What to Look For in an SEO Analysis of a Website

By Harry Mackin

Conducting a thorough SEO analysis of a website provides much more than a list of keywords. An in-depth examination of your SEO strategy helps enhance every aspect of your brand’s marketing. It provides deep insights into what your ideal audience is looking for, and how you can provide it to them in a way they’ll notice.

To do that, SEO analysis has to go deeper than surface-level results. It has to carefully study the competition’s SEO strategies, the audience’s intent, and more. The next time you decide you need an SEO analysis of your website, look for a team of experts who can provide each of the following key steps:

An audit of your current SEO

An audit is the first step of any SEO analysis of a website. It’s a process that can be aided by some SEO tools that are available for free online.

An SEO audit provides a comprehensive overview of the current health of your on-site SEO. Auditing tools accomplish this by crawling your website and checking a combination of different content, on-page, and technical qualities that affect SEO against known best practices.

A few of the most common parameters evaluated during SEO audits include:

Technical SEO (such as page speed, mobile friendliness, crawlability, etc.)
Meta information (titles, descriptions, image tags, etc.)
Page and URL structure
Link structure (redirects, back and crosslinks, etc.)
Keywords and current keyword rankings
On-page content quality (length, readability, keyword inclusion, etc.)

Many auditing tools will assign “scores” for each of the SEO categories they’re checking against. These scores summarize how your site’s SEO measures up to best practices or your SERP competition.

Many tools also suggest quick methods for fixing common SEO mistakes to improve your scores. For example, most SEO auditing tools will point out if you have any pages that aren’t crawlable on Google and suggest ways you could correct that.

SEO audits can give you a broad idea of how effective your SEO looks right now and can point out ways to start improving it. What they can’t do, however, is contextualize the effectiveness of your SEO relative to your website’s unique needs and goals. To do that, you’ll need to dig a little deeper.

Keyword analysis

An audit tells you which keywords you’re currently ranking for; a keyword analysis begins to evaluate which keywords you should be ranking for.

Keyword analysis begins by evaluating your website to find the keywords relevant to your subject matter. For example, if your website’s goal is to promote your B2B brand’s services, then a keyword analysis would likely start by evaluating metrics such as: