Categories: SEO

How to Perform Website Analysis for SEO- SEO Audit Guide

If you start working as an SEO Analyst at a company or if you receive inquiries to create and implement an SEO campaign on a company’s website when you work as a freelancer, the first step you need to take is doing a website analysis also known as SEO Audit for the company’s website and make a report/proposal on your findings. A website analysis shows the position of the website initially before starting the SEO campaign and it can be used to compare later.

As a matter of fact, an SEO website analysis report also saves the headache both for the SEO Analyst and the company requesting the campaign because an SEO Audit report shows the areas which can take time and also be used to monitor the progress of the SEO campaign.

When doing a website analysis, there are four most important universal tasks to be done:

  • Reporting on the current state of the website- as regards to its visibility on Google, the achievements, the type of inquiries it must be receiving at present
  • Check the age of site as well as how it performed in the previous years
  • An internal analysis of the site
  • Preparing the final report

Pointing out recommendations in your report will help the company take full advantage of the internet marketing potential.

Here I give you the ultimate, most comprehensive guide to performing SEO Audits/ conducting a website analysis prior to formulating an SEO campaign. Since I want to educate all the beginners as well as point out new insights to the experts both together, this post is going to be a detailed one but I assure you the long read will be worth it!

In this post, I will be discussing all the bits and fragments of a website that’s to be analyzed during an SEO Audit, the contents of a website analysis report and I will be giving you the bonus of telling you which SEO tools you can use to analyze the various aspects of the website- something I guess no SEO blogs have been informing you about.

Part 1 of Website Analysis for SEO- Checking a website’s overall performance in Google

As part of doing a website’s SEO Analysis, you need to check a website’s performance in Google. It shows your website’s position and ranking on Google, as well as the factors contributing to such rankings.

Part 2 of Website Analysis- The website age and its performance in the past

Even if knowing the age of website has no significance of its own, it can work wonders to make impressions on your employers. It can also help you know when the site was started and the keywords and headings used on the site’s content previously.

Suppose you get an enquiry wherein the owner of the website tells you that he was receiving a lot of enquiries/having higher conversion rate before, going through the previous version of the website can make you understand the keywords which led to conversion.After that you can formulate optimized content strategies for the website.

How to check the age of a website? If you have installed the SEOBook toolbar on your Mozilla Firefox browser, click on the “Archive.org site age” button when you are on the site. Alternately, you can go to http://web.archive.org/web/*/example.com, from your browser and a data which looks like a calendar appears. If you click on the dates marked in blue, you can get a screenshot of the site as on the date. So, the catch is to go to the oldest date available by clicking on the year and then the first date marked in blue. There, you get the oldest, the first version of your website! Interesting, right?

Part 3 of Website Analysis- A complete internal analysis for the website

A complete internal analysis of the website is mandatory if the company is planning to go for an SEO campaign. A website’s internal analysis reveals the underlying errors in its design and structure. One of the best tool to analyze all the internal aspects of a website is the GTMetrix tool. Besides offering a detailed comprehensive overview of the website’s structure, it has a grading system that gives you scores on the various aspects of the website. It also gives you suggestions as to how you can optimize or fix certain issues like page speed. Here is a sample analysis report from GTmetrix.com for Softloom IT Solutions.

Part 4 of Website Analysis- Presenting the Website Analysis/ SEO Audit Report

The last and most important step is making a report on the website’s SEO Analysis. A well presented SEO Report is key to getting hired or convincing your boss that you are one smart SEO Analyst!

Make sure you support all the facts and findings in your report with appropriate screenshots. Also make recommendations or suggestions as to what you will be doing to improve the site’s performance as well as its rankings. So here I give you brief list of contents that form part of a brilliantly prepared SEO Website Analysis Report:

  • Your company profile:Name of your company(or your name), title of the report as well as the date on which you created the report.
  • The profile of the company you are reporting for:Name of the company, URL of the companys website, Webpage title
  • Page Authority and Domain Authority
  • Google Visibility:Number of pages indexed on Google.
  • Alexa Rankings
  • Bounce Rates
  • Daily Page Views
  • Average time spent on site
  • Links Analysis:Number of backlinks to the website, the number of domains and root domains
  • Reputation Analysis:The anchor text of the backlinks coming into the website
  • Internal Analysis:PageSpeed score, YSlow score, Page Load Time, Total Page Size, Requests, Broken Links if any
  • Page Speed Improvement recommendations:Leverage browser caching, G Zip compression, CDNs, scaling and optimizing images, custom 404 not found error page, defer parsing of JavaScript, whichever is applicable
  • SEO Recommendations:Optimizing the URL, title tags, headings and meta tags of the website; adding Alt tags for images on the companys website, XML sitemap generation for easy crawl-ability by Google bots, mobile optimization of the website, creating a company page on the social media sites if not done yet.

An SEO audit report comprising all these ingredients is sure to impress the person reading it if it’s presented in a simple but catchy design. Don’t forget to add screenshots wherever required. A picture speaks 1000 times better.

SEO Tools for conducting a Website Analysis/ SEO Audit Tools

I hope my post has helped you with conducting an effective website analysis as an SEO professional. Why not let me know in the comments section? If you have any doubts, leave me a reply and I promise to answer your queries swiftly!

For more awesome SEO tips and website analysis posts, stay tuned to our blogs!

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Maryam Marjan