The adage goes, “The first step to fix a problem is to not only realize there is one but also admit there is one.” When it comes to your website or your business, if you are not getting traffic, there is an apparent problem as you are missing out on a vast market share. The next and proper step is to “analyze” your current results and see what you are doing incorrectly and, surprisingly, correctly. Website analysis is a critical first step after realizing a shortage in your website traffic. When analyzing your website, you can draw a blueprint for solving this terrible problem and create a terrific solution. Search engines are a very controversial commodity in marketing, we recommend understanding how SEO works to get your head in the game.
In this article, we will briefly go over simple and easy steps for website analysis. Hopefully, by the end of this article, you will begin to think about a blueprint of success for yourself. We review different means of Website Analysis and your basic Website Design & Experience. After the basics are covered, we go over what to analyze and what is working and isn’t on your website, and then shortly after, we will go over how you are doing outside of the website. Doing website analysis and even website SEO analysis carefully can make you go a long way in your journey to more customers at your doorstep. Let’s get started!
Getting Started on Tracking Website Performance
Getting started on your website analysis is complicated as many unknowns stand in your way. Where does it start, and where do you go? It is a complex area to explore in your journey to getting more traffic. The first step is to analyze how to check your rankings on Google and other search engines we cover in this article. Right here, several options can help you get in the right direction. We have a lot of recommendations, and there are flexible budgetary options, including free ones, to accomplish drafting your blueprint. When you find a place to check your rankings, you can begin to see how you and your competitors are doing at a glance. You may even be delighted to find out that you might be ahead a little bit and need to make some minor fixes to get ahead of the game.
When choosing the auditing software of your choice, make sure it works for ease of use, budget, and what makes you feel most comfortable. It is even okay to use more than one; in fact, we highly recommend it. It is better to have one source telling you what direction you are in than just simply one source. There are many choices in Website Auditing Software. This step needs to be done carefully to stick to your plan.
Understanding how to check stats such as Keywords, Backlinks, Site Health, and more is also an education worth discussing. Later in this article, we will briefly review these essential items covering your Website Success. First and foremost, we need to dive into just the basics. Solving some of these fundamental problems may make what seems complex Website Site Health SEO Fixes disappear.
Basic Overall Website Interface & Experience
I want to open this portion of this step of website analysis with just a few questions. These questions might just be that “aha” moment that can help you get along your way to fix your website today. You might be delighted to find out that there are easy solutions to what may seem like complex problems that may seem “unsolvable.” But let me assure you that you have infinite resources and prowess to get what you want. If you want more traffic, then all you have to do is ask and the internet shall give you all you need to answer the questions.
Just a Few Questions About Your Website?
- Does Your Website Load Faster than a Second?
- How About Your Mobile Speed? Is it fast on a phone or a tablet?
- What about how your site looks on all devices? Is the design proportionate on all devices from your Desktop Screen down to your Mobile Phone Screen?
- On the top-left on your browser on your website, does it have the “Secure” Message on your website URL? In other words, is it Http://www.yourwebsite.com or is it https://www.yourwebsite.com?
- Do you have more than just a few sentences of copy/verbiage on your Home Page? Or other pages?
- Does your copy actually help your customers solve their problems? It just doesn’t scream “pick me” in every possible way?
- Do you have good navigation on your website where your viewers can easily get around to the key pages on your website?
- Does your website have Proper Meta data such as JSON-LD or Meta Titles, and valid Descriptions?
- Do you have a focus keyword on your pages?
- Do you have less than 160 characters on your Meta Descriptions?
- Is your JSON-LD Valid?
- Do you have a Valid Sitemap?
- Do you have Alt-Text on your images?
- Are you adhering to Website Accessibility Standards?
- Do you have an easy means of Contact or Ordering Online?
- Are you using Tools like Google Analytics, Tag Manager, Search Console and more Webmaster Tools?
Take a Gander Before You Continue
If you have said no or I do not know to any of these questions, we might want to suggest either you look into it, or that you fix these problems right away before jumping to the next section. These are just basic needs that make a website successful on a fundamental level. We will bring up some of these points in your Site Health Report below. When presenting your business to your customers, you want to be the choice option. You want people to buy from you, and you know as a buyer yourself, you don’t want a website out of whack screaming ‘pick me’ on almost every sentence. You want to connect to your customers and give them an excellent overall experience.
The same can be said about Google and other search engines. If your website is not presentable to your current customers, how might you think Google will feel about your website? Even if you put good copy and you are not solving other critical problems, the problem will still be resolved. The reason is that you need good “Website Health” to get better results from Search Engines for organic traffic. You want to give everyone a good experience to get you sales and organic sales acquisition opportunities. Lets talk about this next step of website analysis for your blueprint, Website Health.
