What Can an Advanced SEO Analysis Tell You?
By Nick Nelson
What is your website’s stage of SEO maturity? The level of analysis you’re conducting can be a great way to gauge how far along your strategy is on the curve.
Basic SEO analysis helps you understand whether your site is fundamentally equipped to succeed in search. Delving into more advanced and nuanced analysis is where you can start to focus and differentiate from the field, driving real results in crowded markets.
Many of the more basic techniques for assessing your site’s SEO health and performance can be handled with help from free tools and simple processes. From there, you can start leveraging more advanced methods supported by seasoned expertise, powerful technology and strategic oversight.
Let’s dive into the insights, opportunities and outcomes you can expect when using basic and advanced SEO analysis.
What is basic SEO analysis?
These relatively basic SEO practices have become much easier for any digital marketer to handle thanks to evolving tools and technologies.
Although an expert hand is valuable in getting the most out of an audit or keyword research, any marketer can start gathering data and insights with the help of SEO analysis tools like Moz, Semrush, Google Analytics, and more. Here are a few basic processes and techniques to consider:
SEO audit
The best way to get a core understanding of your website’s current strengths and weaknesses is through an SEO audit. There are countless free and paid tools that can help with this process. They might systematically evaluate things like keyword optimization, backlink profiles, structural issues, and external signals. These audits give you a baseline view of your site’s SEO health.
Keyword research
Online tools can also help you research keywords that prospective customers are searching for, providing information like keyword volume and difficulty. This can serve as a starting point as you identify the topics and themes that will direct your content strategy.
Content analysis
Analyze your site’s content library to identify gaps, redundancies, internal linking issues, readability, and more. While useful, basic content analysis tools have key limitations such as surface-level insights, context blindness, and limited customization capabilities. For larger brands with extensive legacy content, more sophisticated solutions are needed.
Technical SEO analysis
Is your website mobile-friendly? How fast do your pages load? Is the structure easy for search engines to crawl? These are the types of insights produced by a technical SEO audit, for which tools like Google Search Console and Screaming Frog can be handy. However, prioritizing and implementing these fixes is a more complex undertaking.