Complete SEO analysis guide: analyze SEO as an expert

Have you noticed that, despite the efforts invested in your project, your website is not performing, the number of visits has suddenly decreased, you have been months without new leads?

In this case, before diagnosing any problem, it is good to perform a study of your website from top to bottom. This is where the concept of “SEO analysis” comes into play. From this, you will be able to understand what are the problems to solve, the reasons why your website is not working, and act immediately.

Buthow is SEO analysis carried out? From Rodanet, we offer you a complete SEO analysis guide to prevent and treat all those “mistakes” that may be preventing your website from generating new business opportunities.

What is SEO analysis?

SEO analysis is the process of reviewing and evaluating a website with the objective of improving its visibility in search engines. It involves implementing various strategies and techniques to optimize the site so that it is more easily found by search engines.

Who should perform an SEO analysis?

Managing a website is like growing a small plant. Although we will not see its fruits immediately, it is essential to water it and take care of it, in the hope that one day we will be able to harvest a good crop. For this reason, anyone who has a website should subject it to SEO analysis: whether it is an e-commerce or a “showcase website“, SEO analysis is a fundamental step for it to grow strong, healthy and profitable.

When to perform an SEO analysis?

Many decide to perform an SEO analysis only when they perceive that something is wrong: a decrease in the number of visits and conversions is usually the first sign that something is wrong.

However, carrying out SEO analysis on a regular basis is essential to take full advantage of its benefits. This is not just a corrective measure, but much more: SEO analysis is the starting point for setting visitor goals ,
leads
and conversions during a specific period (such as a year) and, thus, to design an optimization
optimization strategy
strategy.

It also allows you to analyze business opportunities that you are not covering or to verify whether your SEO growth strategy is working or not.

In any case, it will be necessary to perform an SEO audit when:

• During and after migrating a website: to ensure that we make the changes with guarantees of success and that the migration will not lead to loss of traffic.
• Regularly and periodically: carrying out SEO analysis on a regular basis, for example, every quarter or semester, helps to detect changes in site performance and allows you to continuously adjust your strategy to maximize results.
• After significant changes to the site: any major change to the structure, design or content of the website may affect its performance in search engines. Therefore, it is crucial to perform an SEO analysis after making substantial modifications.
• When there are fluctuations in traffic: if website traffic experiences noticeable fluctuations, both positive and negative, an SEO analysis can help identify the reasons behind these changes and take the most appropriate measures.
• After algorithmic updates: search engines, such as Google, make periodic updates to their algorithms.
  algorithms
  . If you notice a significant change in web performance after an update, an SEO analysis can provide information on how to adapt to these changes.
• When initiating a new strategy: if you are planning to implement a new content, marketing or linking strategy, performing an SEO analysis beforehand can help you understand how these actions can affect site visibility and performance.

How is an SEO analysis performed?

Analysis of the initial situation and of your situation with respect to the competition

The starting point for understanding the state of health of our website is the analysis of the current situation. This phase is essential for:

• Make year-over-year comparisons: compare the performance of the website in different years. For example, you can see how your site performed in 2022 compared to 2023.
• Understand whether the website has improved or worsened over time: this involves assessing whether the strategies and actions implemented on the website have been effective in improving its performance or whether, on the contrary, they have had a negative impact.
• Detect possible deviations from the original objectives: sometimes, when launching or managing a website, specific objectives are set. Over time, actual site performance may deviate from these objectives.
• Knowing where we are capturing traffic and what parts of our website are vital to get visitors and potential customers.

What is the fundamental tool to carry out an SEO analysis of this type?

Google Analytics
Google Analytics: through this tool it is possible to track visits, new users, leads and conversions that reach the site during this period and their channels of origin. Analytics is also essential to make comparisons with previous periods. In this case, it is good to take into account seasonality, which can affect the number of visits. It is difficult for a user in August, while at the beach, to search for a New Year’s destination.

Therefore, it is good to compare the current period with the same period last year to avoid distorting the data. In this step it is necessary to keep your eyes wide open. Any anomaly, even the smallest, can indicate the presence of problems and frictions that prevent us from improving our visibility in search engines. Or, worse, the start of a penalty by Google, which will gradually begin to position our pages lower in the SERPs.

