SEO Analysis
Guide to Website Analysis
What are search engines?
Search engines are digital tools that connect internet users with websites. Their primary task is to discover, understand, and organize internet content to present users with the most relevant and optimal search results. Search engines are essential for ensuring that your content is found and viewed by users online.
What does an effective SEO analysis entail?
An effective SEO analysis involves a thorough examination of a website's visibility and performance in search engines. It includes assessing technical aspects, optimizing content, analyzing keywords, and the presence of relevant external links. A comprehensive SEO analysis helps identify strengths and weaknesses, enabling website owners to make well-informed decisions about improvements and increase their online visibility and traffic.
Free SEO analysis
Google Analytics
A web analytics feature from Google that tracks and reports on how long users stay on a website, how many pages on the website users have read and much more. Via google analytics you can also get information about who is visiting your site.
Google Search Console
Is a tool from Google that provides webmasters and website owners with information on how their website is being indexed, as well as what needs to be done to optimize the page and its indexing.
Confirm you are the owner
To access these tools, features and data around your website, you must confirm that the website belongs to you. This is a requirement to protect a website's data from being disclosed to outsiders. So the first thing you need to do is verify your website.
Learn how to use Google Search Console
The Google Search Console is a great tool. Quite simply, because it helps you to view your website from Google's point of view, in terms of strengths, weaknesses and that in between. In short, it is a free tool that helps you monitor and maintain your website's organic presence in search results. Your organic presence is the presence you have achieved without paying for ads or the like.
However, the Google Search Console may seem confusing and unwieldy at first. There's a lot of data, but very little help or advice on how to actually fix the bugs or vulnerabilities that Google's Search Console has found on your site.
Nevertheless, having the Google Search Console at the top of the toolbox is a must. Especially because the Search Console gives you information that you will not find in Google Analytics. The challenge with the Google Search Console is that you need to know how to use the data that the Search Console holds about your website.
Using Google's Search Console, you can learn why your website performs well (or less well) in Google's organic search results. With the Search Console attached to your page, you have ensured that Google has access to your page data and content. Among other things, it helps you to spot spam content so that your page appears polished and un-infiltrated.
The console also helps Google's crawlers discover your content faster, and enables you to remove old content if necessary. The amount of data and information you can find about your website at Google Search Console is impressive. Here you will find information about website traffic, rankings, search results, page issues and redirection errors.
The Google Search Console initially seems like a steep hill to climb. However, after playing with its features for a while and figuring out what's up and down the console, it's not that difficult to handle at all.
Get started with the analysis
Well underway with the analysis
The next step after setting up Google's analytics tools is to get started.
Important analyzes to start with
Both Google Analytics and Search Console are invaluable tools when it comes to analyzing and improving your website, but they do so in two completely different ways. Where the Google Search Console is used to quickly get an overview of important improvements you can make regarding your performance on Google search results, Google Analytics will provide you with data and information on how effective your website is for visitors to your website.
Below you will find a number of important reports that you can use to ensure that your website and its content are most effective:
Search Console
Analytics
Improvements
Today, almost all of them use their mobile phones to research products and to quickly see what people are saying about the latest movie, restaurant, etc. Under improvements, you get a quick overview of whether your website is optimized for mobile. You can also get a list of which pages are not optimized and what is wrong with them. If you use Schema.org structured data, which is highly recommended, you will also be able to see here what will be the best possible optimization of your pages, and / or what errors need to be corrected.
Indexing
Most search engines can easily find all the pages you have posted, as long as you ensure that another page links to them. However, it is recommended to add a sitemap. With a sitemap, you can easily tell the search engines which pages you would like them to find, and via indexing report you get a quick overview of whether Google has accepted the page and if not, why?
Efficiency
The effectiveness report provides an overview of how your content is being received on Google. You can see which keyword is used to find you, which pages are found, how many clicks a page has received, and where your page is, on average, ranked across Google's national search engines. You can view data for up to 16 months backwards and easily compare results. As an example, you can compare the last 6 months with each other.
Link relationships
Pagerank is the basic element of Google's search algorithm, and thus one of the most important elements to keep track of. Pagerank, in short, is a ranking of your website measured by the amount of pages that link to your page. Every time a page links to your website it positively affects your page rank. The more links to your website, the better your website must be. Unfortunately, this system was quickly abused as it was possible to buy links or trade in them. The page ranking system was therefore cleaned up and a distinction is now made between good and bad links. Good links come from pages with good content, and bad links come from pages with spam. With the link overview, you can easily tell Google which links you accept and which you do not. Having too many spam links to your site can ruin your effectiveness.
Acquisition
Although the Google Search Console easily gives you data about the visitors your page receives through Google, you should not be content with using only search engines to drive traffic to your website. You can also get a lot of traffic to your website through email campaigns, social media and links from other websites. This report gives you an overview of the visits you receive via email campaigns, social media, links from other websites and on the visitors who come directly to your website.
Behavior
The behavior report reveals what your visitors are doing on your website. Specifically, the reports tell you which pages people are visiting and what actions they are taking while visiting. You get an overview of how much time is spent on each page, how fast the pages load, what navigation flow is usually used, so you can best optimize your content.
Audience
When you plan your content and set a goal for what you want to achieve with your website, you will find the audience overview extremely helpful. Here you can find information about age, gender, nationality, interests, etc. about the visitors. You can also see if the visitors are first-time visitors or returnees. You also have the opportunity to best see what technology is used to visit your site: mobile, tablet or desktop.
Conversions
An important part of Google Analytics that many unfortunately do not use is goal setups. With goal setups, you can get a quick overview of conversions. Some of the most important things to track can be things like: e-book downloads, the checkout page of a webshop, and how many visitors spend over 3 minutes on a particular blog page and more.