On-Page SEO Site Health
If you presented your website to Google and other search engines, how would they feel about your website if they were human? Do you think they would find it “better” than how your competitors present themselves? In discovering your Site Health during your website analysis, you might find some of the things that will make you stand out better than your competition. Application of the fixes will do wonders the next time you present your website to search engines.
Your choice of Website Auditing software or more can provide you with the guide that you need to succeed. Your Site Health Score will be shown to you within minutes by some auditors, depending on the size of your website. Once you get your score, the work begins! Remember the questions we have mentioned above? If you have not addressed the above problems, you might see them come to you as “errors,” “warnings,” or even “notices” to improve your website. The good news is that if you picked a great Site Auditor, you will even get cueues on how to fix each issue on your website. We recommend jotting down the errors and taking care of those right away before handling your Warnings and Notices.
Errors, Warnings, Notices and Your Score
Website Errors are serious problems for your website and they are major factors of why you might not be getting traffic. Errors might include Slow Page Speeds, HTTPS (your security padlock) not resolving, not having a Sitemap, Duplicate Content and more. These would be top priorities to take care of when done with your Analysis. Warnings should also be taken seriously and solved at your earliest convenience. Warnings might include your Meta Description being too long, your content being “too short”, or even Alt Text not showing on your images.
Notices are typically more minor problems but still worthy ones to solve. They might include pages taking more than three clicks to navigate to, pages that are intentionally blocked from crawling, or even that some pages are not internally linked to. Do not sweat on all of the details on these items, as the Site Auditing software should explain it well, and even if it doesn’t, we will be more than glad to help.
The score is hard to benchmark as there are several industry benchmarks. We recommend going where the top 10% of websites aim for. The top 10% of technicallly ranked websites aim at the Site Health Score of 92% or above. That has been quite the sweet spot for us and our website clients. Now that we have covered getting your Site Health Scores, lets go into the next common thing every one gets excited about, how are you ranking.
Organic Traffic Analysis
If we were to look at your overall website organic search results, it can be difficult to understand at face value. Right here is where the numbers come out and immediately, it becomes near impossible to understand. We will walk you through each step of the way to help you understand better on how to analyze your current website traffic. Website traffic analysis is another massive piece to your website analysis.
Your Website Traffic Analysis
Now that you have your “Organic Search” or “Traffic Report”, lets quickly diagnose this. The Keywords are just basically how many “search queries” you are ranking in the Top 100 results on Google and other search engines. Traffic is guestimated traffic based on your position and volume of users that look up that query or keyword. Traffic cost is basically the guestimation of how much money you are saving by simply organically ranking for the keywords you are ranking for. Branded traffic are keywords that customers actively search by your company name on Google and other search engines. Non-Branded traffic are just keywords that are not relative to your brand, but are broad.
Now that we have gone over the basics of your Organic Search Report, let’s dive into the important pieces of information: your top-rated keywords.
Keyword Analysis
Lets go over Keyword Analysis. As we discussed, there are huge variations of statistics that may seem overwhelming at first but are much easier to understand when following them carefully. Auditors like SEMRush offers Position Change analysis, making it much easier to know if you are in the right direction or not. You can see how many keywords you have earned, lost, declined in rankings or increased in rank position.
We will go carefully through eash piece of the stats surrounding a keyword. You have the keyword itself which is a keyphrase or query that someone is actively looking up on search engines. Then, there is the intent, whether it is informational, transactional, commercial, or navigational. Intent is very important when dictating types of pages and how you present yourself. You then have the position of the keyphrase. Following that, you have the amount of guestimated traffic you get from that keyword, then its monthly volume of users that actively searches that phrase.
After the volume, you have the percentage of difficulty that it is to rank for the keyword. After that is the URL or link of your website page that is ranking for that keyword, and lastly, the SERP it is on and the updated date of when it was last checked.
That was a mouthful, but long story short, the more keywords you rank for, the more organic traffic will come to your website. It is only a matter of time when those traffic members become paying customers. Let’s talk about the organic traffic analysis.
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic on Website Analysis 9 times out of 10 are mainly guestimated. The only “actual” traffic that is captured is on Google Analytics and other Webmaster Tools. It is essential to understand this, because people feel doom and gloom when they are on low numbers but still get traffic from other sources anyways. That is one of the reasons why we asked earlier if you had Google Analytics and related tools installed on your website. It is a way to get a definite answer.
When it comes to your organic traffic guestimated by Website Analysis software, it is based on their tribulations of how much traffic share you get based on the position of where you rank on a keyword. Therefore, you can have all the keywords in the world. It is not be meaningful if your position is not high enough for your customers to see you in the broad daylight of the search engines. You need to fight for your keywords, and we recommend doing the next important thing in organic research, looking into your competitors.
