, which can be compared with the old one to check if the SEO strategy paid off.
You want to keep track of both content SEO and technical SEO by checking how the last campaign altered your keyword rankings, page load speed, conversion rate optimization and site crawlability.
To conduct an SEO Analysis you can hire a professional or a digital marketing company, but there are also some tools you can use on your own.
Tools for SEO analysis
An SEO analysis can be seen as a tool for people to study a site and identify its weakest points. There are many tools online which can help you get an SEO Analysis, the most popular among them being Google’s Webmaster Tools.
Other SEO Analysis tools are:
- SEMrush
- Ahrefs
- HubSpot’s Website Grader
- Check My Links
- BuzzStream
- Moz’s Pro Tools
- UpCity’s SEO Report Card
- Woorank
- Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider
- Found’s SEO Audit Tool
- Remove’em
- Varvy’s SEO Overview Tool
Some of these SEO tools are free, while others cost several dollars per month. Depending on your needs, you can choose one of them, based on the reports it can return. You can also turn to one of these tools based on its user-friendly degree. If you are going to conduct the SEO analysis yourself and you are a newbie, you want to work with a simple, straight to the point software.
What should be included in an SEO Analysis?
Different marketing agencies conduct different types of SEO reports, so it is not uncommon for a report to include different points. However, a good SEO analysis should always include a number of key points.
Statistical Data
Statistical data is the biggest part of a SEO website analysis, but it can easily become overwhelming, exactly because it can be so large. When you conduct the research, you gather a lot of statistical data on how many people are looking for a specific keyword or how well are your competitors performing. On top of these, you also get information that you might be seeing in the web stats program, like load speed, navigation, duplicate content, and bounce rate.
Detailed SEO Analysis
An explanation of all the terms used in the report is another essential thing you should be finding in the SEO analysis. A good marketing company is going to create a detailed search engine optimization analysis which is both informative and easy to read, even for someone who has no knowledge of SEO.
Keyword Research
A specific keyword research, which can give you a hint on which keywords are the best for your site. Also, the more detailed and long the keywords, the better. Few sites can actually rank for broad terms, so look for key phrases to optimize for. The keyword performance reports include the difficulty to rank, competitor’s keywords and monthly searches.
Current Search Engine Rankings
Current search engine rankings are another important point of a SEO evaluation of a website and the more is better in this case. Think more than one thousand results in each of the major search engines on the market.
Internal Linking
Detailed and customized simulations can show what crawlers will index when they read the site, as well as how many pages are indexed, the broken links and when was the last time your site was crawled by search engines.
Recommendations are often optional in SEO reports because the specialist or the company which conducts the report aims to work with you on an SEO project. However, there are companies which do add this section to their SEO analysis, enabling the site owner to DIY some of the elements, based on the report.
Apart from the above, SEO analysis reports contain site layout, use of meta descriptions and alt text for images, pages without content, spammy links, backlinks, social media integration and site design responsiveness. The last two are very important in the current digital environment when having a mobile-friendly site is not enough to perform in search engines.
Why is an SEO Analysis Important?
A compelling SEO report on your site is essential for building an effective SEO campaign. The SEO analyze shows which are the weak points of a website and how they can be improved in order to increase the site’s ranking and start generating more leads. At the same time, an SEO report enables you to focus on the elements which can help your site grow, the elements with the highest impact on SEO.
