A website analysis is the practice of testing and reviewing a site’s performance concerning your search engine optimisation efforts. SEO is a long-term and ongoing strategy known for not showing immediate results, especially regarding business goals.
Let us give you an example.
You know that one of the factors that influence your rank is page speed. After performing a few tweaks, you can immediately check to see if there is any improvement in your site’s performance. But, that’s just one facet of SEO. The overall strategy is meant to improve a business’s rank in the search engine results, and getting a higher rank takes a lot more time. Usually, the first major results of SEO appear a few months after the strategy has been implemented.
This makes it essential to analyse your website not just before you form an SEO strategy, but also in the midst of it.
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Why a Website Analysis Is Important
Having a website that ranks well on Google is extremely important in today’s competitive business climate. Apart from bringing a good influx of search traffic to your site, earning one of the top positions in Google search result pages is a major boost in the trust new audiences have regarding your brand.
After all, everyone knows that Google doesn’t just put any website at the top spot, so if a link makes it there, it means:
- It’s relevant to the query
- The website is high-quality from a technical standpoint (good navigation, no broken links, mobile-friendly, etc.)
- The business behind the site is legit and can be trusted
Performing an SEO review on your site is a way to make sure all your efforts are paying off. Before you consider what means you need to improve your rank, you will likely need to perform a website audit to see what’s the current performance of your site. Once you implement the first stages of your strategy, it’s worth going back to the audit to see how your efforts are doing in real-time.
How to Perform a Website Analysis
The term “website analysis” sounds like it leads to a complicated process, but that’s not really the case. Many SEO audit tools on the market can support your analysis and offer this data.
Instead of the tool itself, you need to know about what metrics or individual efforts to look for during your analysis. Below, we’ll go through some of the key components your website analysis should contain.
The Technical Side
The various technical sides of SEO ensure you have a high-quality website in terms of usability. There are many different components to it, such as:
- Site structure
- Internal linking
- Page load speed
- Broken links
- Metadata optimisation (using headings, title tags, meta description)
- Image optimisation, etc.
You can use the Google Search Console to generate SEO reports and get more information regarding your site’s technical performance. In fact, you can set up alerts and get immediately notified when something goes wrong with your site, such as a broken link or an error regarding the site’s performance.
Keyword Relevance
Keyword research is a big priority for SEO and content marketing, but deciding on the right keywords to target can be a struggle sometimes. If you go too broad, the competition level is very high and you risk not getting any additional website traffic for these keywords.
Conversely, if you narrow it down and choose the less-popular keywords, you risk not having any traffic at all, since people might not use those terms in the queries. Staying somewhere in the middle is a better option when it comes to marketing search terms.
You can use a tool like Moz Pro’s Keywords Explorer and check to see if your most prevalent keywords are relevant enough to be targeted.
Link Building
Your link building efforts are a staple of the overall SEO strategy. Both internal and external links are essential to navigation, and a good number of quality backlinks can increase your brand’s visibility tremendously.
To check your backlinks, you can use the Ahrefs tool and get a better idea of what websites link to you. As for the ones on your site, the Google Search Console can provide you with all the data you need.
Social Media Interactions
Social media platforms offer an amazing opportunity for brands to get closer to their audience, engage with them, and support their SEO efforts.
Sharing content on social media generates links that can support your link building efforts, but you should also look at how your audience interacts with the content. Are they engaging with it directly by sharing or commenting on your posts? Or are your articles going unnoticed?
These interactions are quite telling regarding the quality of your content. If your audience is silent, it likely means you need to go back to the drawing board, as the topics you’re offering them aren’t relevant or interesting enough for them to act.
User Experience and User Behaviour
An SEO strategy ultimately improves the user experience of your site, so it’s a good idea to check and see if that’s happening or not.
The best SEO checker for this purpose is none other than Google Analytics. Look for:
- The bounce rates
- Web pages with the highest and lowest traffic
- Website traffic sources
- Actions taken on page
- Other metrics that show info about your audience and their behaviour, like their location, popular visiting times, etc.
Get a Free SEO Health Check
See if your SEO efforts are paying off with Australian Internet Advertising’s free $500-worth SEO health checker now.
If you also need help refining your strategy and improving your results, we are happy to assist Sydney business owners with all their SEO needs. Call us at 1300 304 640 or reach out online!
