How to do an SEO Analysis?
First, the health status of the website must be known, and if the main pages are indexed by Google. Google Search Console is used for this . Then, a keyword analysis is done to identify with which keywords the products or services of the industry in question are searched, for which Google Keyword Planner can be used , or another SEO tool such as Ubersuggest or Screaming Frog . Finally, the loading speed of the main pages is checked with Google PageSpeed Insights . and an analysis is made of competing web pages, for which extensions such as Similar Web and MOZ Bar can be useful. We will look at this in more depth in the next article. 
What is an SEO audit (analysis)?
It consists of an evaluation of the current status of a website; the traffic it receives, the keywords that people find it with, if there are any errors of any kind, and also if they are indexed by Google. On the other hand, it is investigated what words they are using to get the products and services of your industry. The charging speed for various devices is measured, and the main competitors are analyzed.
Based on the results obtained in this phase, an action plan is designed that will be the SEO on Page .
What is the goal of SEO analysis?
Collect all the information relevant to the web positioning and current status of a domain to later analyze it and draw a course of action aligned with interests. It is knowing where we are in order to know where we are going. It also serves as a frame of reference to compare in the future if the efforts have paid off.
What are the elements of an SEO analysis?
The elements of an SEO analysis are: site crawling, search traffic, keyword analysis, site packaging, page load speed, and competitor analysis. Next we will see one by one, and we will tell you free tools with which you can do each one.
website tracking
How much information about your company is there on the Internet?
The first step in any analysis is to know how much information you will be working with and what its current status is. Here it will be determined:
- Total number of pages.
- Total pages indexed (saved) by Google.
- Number of site pages excluded by Google and their reasons.
- Site pages with AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages).
- Most important errors (broken links or links that do not open where they should).
- Websites that most link to the company’s site.
- Anchor texts with those that most link to the company.
You will be able to easily access all this information through Google Search Console .
traffic analysis
How are the visits obtained from Google distributed?
When carrying out an SEO analysis, you have to determine where the users who land on your website come from and which are the sections that receive the most visits from search engines.
In many cases, companies create their websites and spend years and years creating pages, changing links, adding resources and stop counting.
This means that, at the time they want to start their SEO work, companies do not know which pages are generating the bulk of the traffic to their site.
Why is it important to know this information?
Because if your site has 150 pages but more than 50% of the traffic comes from just 30 links, the most logical thing would be to focus your efforts directly on those URLs.
Example:
Analysis of a website with more than 10,000 links: 50% of the traffic is concentrated in less than 30 URLs.
What do you do in such cases? Depends.
If your most important pages (purchase or conversion pages) are not found in these 78 URLs, you will have to do some SEO work to generate more traffic on the other pages of your site, the ones that are important for your company.
If, on the contrary, the bulk of your business is found in those 78 URLs, start by optimizing those.
Evaluate what you want to achieve and act accordingly.
keyword analysis
With which phrases does your company want to position itself? What are the most searched terms in your industry (products, services, questions)? With what words do they find your website?
The keyword research or study of keywords will allow your company, among other things:
- Know what expressions people use to search for the products or services you sell.
- Determine what questions your potential customers are asking.
- Find out if you have a lot of competition to reach the first page of Google.
Point 1 is key because there are often many differences between how we think people search for our products/services and how they actually do.
For example:
At Pencil we have a client who told us: “We want to come out first when people put ‘Buy apartments’”.
What happened when we did the keyword research?
We realized that people were not using Google the phrase “buy apartments”, but “apartments for sale”.
That let us know that we should take a different path.
In that sense, carrying out this keyword study is essential.
There are free and paid tools to perform this research.
Among the free ones we have Ubersuggest , by Neil Patel, and Google’s Keyword Planner . There you will be able to see an approximate volume of how many searches are carried out per month for a certain term or phrase and you will know the competition that you will have when trying to reach the first page of Google.
Also, using Google Trends can help you decide between two keywords that you want to position, determining which is the one that, at the time you are creating your content, is trending among users.
If you are more interested, here is a detailed guide on how to do keyword analysis .
site packaging
What are the titles and descriptions of your pages?
The packaging of a website is made up of three elements: the title tags, the meta tags, and the internal titles (H1, H2, H3…). The title tag is the title of a page for Google. It’s the text that appears in blue and large letters on a results page. The meta tag is the brief description that appears below it, and the internal titles correspond to the titles and subtitles within the page.
For a page to rank correctly, it is crucial that all these titles are optimized for SEO, keeping a close relationship with the information offered within the site, since:
1.- Google uses these titles as a positioning factor when making its results lists. If there you do not indicate to Google that you are answering a certain question, your content will not rank, even when it is of very good quality.