If we notice something strange, the first thing to do is to analyze the performance of the individual channels (organic, direct ,
pay-per-click
and social media) to understand where the problem is coming from. For example, it may be that our latest Facebook posts have not generated clicks as in the past or that our paid advertising campaigns need to be reviewed and optimized. If, on the other hand, the problem is “organic”, it will be necessary to continue the SEO analysis to find its roots. At the end of this first phase of analysis, we can be faced with 3 different scenarios:

• Our site is progressively losing visitors and needs a more detailed diagnosis.
• The website is gaining new visitors. In this case, we will act to maintain the ranking and position ourselves for a greater number of keywords, through the creation of new content (blogs or static pages).
• Our website is stagnant. In such a situation, it is essential to plan actions to increase visits.

In addition, especially for the last point, it will be very helpful to see what the competition that is positioned above us is doing and what is working for them. For this purpose, paid tools such as Ahrefs, Sistrix or Semrush can be very useful.

Phase 2 of the SEO analysis, the most technical one, is essential to guarantee a correct crawling of our website by search engines.

Technical errors

The objective of this second phase of the analysis is to identify all those technical deficiencies that may cause problems in our ranking. These are not always superficially visible and, in order to find them, it is necessary to go beyond what is seen “with the naked eye”. Here are some examples.

For this second phase of SEO analysis, several tools are also used, but if we had to highlight two, they would undoubtedly be Google Search Console and Screaming Frog.

Are there 404 errors?

How many times have you encountered the sad 404 error? “Page not found” indicates that the client (our browser) has successfully connected to the site’s server, but was unable to find the requested resource.

What could be causing the 404 error? Imagine you run a travel website. When the trip you have organized is no longer active, you delete the page. However, an old Facebook post still links to that trip and a curious user tries to access it. In this case, the user manages to enter the website, but does not find the content he/she was looking for.

The presence of 404 errors can cause significant problems for both the user and SEO, since Google when crawling our website, does not track 100% and if we have the web full of urls that give error, we may be wasting that percentage and causing Google does not detect other important urls for the business.

Rich Snippets

The
Rich Snippets
improve the appearance of your search results by displaying additional information. Be sure to add relevant Rich Snippets to your site, such as Local Business or the BreadCrumbList. This not only improves visibility, but can also increase the click-through rate (CTR).

Loading speed

The loading speed of a site’s pages significantly affects its performance and positioning. We know that the most important thing for the search engine is to always offer the best content to the user. Therefore, a web visitor who cannot quickly view a page tends to abandon it within a few seconds; Google perceives this“bounce” as user dissatisfaction and tends to lower the site’s ranking.

Thanks to technical tools (e.g,
PageSpeed Insights
), it is possible to evaluate the loading speed on mobile and desktop devices. If we detect problems in the loading of web pages, we must act immediately. In what way? Here are some examples:

• Reduce the size of the images;
• 
  Lazy load
  The idea behind the lazy load is to delay the loading of visual elements until they are needed, that is, until the user scrolls or interacts in some way with the page. Instead of loading all the images and resources at the same time when opening a page, the lazy load initially loads only the elements that are in the visible part of the screen, postponing the loading of elements further down the page until the user scrolls to them. This can significantly improve page load times and reduce the initial load on the server;
• Opt for a better server;
• Take advantage of the browser cache.

Mobile usability

Another determinant factor in the organic positioning of a website is whether it is

responsive

y if navigation on mobile devices is easy and usable: the content of the site automatically adapts to the device from which it is navigated, the buttons are large enough to click comfortably, the font is a comfortable size for reading…

Do you want to know what problems your site has on mobile devices? Use
Responsinator
a tool that allows you to understand how users view your website from multiple devices.

Content analysis

For which keywords are we positioning?

The analysis of
keyword analysis
plays an essential role in the search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. It involves identifying and carefully selecting the words and phrases that people use when searching for information online.

Using keywords randomly, without thorough research, can have a negative impact on the effectiveness of our entire SEO strategy. For this reason, it is crucial that they meet three fundamental criteria:

1. Search volume: it is vital that the keywords have a significant level of monthly searches. This indicates the demand and interest of people around those particular keywords .
2. Low competition: choosing keywords with low competition means that there will be fewer websites competing for the same keywords. This increases the chances that our page will rank better in search results.
3. Business relevance: the selected keywords must be closely related to the content and main focus of our website. This ensures that the traffic coming to our site is made up of people interested in what we offer.

