So, what exactly is SEO analysis (Search Engine Optimization)?
More importantly, how can you use SEO to increase your digital presence and drive more visitors and sales to your website? (Hint, it’s not magic.)
I believe SEO is pretty simple.
In this article, we’re going to pull back the curtain and take you through everything you need to know about SEO, why it’s important to understand SEO, and how you can use it to gain a competitive edge over your competitors.
What is SEO analysis?
Starting with the very basics, SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”.
Search engine optimization is—just as it sounds—the process of optimizing your site and content for search engines like Google.
You do this because the better a post is optimized for a search engine, the higher it will rank in Google and the more visibility it will have in search results.
See, we told you it was easy!
Read More: Manage your readers’ expectations to reduce the average bounce rate of your posts
Why is SEO analysis important?
If you’re involved in online work in any shape or form, from NFT websites to SaaS companies to content marketing agencies, you’ve either been offered SEO services or heard about how important SEO is.
The SEO industry is estimated to be somewhere in the region of $79 billion (give or take a few billion).
If this sounds like a crazy number, it is because it is. SEO is with some of the biggest industries in the world—and for good reason.
Just think of this: billions of people are searching every day, and every search you make on your site is valuable to you.
When SEO is done well, the ROI on the investment of time and money can be incredibly high. Once you achieve a high rank for keywords that are driving traffic and sales to your site, you are effectively getting “free” leads.
Of course, it’s not free in every sense of the word, as you’ll be investing time and possibly money into your SEO efforts.
But compared to paid advertising, organic traffic is a free source of traffic that keeps paying.
The 10 Most Important SEO analysis Ranking Factors
We have explained what SEO analysis is and why it is so important. You are probably now wondering exactly how you can better optimize your site.
This is a long topic that could span several volumes; Google uses over 200 ranking factors to determine which sites will appear in their search results.
Don’t worry, though. All these signals are not treated equally. In fact, many of them either won’t be relevant to you, or you don’t need to spend time on them.
Generally speaking, there are three key areas of important ranking factors that you should familiarize yourself with:
On-Page Ranking Factors: These are related to your page content. Things like keywords, title tags, and images give Google a good idea of ​​what your page is about
Off-page ranking aspects: These connect to calls outside of your sites, such as backlinks and sociable movements.
Technical ranking factors: These are related to your site’s performance, such as mobile compatibility, accessibility, load speed, and more.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at 10 important SEO analysis ranking factors that will make a huge difference in your rankings:
1. Make sure your site is secure and accessible
As with most things, you need to start off on the right foot. In Google’s view, this means presenting them with a secure site that is easy for their spiders to crawl.
Having a secure site means installing an SSL certificate. This adds “HTTPS” to the beginning of your URL, as opposed to unprotected site URL structures that only have “HTTP”.
Having a valid SSL certificate encrypts all data transferred to and from your site
This is a huge factor in reducing the risk of being hacked and is a ranking signal because it implies trust.
Another technical SEO aspect that you need to get right from the offset is making sure that search engines can crawl your site. If your site isn’t visible to search engines, you won’t appear in search results, no matter how amazing your content is.
To accomplish this, you must make a robot.txt file. This file tells Google where it can find all the data on your site
The most straightforward way to do this is by employing an SEO analysis plugin. YoastSEO is the most popular SEO plugin on the market and will ensure that your site is easily crawled and indexed.
2. Mobile Responsiveness
Most users access Google from a mobile device. As a consequence, Google currently uses mobile-first indexing when indexing and rating a page.
This means it’s essential to check that your site loads correctly on mobile and is easy for mobile users to read and navigate. Actually, if your site peeks and crowds correctly on a desktop, your rankings will sorrow if you can’t say the exact about the mobile version.
A mobile responsive theme is a must. Checking that text appears large enough on small screens, navigation buttons are easy to press, etc.
3. Keywords and SEO analysis
We can’t stress enough how important it is to do keyword research and target the right keywords for your blog topics. This is one of the most important ranking factors, yet it’s an area that most people get wrong.
Keywords are search terms that people type into Google when they are looking for something. Your goal is to deliver content that aligns as closely with their search intent as possible.
Before writing an article, you need to identify the main keywords you want to target. Then you should list some secondary related keywords.
Finding and optimizing a page for the right keywords is something that gets easier with practice. It’s also essential that you use a good keyword tool, such as GrowthBar.
Your customers won’t always search for the same phrases and ask the same questions you think.
Without a keyword tool to verify that keywords have search volume, and more importantly, they’re not too competitive to target, you’re doing guesswork.
GrowthBar is an SEO tool for keyword research, SEO insights, content creation, and more.
4. URL, title, and header tags
After you know the keywords you want to optimize your content for, you need to know where to use them to help search engines understand that you’re optimizing your content for them.
Search engines place a lot of weight on a page’s URL and title and title tags. This means including your keywords, your article title, and meta tags in your page URL.
