A Website Analysis to Improve SEO: Metrics, Tips, and Steps

Imagine conducting a website analysis of your website to find out you have lost customers due to slow loading times. You also realize that the once-powerful keywords are losing their relevance. It’s no surprise, as you need to consider trends. 

After using website analysis tools to analyze your website and your competitors, you discover that their content strategy outperforms yours. Amongst other things, you found that your website wasn’t fully responsive and optimized for mobile. 

On a closer look at the nitty-gritty, you realize a couple of broken links and crawl errors on your website, affecting your rankings. 

Conversely, after fixing every issue, you start seeing results. Your website is gaining more traffic, and conversion rates have increased immensely. This scenario helps us see how website analysis can be a game-changer for SEO.

Website analysis is as vital as making customers happy. It is essential to weather the storms of the digital landscape as an online business. So, if you want to know what website site analysis is, the importance of website analysis, and key metrics to consider, keep reading!

What Is Website Analysis and What Role Does It Play in SEO

A website analysis is a process that involves evaluating your website’s performance. It helps you gain insights into your site’s overall health, speed, traffic, and user experience (UX) for search engine optimization. 

Consistency with your website analysis ensures you achieve your KPIs and remain relevant. To improve your website health, you should check website structure, content quality, user engagement, technical aspects, and overall performance. 

The Role of Website Analysis in SEO

You can have a website without SEO, but you can’t have SEO without a website. It shows how vital a website is to optimize for search engines; therefore, website analysis is the key to solid Search Engine Optimization (SEO). 

You can find improvement areas that impact your site’s SEO directly and indirectly through your website’s analysis. These areas may include target keyword relevance, content strategy, page speed, broken links, crawl errors, and page load times. Use keywords, technicality, content relevance, and UX benchmarks for your site analysis. 

If they work fine, your site will also function well for SEO. Another factor to consider is backlinks. Increasing your website’s backlinks can improve your ranking position significantly.

Key Metrics to Analyze for SEO Improvement

The following are vital metrics that you can use to analyze a website.

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic refers to the number of visits to your site through unpaid means, i.e., search engines like Google. It’s the traffic you receive without ad placement. Lately, the primary goal of SEO has been to increase organic traffic, and that’s where website analysis comes in. 

You can use website analysis to investigate keywords and determine if your website is relevant with tools like Google Search Console and SEMrush. 

Google Search Console is one of the best tools for tracking organic search performance. It can help you break down traffic sources and discover your progress over time.

Time on Page (ToP)

The time spent on the page dramatically impacts SEO as it shows your relevance. It’s the average amount of time users spend on a specific webpage. Without visitors spending time on your site, search engines like Google will think your content is not engaging and relevant, making them drop your ranking. 

You can also use Google Analytics to get the data on ToP, helping you identify pages holding visitors’ attention.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate also impacts SEO immensely. It’s the percentage of visitors who leave your site immediately after viewing only one page. 

If your bounce rate is high, it shows you need to improve your content and the user experience. It could indicate your content is less compelling, quality, engaging, or relevant. 

It may also indicate your site’s loading times, user experience, and technical issues. You can see the bounce rate of your website through Google Analytics to help you identify pages that need improvement.

Pages Per Session (PPS)

Pages per session is also a significant metric for SEO. It represents the average number of pages a user views on your website per visit. The higher, the better, reflecting user interaction with your site. Have you given your visitors a reason to stay on your site? 

Website analysis helps you understand the average number of pages viewed per session through Google Analytics. This way, you can tell if your website content is relevant. Another factor contributing to this is UX. 

If your website is challenging to navigate, it will be hard to view other pages. You can survey to find out what is causing a low PPS.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is one key metric that does not directly affect SEO but shows that your SEO is well done. It’s the percentage of visitors who take desired steps like purchasing, filling out a form, or signing up for a newsletter.

It’s calculated by dividing the number of actions by the number of visitors. If your conversion rate is high, your content is relevant, and the user experience is also great. This will likely increase your organic traffic.

Identifying and Fixing On-page SEO Issues on Your Website

Firstly, you need to find the on-page SEO issues with your website before fixing them. 

Let’s show you how to do that in the following paragraphs.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is one of the major SEO issues that online stores tend to experience. It may look minute, but it impacts SEO significantly. It’s a case of having pages on your site with similar content. 

When two pages of the same website are identical or near identical, Google gets confused about which is original, so it ranks neither of them. 

Some real-life examples of duplicate content include the following:

• Blog posts with similar content and search intent;
• Product pages with similar content on an eCommerce store as a result of identical product descriptions. 

