If you want to improve your website’s visibility on search engines it is beneficial to possess the skills to analyze a website for SEO.
The process of SEO analysis entails assessing a website to assess how well it is optimized. By recognizing the significance of SEO analysis, you can devise a fruitful SEO plan to improve rankings, draw in more website traffic, and enhance conversions for relevant search terms.
1. Check the level of presence of your site in Google
To start evaluating a website’s SEO, the initial step is to assess how it appears in Google’s natural search results. It is essential to determine the number of pages that are included in the search results (SERP) compared to the number of posts that have been published on your website. It should be noted that not all of your website’s pages will always be indexed by Google. If you observe that Google has indexed a lower number of pages than what you have posted, it suggests that there might be issues with the content or technical aspects of your site.
Your search visibility is in a favorable position if the number of indexed pages is close to the number of published pages. Nevertheless, you can still enhance that visibility by conducting an SEO analysis of your website and implementing a series of actions, presented below.
2. Check Your Website’s Rankings
Checking your website’s rankings is the next thing you should analyze. You can perform this analysis with a number of different SEO tools. People always compare SEMrush vs SE Ranking and get maximum results in their work. And everyone knows that by using them you get powerful for keyword research and competitor SEO analysis. It also reports the current ranking position.
3. Perform SEO analysis of page titles
For on-page SEO, it is essential that every web page has a distinctive and well-optimized page title (also called a meta title) as it is the most influential factor in determining its ranking. Plus, it contributes significantly to your overall SEO rankings.
Review each page title on your website and analyze if they are SEO friendly:
- The length is not more than 60 characters.
- The article title begins with the main keyword (also known as “forward loading”).
- Additional keywords are included after the main keyword without excessive repetition.
- Includes attractive language that increases the likelihood that users will click on the listings displayed on the Google search engine results pages.
4. Analysis Meta Descriptions
Meta description analysis is also critical for SEO purposes.
While the meta description does not directly affect Google’s ranking algorithm, it does affect the number of users who click on your listing on search engine results pages (SERPs). This is because Google makes the relevant phrase bold if it matches the search term.
Therefore, it is recommended to place the main keyword at the beginning of the meta description. Also, it’s important to limit the length of your meta description to 160 characters or less to prevent shortening in search results.
5. Check Your URLs
It’s important to optimize URLs for key keywords.
Check the URL of each page for optimal optimization and make any necessary corrections.
When you decide to change the URL on your website, it is important to set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new URL. This ensures that you retain the SEO value of any incoming links. Also, be sure to update all internal links to the new URL to avoid internal 301 redirects as this can have negative implications for technical SEO.
For a URL to be well optimized, it must include the main target keyword with hyphens (-) to separate each word.
6. Analyze the headings of the H1 site
Analyzing the H1 headings on your website is critical for SEO and on-page rank. It is important to evaluate them carefully to ensure proper optimization. Follow these SEO H1 tag guidelines:
- Download the main keyword beforehand.
- Include secondary keywords.
- Keep it between 20 and 70 characters.
- Use only one H1 tag per page.
To make the SEO process easier, duplicate the meta page title.
7. Check keywords in content
The relevance of the keywords in the content plays a critical role in determining the ranking of a web page, as explicitly stated in the Google documentation titled “How Search Works – Relevance”.
“When the content of a search query contains the same keywords as your search query, this is a clear indication that the information is relevant.”
In order to rank highly in search results for relevant queries, it is essential to include your keywords as an exact match phrase in your body text. As such, it’s a good idea to do a comprehensive SEO analysis of each page to determine if your target keywords are present there.
8. Check your images
Incorporating images into your content is a smart and subtle strategy to improve your content for Google. By including targeted keywords in various image properties, you can improve the overall relevancy of a page and increase the likelihood of your images appearing in Google image search, driving more traffic to your site.
9. Check Your Internal Links
Internal links are a useful method to improve search engine rankings and the usability of your website.
By optimizing internal links, you can not only improve your rankings for certain keywords, but also improve the user experience by helping them find more relevant content, thus increasing the length of their stay on your website.
Therefore, it is recommended to evaluate the internal links of a website based on the following conditions:
- Each page must have at least one internal link corresponding to its content. This is to ensure that pages are not ignored by Google’s crawl process, which is commonly referred to as “orphaned”.
- Other relevant pages should contain 5-10 internal links to the most important pages.
- To optimize landing page ranking, it is advisable to use 3-4 keywords in the anchor text of internal links leading to this page.
10. Look for Broken Links
Having a large number of broken internal or external links can lead to various issues with website indexing and search engine rankings.
Therefore, it is advisable to conduct a thorough review of all links present on your site to determine if any of them are not working properly and need attention.
11. Do an SEO analysis of the links leading to your site
Inbound links, which can also be called inbound links or backlinks, are links that originate from other websites on the Internet that lead to your own website.
Backlink analysis for SEO is critical because Google’s algorithm can devalue your content if you have a large number of low quality incoming links.
However, the presence of quality inbound links is interpreted by search engines as a sign that your website is a reliable and trustworthy source of information. This can lead to better rankings and more traffic.
12. Analyze your spam score
If your website’s spam score is high or average, it’s a good idea to check your incoming links and try to remove as many negative links as you can that contribute to that ranking. There are two methods by which you can try to eliminate bad backlinks. Contact the person in charge of the website and ask them to remove the hyperlink from their web page. Use a Google tool to instruct the algorithm to ignore links from suspicious pages or domains linked to your site.
13. Test Your Page Speed
Page speed is currently taken into account by Google as a ranking factor, so it is extremely important to include it in your search engine optimization analysis. Hence, estimating the load time of each page of your website is an important aspect to focus on in order to boost your rankings and increase your traffic. There are many tools for this, and you can also check if the site is optimized for mobile devices. Google uses mobile-first indexing as its primary method of indexing and ranking, favoring the mobile version of content.
Summary
Performing an SEO analysis of a website is not too difficult. It simply includes a few steps that you need to take to ensure that you research and address the key aspects of your site to improve search engine optimization. And they are presented above.
In addition, there are several resources for effectively evaluating a website’s SEO performance. Tools like SEMrush and SE Ranking offer recommendations for improving search engine rankings with specific targeted keywords by identifying areas for improvement.
Iskra Banović is our seasoned Editor-in-Chief at Blufashion. She has been steering the website’s content and editorial direction since 2018. With a rich background in fashion design, Iskra’s expertise spans across fashion, interior design, beauty, lifestyle, travel, and culture.
