One of the surest ways to advertise your business online is through search engine optimization (SEO). Simply put, your site needs to rank among the top websites that Google or other search engines list on the search engine result pages (SERPs) for the keywords you’ve optimized in your web content. Your website will not be discovered by potential clients if it isn’t ranking high enough.
When people talk about SEO, one might imagine that optimizing a site is an easy task. Nothing can be further from the truth. There are many factors that Google ranking algorithms consider when ranking websites, so you must satisfy as many of those as possible.
Part of your SEO strategy has to be focused on knowing why your competitors outrank you on Google and the measures you can put in place to reverse that. The other part should be focused on analyzing how your site is faring online. Is it getting enough online traffic? Where is the traffic coming from? Are your marketing strategies working or do you need to redesign them? Are there conversions? If yes, are they substantial?
The questions above can only be answered through SEO analysis. Here are the key steps of a thorough SEO analysis:
1. Check your visibility on Google.
Your SEO analysis should start with a simple “site:example.com” search on Google, where “example” is your site’s domain name. This search will tell you how visible your site is on Google; if your target audience is finding your content online. If your pages aren’t ranking for the top keywords in your industry, then you need to review your SEO strategies.
2. Identify your key competitors.
If your pages aren’t visible on Google, who is ranking ahead of you? Identify these competitors and see what they do better than you so that you can know which areas of SEO you need to improve on.
3. Find your baseline SEO score.
This gives you valuable but basic information regarding your site’s metrics. It will tell you who visited your site and when. You will know the number of online searchers that landed on your page organically and those who are just there to spy on you or monitor your SEO strategy. Your SEO baseline score also tells you if your pages’ word count, keyword density, page speed and inbound links are well optimized.
4. Analyze your page headings.
Are your titles grabbing the attention of the people searching on Google or do you need to improve on them? Are you using enough keywords in the title? Your page will only appear on the first page of a SERP if the headings match the focus keywords that Google users search for within your niche.
5. Asses the effectiveness of your social media optimization.
Audit your social media presence and strategy. How many followers do you have on each platform, and how many of them actively engage with your content? How many follow you to your website? Are you posting enough on Facebook? Are your Instagram posts appealing to the target audience? Are they worthy of going viral? This information will help you determine whether you are active enough, overdoing it, or you need to improve in terms of creating and sharing content.
6. Analyze your page speed.
Your pages need to load fast in order to give your visitors the best user experience. Check to see if the speed is okay or you need to improve on it. Page Speed Insights is a tool that Google provides for free that will help you analyze the loading speed of your website.
7. Check and fix your internal links.
How well you place internal links on your site will determine how navigable your site is. If visitors cannot navigate to other pages with ease when they come to your site, your SEO ranking will keep going down.
Simple Tools of an SEO Analysis
1. SEMrush
This tool tells you everything you need to know about your organic rankings, from keyword rankings to monthly search volume, to backlinks. You name it. Just go to their site and enter your site’s URL. Everything will be listed there for you, including how your pages perform against your top competitors.
2. Google Analytics
This online visibility management platform is yet another free data source by Google. It tells you how your site is doing in Google. There surely isn’t a better way of assessing your performance on Google than getting the data right from the horse’s mouth- Google.
3. Moz Pro
This is a paid service, but it produces results that are worth the investment. It will help you boost your page rankings, monitor your SEO performance, and grow your overall keyword performance.
No matter what industry you are in, there are likely thousands of competitors that are keen on overtaking you and staying ahead. You must, therefore, keep your website SEO performance up to date.
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