You can use tools like Siteliner to find which two or more pages have similar content. Next, create a list of all the pages with duplicate content and prioritize them. 

If you don’t want to delete any page, you must update the content on at least one. Otherwise, you can delete the less important duplicate pages. The best way to solve the identical content problem is to avoid it. 

Broken Links

Several broken links from your website can affect every aspect of your business and SEO. Imagine visitors clicking on a link that keeps showing Error 404; of course, it will likely frustrate your customers. Also, your website ranking will suffer if Google and other search engines cannot index your links. 

You can find out which pages have broken links through tools like Screaming Frog, which provides detailed and hands-on SEO audits, including a broken link report. This way, you can find broken links and fix them immediately. 

Poor User Experience

User experience is affected by several factors concerning SEO. Therefore, a generally poor user experience likely means poor SEO too. 

Factors like website loading time, broken links, content quality, and website navigation affect user experience, which affects Time on Page, Pages Per Session, and Bounce Rate — all of which impact SEO. 

The best way to correct poor user experience is to do the following:

• Improve your website layering and navigation. Make your site simple and easy to use by decluttering and removing distractions.
• Use relevant and exciting content to compel your audience.
• Identify objectives you are trying to achieve when people visit your website.
• Address technical issues that affect user experience.

While it is essential to optimize keywords, keeping your focus on readers is also non-negotiable. To do so, pay attention to search intent and meet your customers where they are. 

Poor Internal Linking

Another factor that impacts SEO that you overlook is internal links. Do you link to new posts through old content? If you haven’t, it is time to. 

The benefits of adding internal links include:

• Helping search engines like Google locate and index every webpage on your site;
• Helping readers find relevant articles they might have missed from browsing your site.

Google may not index your new pages immediately as there are millions of pages to index in minutes, so it is best to use an internal link to make your new pages crawlable. 

Robots.txt Issues

Several website owners have yet to learn that their websites cannot be indexed due to the robots.txt file. It’s a file based in the root directory of any website that instructs the search engine to index a page or not. 

SEO plugins like Yoast or Rank Math usually create robots.txt files. Check if you have the robots.txt file by using SEOptimer. Google Search Console has provided a step-by-step guide on how to fix the Robots.txt issue.

Analyzing and Improving Website Load Speed

With our emphasis on load speed, it would be weird not to discuss it. First, to determine your website load speed, visit Google PageSpeed Insights, input your URL, and click “Analyze.” 

You will receive the data you need for mobile and desktop versions of your site. A slow load speed can result from inefficient web hosting to large sizes of images or the website code. 

The following are some factors affecting a site’s load speed and how you can improve them.

Shared hosting

Shared hosting could lead to slow load time. When hosting a website on a shared server, other websites are likely uploading vast amounts of data, temporarily slowing down your site. 

The solution is to switch to a dedicated server. In a dedicated server, all the machine resources will be exclusive to your company.

Using large image sizes 

Another essential factor that impacts your website load time is the size of images. Heavy images will make your website difficult and slow to load on the user’s end as they take up significant storage space. 

Uploading small-sized but high-quality images is the best way to go. You only have to find compression tools online for this.

Not using a caching system

Caches are minor but temporary memory storage to store and access information faster. Good Content Management Systems have cache modules and plugins to improve web page load speed. 

You can also install a Content Delivery Network (CDN), whose main job is to deliver internet content to users based on location. They improve the performance, speed, and reliability of delivering content to end-users.

Slow network

It is not you; it is them. Yes, it could be your user’s poor network. You can implement lazy loading for images and other non-essential resources. 

Lazy loading will defer the loading of these elements until they come into the user’s viewport, improving initial page load times.

Redundant Redirects

Redirects add round trips to the server and can significantly impact load times, especially on slower networks. 

Try reducing the number of redirects on your website to fix the issue. 

Improving User Experience to Boost SEO

An intense SEO audit and website analysis can identify what UX-related opportunities you might miss, such as load time, meta descriptions, content relevance, mobile responsiveness, site structure, and keyword optimization. 

Let’s look at ways to improve user experience to impact SEO positively.

Implement responsive design 

Many websites neglect mobile responsiveness, but most users use their phones to browse. Therefore, a mobile-responsive website is essential to increasing your rankings. 

The following are ways to help improve website design for mobile:

• Use fluid layouts adaptable to various screen sizes and resolutions.
• Incorporate larger buttons and swipe gestures.

Regularly conduct mobile tests following website updates to see if your website remains adaptable to mobile screens. Also, consider a mobile-first approach, designing the website for mobile devices first, then scaling up for desktop screens.

