Audit and Analysis is the first step to creating the roadmap for search engine optimization. Until you know the issues and requirements, you can’t make a plan. Being an SEO Consultant, you should always evaluate the website before and after SEO processes.
What to Analyse
Following are the things to analyse before starting the SEO.
Search Console Based Auditing
Search Console is Google’s free website audit tool. You can identify the issues related to the following elements:
- Title & Meta Tags: It tells the search crawler what the page is about. The search console let you know if any title is repeated on any other page.
- Internal Links: Internal links and their associated anchor texts are the first things the crawler considers to understand which pages are to be ranked with what keywords.
- Backlinks (Links to the website): PageRank is the signal that is decided by the number of links from other relevant sites to your websites. Backlinks help to build a strong PageRank. Many SEO Consultants emphasize backlinking only for the optimization process. But such rankings do not last long.
- Broken links: Broken links create 404 errors. If such issues are not fixed quickly, you can certainly lose the rank. Broken links create a bad user experience.
- 404 and 5XX server errors: 404 error is shown when the link is given to that page that doesn’t exist or is removed. 5xx errors are the group of errors. There are 502, 504, 524 etc errors that are linked to your hosting service providers. Under 5xx issues, your website visitors can’t access your website.
- Content Quality: Content should be relevant, informative, easy to understand and not copied from other websites.
Analytics bases Analysis
Google Analytics is a free tool that helps you understand the important metrics, based on user engagement on your website.
- Bounce Rate: The visit is called bounce if a user comes to your website and leaves without performing any action such as scrolling, clicking, downloading or spending some time. Bounce rate indicates your website’s experience to the user.
- Browser and OS compatibility: Always check if your website is performing equally good on all browsers and operating systems. If your website is not compatible with some browsers and OS you may lose the traffic and lead from the users of those OSs and browsers.
- Server Response Time: Server response time let you know how fast your webpage is being shown to the user.
- Page Loading Time: Page loading time let you know how fast your web page is opening. How fast all the elements (such as image, form, video, button etc) of your webpage are coming into sight.
- Avg Time on Page: How much time a user is spending on your webpage. It may vary from industry to industry.
Other Metrics to Analyse the Website Performance
- Page Elements
- Images: How fast your image is shown on the page. Use Alt and Title Tags with images. Image names play a great role in ranking.
- Buttons (Call to action): Button size, colour and location play important roles. Colours evoke emotions. Emotion leads the user to take the action. Colours as well as the message on the button colour can have a profound effect on people.
- Video: The message in the first few frames, quick loading, dimensions, duration etc play a major role. The message should be conveyed on priorities in initial frames. The video should be loaded quickly. Delay in loading the video will decrease the usability and user experience (UX). The dimension of the video should be according to the page. The page should not be stretched with the dimension of the video. The duration of the video is another important thing. Longer videos can distract your visitors. Shorter videos affirm the success of your conveyed message.
- Unused scripts: Unused scripts increase the loading time and response time. Remove that.
Audit and Analysis Tools
There are several Auditing and Analysis tools in the market. You can Google the tool names. PageSpeed, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, AHREF, SEM Rush, RankingMath, Woorank, RankWatch are some of the many tools that can help you analyse and audit your website.
Note: We shall keep adding the new tools to the list. You can send your suggestions to [email protected]