Competitive Analysis
Now that you have looked into your own results, how are your competitors doing? If they are doing better, that can open many doors for you to chase towards getting the same or better glory they are getting. Most Website Analysis tools gives you an idea of who exactly are the “leaders” in your current market. They may be local businesses and you might need to outrank them to take on regional competitors. That continues so on and so forth.
What we recommend when doing Keyword & Organic Traffic analysis on your competitors, actually visit their website. When you are there, you may discover what they are doing better than your website, or how you are doing better than them. Take some notes on what they are doing, and see how you can make your website a better experience than their website. Its that simple, its just very time consuming.
On-Page Analysis Closing Notes
We have now covered briefly On-Page analysis or analysis of traffic on your website. This is a very big step , and a very time-consuming one to fix or improve. Therefore, now that you have a solid understanding on how to take care of this, you can start putting together a fantastic blueprint plan. In fact, this blueprint plan is going to take time and we want to take the time real quick to give you a massive importance in SEO and Website Success.
Nothing is ever done over night. Do not let this amount or even lack of amount of information make you feel overwhelmed. This is a marathon and never a sprint. If you want to do things right, you have to take one step at a time. Do not overwhelm yourself with this information. In fact, we encourage anyone taking the steps to make improvements to give themselves major “props” on themselves. You are doing something a lot of market competitors are not doing.
Seriously, Have Fun and Enjoy the Marathon
Next, don’t cheat. Take your time. Have fun and make it fun. This is your passion, this is your fire! This is what you have either sacrificed a ton of money for or worked endless hours to build. Make this a fun experience, because this is your passion and your joy in life! This portion is to let that passion come out to the world and let it be known. One of the biggest things that grabs customers is not only your ability to inform them and help them, but that they know you love doing it!
This is a lot of work, that’s what we are here for, but also what is necessary to succeed. In the next steps, we want you to know that this portion is a very long road. In fact, we recommend maintenance on whatever it is you improve or take note on improving for your On-Page or On-Website strategy after it is done and letting you reap the benefits. Next, you will be on another long marathon, and this is Off-Page SEO. Let’s go over how to see how you are doing on your Off-Page SEO.
Off-Page SEO Analysis
Think off-page as a term of anything that is not on your website. Think of it as referrals from other websites, social media profiles, and internet listings. These statistics are dictated by how well you represent yourself to other media outlets and websites around the web. The reward is actually very delightful, and you will be excited to see your traffic quadruple because of your efforts with Off-Page SEO.
Listings Management
Listings management is a great thing to look into during your website analysis as it tells you how well you are managing your listings. Great examples of listings can be Yelp, Google Business, Bing Places, the Better Business Bureau, social media, and more. If you have a good Listings profile, you have referring Domains of high magnitude listing on your Backlink Profile. This would be a massive score update to your Domain Authority.
Domain Authority
Domain Authority is a statistic in SEO that determines how likely your website is going to rank on the internet. To sum up Domain Authority, think of dissecting it to the human level. Let’s say Elon Musk is a highly authoritative person in the world, his DA if he was a website would be nearly 100. Wikipedia is a terrific example of high domain authority. Websites with high Domain Authority (DA) have not only a high amount of traffic but also a very impressive link profile.
Backlinks & Referring Domains
Your link profile is a massive piece of the puzzle. To analyze your Backlinks and Referring Domains, any website analysis company will tell you how to check your backlinks and referring domains. Backlinks are links on other websites that are referring to your website. Referring domains is a metric of what domains have these said backlinks. Referring domains have Domain Authority scores themselves. It is good to know the higher the authority of backlinks you receive and the number of backlinks from higher authoritative domains, the more traffic and authority you will have.
Backlinks are not easy to get. You need to communicate with other website owners to link your content on their website. It is an uphill battle when you are just starting out. Link building is very time consuming and takes a lot of time to get. If you cheat and buy your backlinks from referring domains, it is the equivalent to cheating on a test. Either you get caught and severely punished, or you do not learn anything from whatever you are testing on. Reach out, network, and get to know others in your community and industry and that will get you more “trust” and eventually, more authority and traffic.
Social Media
It is worth mentioning that you should have as much Social Media as you can handle. You want your business everywhere, otherwise, you are missing out on a huge market share of customers. If the content on your website is great and you do not have social media to share it on, then your efforts may not be as worth it. It is very important to know that having an effective social media strategy is a terrific strategy to your Off-Page SEO.