5. Images and Alt tags
Images serve a variety of SEO analysis-related purposes, as well as enrich a piece of content for visitors.
When searching on Google, you’ve seen images pop up, right? Not just under the “Images” tab, but also within the “All Results” page.
That’s because Google, and people, love images. Visuals often have higher click-through rates than text—if the images are highly relevant to a searcher’s intent.
You should always use a lot of quality images in a piece of relevant content. It’s also important to add your keywords to the alt text for each image.
Remember, Google is basically a bot that crawls text and code. It can’t see and interpret images (yet). Alt text tells Google what an image is and what keywords to rank for it
6. User Experience and SEO analysis
You should always strike a balance between writing for search engines and writing for people.
User experience is a ranking factor because Google measures how users interact with a page, and they test it themselves using something called “RankBrain.”
RankBrain is part of Google’s core algorithm, which uses machine learning to try to replicate a visitor’s experience with a page.
They use these signals to help rank pages based on the quality of that experience.
7. Core Web Vitals and SEO analysis
Core Web Vitals is the latest update that Google has announced that will affect the ranking factor.
Due to be released in May 2021, Core Web Vitals measure a user’s first impression when viewing a page. More specifically, how quickly the page loads, how quickly and easily it is interactive, and some other metrics around the layout of the page.
In short, pop-ups, intrusive ads, scrolling elements, and anything else that hinders the user experience are expected to cause a negative ranking.
Key Web Vital Google Ranking SEO Source: Google Search Central
Source: Google Search Central
8. Topical relevance and interlinking
A site’s topical relevance is a huge ranking factor. Figuring out how to get to the point where search engines “trust” you as an authoritative source in your niche is difficult. However, this is something you should always keep in mind and work towards.
To increase your topical relevance, you need to create a lot of content around a topic, interlink your articles well, and improve your site’s overall authority by attracting links and increasing your traffic.
At the page level, topical relevance relates to how relevant the content is to target keywords.
At the site level, Google considers all of a site’s content to determine the site’s expertise in a particular topic. You can help yourself by using the topic cluster model to organize your content.
Read More: SEO tools for backlinks that will help you get high-quality free!
9. Social cues SEO analysis
Social signals consist of links and visitors directed to your site from social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
While the number of links or shares across social media is not a direct ranking factor, there are many positive metrics that influence rankings, such as increased visitor engagement from traffic that finds your site through social media, increased potential backlinks, and overall increased exposure to your site.
It’s definitely worth putting some marketing effort aside to promote your content on social media.
10. Backlinks and SEO analysis
Backlinks are always one of the strongest ranking factors. A link from another site pointing to your site can greatly affect where that page or your site ranks in search results.
Admittedly, backlinks aren’t as powerful as they used to be. Also, how Google considers backlinks has altered a lot over the years.
There is definitely a trend toward high-quality backlinks from relevant sites being given more “weight”.
Gone are the days when you can take backlinks from any site and push a keyword into the search results!
The best links are from sites that are in the same niche or niche as you When a site like this chooses to link to a piece of your content, it sends a signal to Google that your content is worth recommending.
Understanding Black Hat and White Hat SEO
While talking about different SEO techniques, we need to touch on the good and the bad. Like most marketing strategies, there are ways to take shortcuts or break the rules in SEO .
First, we do not advocate anything but fair play and fair play. Fines for breaking the rules can be devastating, and it’s not the right way to build a business that your customers will trust.
That said, here’s a brief explanation of the “black hat” and “white hat” SEO terms you’ll no doubt hear from time to time.
Black Hat SEO and SEO analysis
Black hat SEO is the practice of “gaming the system” by manipulating search engine algorithms to rank higher in search results.
With huge financial gains on the line for higher rankings, some SEO practitioners will, unfortunately, do whatever it takes to get their site ranked higher.
We are not going into detail on Black Hat SEO. This is a short-sighted, unethical practice that puts a site at risk of being penalized and eventually deindexed.
It is important to be aware of what Black Hat SEO is though.
If you ever find yourself working with an SEO consultant or agency and get an uneasy feeling about their tactics, you can check Google’s terms and conditions.
Not only is practicing white hat SEO the right thing to do, it is also going to yield the best results in the long run.
Like it or not, Google has the largest market share of any search engine. As of July 2020, Google handled 86% of all search queries. Bing ranks second with only 6% of all online search queries
When we talk about SEO in this article, we always refer to White Hat SEO.
This is the only way to increase your site’s visibility online and build a sustainable business in our eyes.
Google Ranking Using SEO
Conclusion
We hope you enjoyed this introduction to SEO. Those three letters, S-E-O, should feel a lot less intimidating now.
At its core, SEO analysis is really simple, right?
SEO is always changing, though, so it sounds like you’re not really on top.
However, if you follow best practices and optimize your site for as many ranking factors as possible, you will see your digital presence improve.