Improve website structure

This is one of the most prominent factors influencing UX. A poorly layered site structure makes site navigation difficult for users. Unordered menus, illogical page hierarchies, and broken links will endlessly frustrate users and the search engine.

Additionally, an incohesive site structure discourages users from exploring more pages. Once they visit a page on your website and are dissatisfied with the experience, they will likely leave your site immediately. 

Search engines monitor user behavior, and a low bounce rate suggests that your site provides valuable content. This can positively influence search rankings. To improve site structure, use a site map, create a logical hierarchy, use breadcrumbs, and implement straightforward navigation.

Create relevant content

Nothing beats relevant content. If you have been consistent with relevant content, your site visitors can understand even when the speed is slow. This is because consistently offering your audience captivating, original content has positioned you as an authority in your field. 

Relevant content isn’t limited to blog posts. Imagine going to the About Us page only to see product info. That’s not relevant.

Conducting a Backlink Analysis for SEO Enhancement

To improve your off-page SEO efforts, you should analyze how many sites link to your site with their content. Since backlinks are links from other websites to your website, they are essential for your overall SEO strategy. 

The more quality backlinks you have, the more likely you will rank as number one. You can use tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz Pro’s Link Explorer for comprehensive backlink analysis. 

Let’s explore the general steps for backlink analysis:

• First, use a reliable backlink analysis tool like Semrush Backlink Checker Tool to obtain a list of your backlinks and other relevant information.  
• Assess the quality of each backlink by checking the site’s authority and industry relevance. A higher site authority indicates to the search engine that you are highly credible and relevant, hence having a more significant impact on your SEO. 
• Check the anchor texts interlinked with the backlinks. A long-form keyword anchor text is suitable.
• Compare your backlink performance with your competitors to see opportunities you have missed with your backlinks and outperform them.

Use the Google Disavow Tool to remove your links from low-quality or spammy sites. It would help to have a diverse backlink profile for a healthy SEO strategy. 

Tracking and Monitoring Website Analytics for Continued SEO Boost

There are several tools to continually track and monitor website analytics for SEO boost, but we will focus on the Google Analytics tool. With GA, you can track website performance, collate visitor data, assess marketing activity success, and spot user engagement data. 

First, you should connect Analytics to Google Search Console to see the whole picture, according to Leadhub‘s Kim Doughty. In his words, “After linking GA and GSC, use queries to identify opportunities for improvement with target keywords and the pages you want to rank for.”

Visit Google Analytics and go to Acquisition > Search Console > Landing Pages after linking both tools to discover the landing page to your website from Google. This will help optimize your site’s landing page.

Website Analysis Tools and Resources

The following tools will significantly help your website analysis and contribute to your SEO success. 

Semrush’s Domain Overview

The Domain Overview tool by Semrush helps provide details about a domain’s visibility. You can find info like paid search activities, backlink profiles, organic search traffic, and a bird’s-eye view of your main competitors. 

All you have to do is input the domain URL, then hit “Search.”

Google Search Console

Google Search Console helps you monitor your website and issues that arise from it (for example, indexing problems). 

In this tool, you can diagnose any irregularities that may affect SEO through its report pages:

• Performance report: Contains total clicks, average CTR, total impressions, and middle position
• Page Indexing report: Displays which pages Google can find and index and indicates any related issues 
• Links Report: Tracks the backlinks to your site

You will likely receive an email if your website develops any issues, according to Google Search Console, so you should check daily. 

Google Analytics

Google Analytics will show your traffic and the website visitors’ activities. 

To see the SEO performance data that you need, head on to “Acquisition”> “Traffic Acquisition” and head on to Acquisition”> “Traffic Acquisition”> “Referrals” to discover your primary traffic source.

Semrush’s Site Audit

The Site Audit tool by Semrush helps analyze and identify technical SEO issues like broken links, poor load speed, security challenges, and on-page SEO inefficiencies. 

To do so, head on to the tool, create your first project, and set up an audit.

The Role of Regular Website Analysis in Long-term SEO Growth

Over time, a continuous website analysis will massively impact SEO growth. Firstly, your website will likely increase in Google’s Search Engine Page, impacting organic growth. You will probably see an increase in your overall user experience and an improvement in content strategy. 

Continuous website analysis guarantees that you are targeting relevant keywords, which increases your website’s visibility. Metrics like average time on page, conversion rate, and page per session should also see improvements. 

Overall, website analysis prevents you from getting frustrated with guesswork and helps you to save time to focus on what is more important.