Putting it Together
Off-Page website analysis can be hard at first, but once you get through it like On-Page analysis, it gets pretty easy. All you have to do now is check on it regularly, and try to improve these statistics one at a time. We preferably do not recommend doing Off-Page strategies unless you are doing Listings, and Social Media. We highly recommend not promoting as much until you have fixed the Errors of your On-Page Website Analysis report. This is about presenting yourself to facilities different than search engines, but humans. Now that we have gone through each step, lets try to put together a plan.
Putting Together an Improvement Plan
Now that we have stats together and a list of improvements, it is time to take action! The best part of website analysis, is the discovery of direction! This is the end result we want because now we can go forth and attach the things that are getting in the way of business growth. In this step, it is essential to take things one at a time. We recommend taking care of the Basics of improving your website from the questions we left for you earlier. Then following the article one step at a time.
After you have done the basics and your Site Health, promoting your website on other faculties would be great. But your customers have A LOT of questions based on the problems you solve for them daily. We have noticed that over 80% of websites are mainly Commercial and Transactional. They do not really want to give the user means of discovery rather they are finding something they are looking for, or being informed on how it can help solve their problem. We highly recommend when you are ready to improve Organic Traffic that, you start writing articles like these yourself to put yourself out in the open market, answering your customer questions.
Keyword Research Makes Article-Writing So Much Easier
In fact, keyword research goes deeper than what we shared on organic research. The keyword metrics are the same, but you can easily find a topic to discuss with your consumers. It is that simple. Write content that connects with your customers and informs them on what they need to do. Do less of “you” and more about “them,” and you will eventually gain their trust. Gaining their trust will eventually make them your customers! We recommend sharing your content each time it is posted to all forms of Listings & Social Media you have to get traction everywhere. Following this, if you feel your content is good enough to be shared by other authoritative websites, reach out to these owners and network yourself.
Over time, you will start to see the reward.
Simplifying Your Blueprint
To simplify, here is what we recommend when taking action from your website analysis report:
- A huge pat on the back to you for taking the time and effort to improve your business!
- Make sure your answer is at least positive to all of the questions we asked you.
- Get your Site Health Score to a Minimum of 92% on your Site Auditing Software.
- Make sure your Errors, Warnings, and Notices are kept to an absolute bare minimum.
- Have an effective Keyword Targeting Strategy on Pages, Products, Category Listing Pages, and Articles on your Website.
- Make sure you have a great Listings Profile and great Social Media Marketing around your business.
- On your Listings (if applicable) and on Social Media, share your content as much as you can. Connect with as much customers and people as you can and inform, inform, inform! Promoting doesn’t hurt either, just don’t be like “pick me” all of the time.
- Start a Link Building Campaign and Network your way across the web and build your Authority.
The last piece of advice is probably the best one. You need to maintain all facets mentioned above and keep a growth margin every month! Once you are done, you need to make new benchmarks, even if you surpass everyone in your share market. Lets conclude about this Journey being worth it for you.
A Journey Worth Taking
This website analysis you have completed will give you all of the answers you need to make improvements. We think if you follow our recommendations, you will improve in the correct order of steps and increment more efficiently. Understand that you should not aim to complete all steps in one month, that it is going to take months if not up to a year to get to this level. This is not a sprint, but a worthy marathon taking. It is a journey or adventure that you will remember for the rest of your life. It will make you feel like you can accomplish anything.
The reason I am so optimistic about it is that we have seen it time and time again. It has transformed a business from $2.5 million dollars in lead acquisition opportunities to $50 million in 5 years. And that is just doing it at the minimum! The end result can have you in a new plane of life that not a lot of businesses or personalities can achieve on the internet. The other reason we are very excited about it is that you will save so much money for organically ranking on search engines. If you rank organically, you save the trouble of having to pay per click on each keyword on Google and other search engines which costs a lot of money. You will likely be discovered and as long as you deliver on a good experience, you will get better traffic acquisition and sales acquisition opportunities.
Concluding
We really hoped you enjoyed this article. We hope this article helps you improve your overall presence or at least gets you started. If it gets you in the right direction, leave us a comment or send us a message and let us know. We are passionate about websites and good SEO and Digital Marketing strategies. If it helps, share about it and tell all of your friends and family if possible. We want to help as much businesses or individuals as we can!
There For You During Your Journey
I would be remiss without mentioning my amazing team of digital professionals. The group is very passionate about building the Best Possible Websites paired with the fairest price. Better Websites Make Better Profits! We are no gimmick based agency, we just want to get things done and get you results! If you want more information, let us know, we are passionate about this and love this. We love helping other businesses succeed in the digital plane.
You can Contact Us today or give us a call at (440) 571-1011. We hope you have fun improving your website after you have done your website analysis.