How do we determine if we are on the right track? We can use the tools provided by
Google Search Console
a platform that provides detailed information about the performance of our website in search results. In particular, we focus on three key metrics:

• Total impressions: refers to how many times our page has appeared in search results.
• Clicks: frequency with which someone has clicked on a Google link to access your site.
• Average position: this metric generally tells us in which position our page appears in the search results for a given keyword . If the average position is high, but impressions are low, it could suggest seasonality issues or low demand for that keyword.

To discover new positioning opportunities and new keywords, it will be very useful to analyze the competition (with tools such as Ahrefs, Sistrix or Semrush) and use the Google Ads Keyword Planner.

Meta tags or metatags

An effective search engine optimization strategy cannot do without the creation of meta tags (meta title and meta description) for each page of the site, whether static or a blog article.

Metadata, such as H1 heading tags and heading hierarchy, is important for structuring your content and making it easier for search engines and users to understand.

These elements have a dual function:

• They allow the search engine to quickly understand what the keyword is for
  keyword
  you want to position the page for.
• When they are eye-catching and contain a call to action (e.g. “Find out more!”, “Read now!”, “Buy now!”), they encourage the user to enter the result displayed in the SERP.

There are technical tools, such as Screaming Frog, that can tell us which pages lack a meta title and meta description. In addition, these tools also show us the number of characters used for both the meta title and meta descriptions. This allows us to know if we have exceeded the maximum limit of characters allowed by Google, which is 65 and 165 respectively.

Is there duplicate content?

Duplicate content represents a real plague for many sites, especially if they are e-commerce sites. For example, as ecommerce SEO specialists, it is very common to confuse a product attribute with what would be two different products.

Example: the same t-shirt in different colors should only create different products if the keyword has searches. If it does not have searches what we must have is a product sheet where you can choose the color as you choose the size.

Creating different tabs for the same products generates a lot of duplicate content.

In recent years, duplicate content has become one of the main causes of penalties for a website. Therefore, the key is to create original texts.

How do you know what content to create? We can use tools such as

CopyScape

which indicate possible matches between our texts and those found on other sites. Once identified, we can act to make the content creative and original, which will also improve communication with the user and increase the number of conversions.

Are you overdoing it with SEO optimization?

Optimizing the site for the search engine is all well and good, but overdoing it can also become a problem. Google can easily tell when there is a case of “over-optimization”. With this term we refer to all those practices that abuse SEO techniques to make the search engine rank the website faster and more effectively.

Have you ever read an article on the web and noticed a “robotic” style? In these cases, some words are present in the text, not so much to offer added value to the reader, but to highlight them to the search engine. Here is an example:

Let’s analyze the content of the texts on our website. Are they difficult to understand and could they have been written for the sole purpose of gaining visibility on Google? It is not necessary to repeat the
keyword
keyword dozens of times throughout an article to optimize it.

Search engines, nowadays, are smart enough to understand for which keyword we want to rank without having to resort to useless stratagems.

Analysis of backlinks

In short: we have analyzed the initial situation of our site, identified technical errors and optimized our textual and multimedia content. Is there anything else missing? Of course we do: the analysis of our
backlink

s
but especially those of the competition, is a fundamental step.

This is the branch that is defined as“Off Page SEO“, because it takes place outside our website. The goal is to get quality websites to provide us with inbound links to gain more credibility and authority in the eyes of search engines.

All this strategy will be useless if our website receives harmful links. They are defined as such because they come from sites that:

• They have nothing to do with the main theme of our website.
• They have no visibility in search engines or have even been penalized.
• They have no content, only lists of links.

Majestic can help us evaluate the quality of inbound links and select those that could be a problem for our site.

In conclusion…

The SEO audit consists of a thorough review of all aspects of a website, from structure and content to technical and performance aspects. By identifying these areas of improvement and resolving the problems encountered, the site can be optimized to meet search engine guidelines and provide the best experience for users.

Do you need a professional consultation with one of our SEO specialists to analyze in detail the health of your website? Contact us and let ‘s talk about how to grow your project.

Tamara Rigotti

Copy & Content Strategist en Rodanet | tamara@rodanet.es | + posts

Tamara es redactora #seo y la boxeadora de la oficina. 🥊
Siempre escribe textos con gancho 😉

• Tamara Rigotti

  https://rodanet.com/en/author/tamara-rigotti/

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