2.- Although descriptions (meta tags) are not used as a ranking factor in Google, they give users a brief and very important summary of the topic of your articles. If your descriptions captivate the audience, it is much more likely that you will get more clicks and, consequently, continue to rise in Google ( meta tag example ).
Instead of perusing, people on the Internet scan, so you have very few seconds to capture the user’s attention. Therefore, you should take advantage of meta descriptions as a hook for your content.
To learn more about how to headline, check out our guide to SEO titles .
To know the packaging of a website you can use SEO software such as Screaming Frog. Alternatively the MOZ Bar extension can be used.
upload speed
How fast does your site load on desktop and mobile?
Time is money. Consequently, the loading speed has become one of the most determining factors in the percentage of bounce, or abandonment, that websites have.
In this sense, the loading speed has become one of the main factors that Google takes into account to rank a page. Cyrus Shepard, in his How to Succeed at Google SEO article , lists load speed as the number 9 important factor out of hundreds. According to its scale of importance, it is crucial.
It’s not hard to see why: if any web page on your site doesn’t quickly load the answer people need, they’ll look elsewhere.
According to Kissmetrics , 1 second delay in load time results in a 70% loss in conversions.
On the other hand, on mobile, if you reduce the load time by 1 second, your conversion rate could increase by 27% .
How to measure the loading speed of our site?
To diagnose our website and see where we need to improve to increase speed, we can use Google PageSpeed Insights.
This free tool performs a complete analysis of any page you indicate. It points out the charging speed for mobile and computer, along with in-depth analysis of the components that are negatively affecting the charging time.
It generates a lot of data, but we recommend you focus on two particular sections:
1.- Diagnostics: information about the performance of the link you placed.
2.- Opportunities: optimizations that you can make so that your URL loads faster.
SEO analysis of the competition
What are the best and worst practices of our competition?
In this section, the web media that dominate the keywords of the industry in question are searched for, and are subjected to a superficial SEO analysis: the packaging, the menu, the CTAs, the type of content they publish, among others; in order to take as inspiration the best practices of each one, and avoid their failures.
It is important to remember that search engine competition is not necessarily the same as competition in your local market. For example, let’s say you have a cake shop: SEO Cakes. Locally, your competition is a couple of stores in your area. However, if you start selling them through a web page, your competition will be totally different.
At Google you are competing against anyone who has written, or done, something relevant in your industry.
So it is always good, in addition to taking into account the offline competition, to review the following:
- Who is ranking in Google for the most searched terms in your industry?
- Do you have your website optimized?
- What kind of content are they doing it with? Long texts, videos, how-to content, research.
- With what kind of information do they relate to the brand name?
- What is the first thing that Google throws when we put the name of the company in the search engine?
- What sections stand out on your menu?
The idea is to later identify which are the best opportunities and work on outperforming the competitors.
How to do an SEO analysis of the competition?
The first thing is to type in googling the main keywords of the industry, obtained during the keyword analysis and see which web pages are ranked the first positions. We recommend analyzing between 4 and 6.
Once on each page we will pay attention to the architecture of the information, the menus, and the most recurrent links. We must pay particular attention to the landing page, to the pages of services or products, check if they have a blog and what type of information they publish, etc.
With the help of Ubersuggest we will be able to check the web traffic and the keywords it ranks for, and with the help of the Moz bar extension , we will be able to easily obtain the packaging of each of the pages.
Conclusions
1.- The SEO analysis is the first step that you must carry out before starting any change in your site. This work will indicate the path to take, which pages to prioritize and what type of SEO work is most urgent. Ignoring this phase would be like trying to get out of a maze with a blindfold on.
2.- Take your time with keyword analysis. Remember that the phrases with which you want to position yourself must be aligned with your marketing and sales objectives. Everything has to be connected. Good research will make your content visible. Then, after they find you, your job will be to keep prospects on your site.
3.- Take the opportunity to debug your website: stay with the pages that are truly useful to boost you. Use this SEO analysis to determine how to connect your content and how to offer the user an incredible experience that will keep them coming back.
4.- Focus on the loading speed of your site. It is better to do without some aesthetic details that can be cool , if they slow down your page. Always keep the user in mind: your first goal is to solve a problem. Viewing high-quality images or fancy features on your site takes a backseat.
5.- Do not forget that your competition in the search engines can be totally different from the one in the real world.
Example SEO Analysis
In the presentation that you will read below you will be able to observe an example of a finished SEO Analysis.
In it are all the points mentioned throughout the article plus a fictitious audit of the competition.
The presentation can be used for businesses that want to know what they would receive if they requested one and for agencies or freelancers that want to use this format as an example.
We hope it will be very useful to you.
Pencil Speech SEO Analysis Example
