StatCounter Insights

Free Insights & Training in SEO, Web & Social Media

How to Perform an SEO Analysis

One of the best ways to determine the strengths and weaknesses of a website’s SEO strategy is to perform an SEO analysis. This involves using a several tools to dive deep into your website, your keyword rankings, your traffic, and other aspects of your SEO strategy. While you can do this manually using StatCounter’s metrics, there are a number of tools that can help you do this faster and more efficiently. Of course, a combination of both will allow to to closely monitor your website’s traffic, as well as the performance of your SEO strategy.

While you can utilize StatCounter and our web analytics to monitor web traffic and determine how visitors are interacting on site. However, an SEO analysis will dive deeper into these metrics as well as assess your website’s backlink portfolio and code to help identify areas of your strategy that are performing well, and areas that could use some attention. Now, allow us to explain what to look for when performing an SEO analysis and how it can benefit your strategy.

Importance of an SEO Analysis

Once you have developed a sound SEO strategy and implemented it on your website, you will need to track how it’s helped your website. For example, let’s say you wrote ten pages of content around various keywords for your business and indexed them on search engines. After a few weeks, you can analyze how these pages have helped drive more traffic to your website, and how they have impacted your keyword rankings.

Another aspect of your SEO strategy that you will want to analyze is the technical SEO work that you have performed for your site. This includes page load speed, conversion rate optimization, and coding work. Usually, you need a website developer to assist you in these tasks, but tracking the progress on the technical SEO side simply requires an in-depth analysis of the metrics provided by StatCounter.

Of course, content writing and technical SEO are just a few integral pieces of a sound SEO strategy. You will also need to check how many backlinks have been acquired for your website and how they have helped improve your website’s domain and page authorities. Luckily, there’s a broad list of SEO analysis tools that can help you in these endeavors.

SEO Analysis: Analyzing a Website

When it comes to performing an SEO analysis on your website, there are several aspects of your overall strategy you will need to consider. For starters, you’ll want to run a page load speed test on your site to determine if there are any coding or optimization issues that can be addressed on the backend of your site to improve your site’s layout and appearance. This can be something as small as optimizing images to load faster or minifying the CSS, JavaScript, or HTML coding. Keep in mind, page load speed is a key factor in user experience, which often directly affects your search engine rankings. In short, the load speed of your site is an important factor to consider.

Another aspect of your site to consider is the keyword rankings. These rankings can be monitored using a variety of keyword research tools, like Moz’s Keyword Explorer or SEMRush, to see if your website’s rankings have improved or dropped. Additionally, you can use Moz to analyze your website’s backlink portfolio to determine if any of your backlinks are spammy and need to be disavowed.

Finally, you can also use StatCounter’s analytics as part of your SEO analysis. When looking at your website’s traffic, see if you can notice a point in time where your traffic had a sudden increase or decrease. Take this date and cross reference it with your keyword rankings to see if an improvement in these rankings has played a role in your traffic change. We even allow you to look at the keywords that have driven the most traffic to your site, which can help you further improve your SEO Analysis and overall digital marketing strategy.

SEO Analysis Tips

While the info above can be of great use in performing an SEO analysis, there’s a few things to keep in mind as you do so to ensure you’re closely monitoring each aspect of your strategy. In performing a more effective analysis, you’ll be able to better gauge which tactics of your strategy are working, as well as those that aren’t. As you perform an SEO analysis for your website and current strategy, consider the following tips:

  • There’s no such thing as too much data. Use any tool you can and consider your findings from each. One tool may provide better results than another, but using both together could provide helpful insight. Plus, it’ll help ensure you’re not missing any important factors.
  • Make sense of your analysis findings. In other words, for any tool you use, keep your website open in another window, and look at each area of your site the tool references as you go along.
  • Always identify your competitors. With a good idea of who your competitors are and where they are ranking, you can narrow down your strategy and really see who you’re up against.
  • Consider how you can improve your social media presence. Without much room for debate, every business should have a Twitter or Facebook profile. Not only that, but you need to ensure you’re posting regularly and keeping your audience engaged. From here, you can see how your social media is contributing to site traffic, and how meaningful that traffic is.

Pro Tips

Remember, many of the tools you use for your own website can be used to determine the strategy of another, competing website. For instance, you can use SEMRush to see what kind of keywords your competitors are using and ranking for, which you can then employ in your own strategy. Simply enter the domain of a competitor in SEMRush and take a look at the list of keywords they’re ranking for. If the competitor is using keywords that apply to your business, consider building content around the same keywords.

Track Your Traffic Improvement with StatCounter

Once you have set up your StatCounter tracking code on your site, you’ll be ready to perform an SEO analysis. This will be different for every website and the metrics and key performance indicators that you focus on will depend on your business preferences. In getting started, keep a close eye on the aspects and factors mentioned above. From there, you can drill down deeper into your own strategy, as well as that of competitors, to find areas of your site in need of attention. Of course, you’ll also find which areas of your site and strategy are performing well.

If you ever need any assistance, you can contact us by filling out the form provided below.

Share this article

Understand your visitors with Statcounter

See why over 1,500,000 bloggers, web designers, marketing and SEO professionals and small business owners around the world use Statcounter to grow their business.

Learn More