How Do You Analyse SEO Performance? 6 Tips from the Semalt Experts
Search engines are mysterious beasts. All-powerful gatekeepers of the internet, they need to ensure that they deliver only the highest quality and most relevant results to their users, lest they be pushed aside for other, better options.
In order to deliver such quality search results, a search engine needs to ensure that the exact algorithm they use to rank searches remains a closely guarded secret. After all, if an organisation knew the exact formula they could exploit it to climb the rankings.
On the flipside, search engines must give websites some indication of what will help them rank well, otherwise, everyone would be running around blind. As a compromise search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing have offered up a set of search engine optimisation (SEO) guidelines—a list of qualities that all top-ranking websites share.
And it's these qualities that form the basis of SEO analysis.
Why do I need to analyse my SEO performance?
You’ve built a website. You’ve followed the basic principles of search engine optimisation. You’ve put your site out into the ether. Why do you need to analyse your SEO performance?
There are two main reasons.
First of all, knowledge is power. Sure, you may have built your website ‘by the book’, but you don’t truly know how well it is performing until you actually test it. It could be that you’ve optimised your website almost perfectly, but your competitors have managed to optimise theirs slightly better, and you still have some work to do. By analysing your SEO performance you can identify the key areas of improvement, and move past your competitors in the rankings.
Secondly, SEO is in a state of constant change. To continually improve the quality of their results and to stay one step ahead of websites, Google, Yahoo! and Bing constantly tweak their algorithms. This means that what got you to the top of the rankings last week may not necessarily get you there this week. If you compare the SEO best practices of today against the best practices of 10 or 15 years ago, the change is dramatic. This list of every Google algorithm update makes for a fascinating read.
Analysing your SEO performance improves your website and helps you to react to change. It’s vital for anyone wanting to get to the top of the rankings and stay there.
So how do you analyse SEO?
The 6 key ways to analyse your SEO performance
Meaningful analysis of your performance rests on six key principles that have remained relatively constant through the history of SEO—features form the core of Semalt Analytics. Let’s take a look at each.
Keyword analysis
When a user types a word or phrase into Google, this becomes the driving force behind the search. Sure, Google can analyse the user’s location, or the profile of the individual that they have built over years, but this information simply adds salt and pepper to the search. The keyword is the main dish.
When Google casts its net over the World Wide Web in search of these keywords, will your website be caught? Do you know all the relevant keywords that your website should feature given the products you sell and the industry you’re in? If you’re a family law firm in London, do you feature as a result for ‘family law London’? If you’re a pizza shop in Brooklyn, do you feature as a result for ‘pizza Brooklyn’? These are very basic examples to demonstrate the concept; true keyword analysis and optimisation is far more in depth.
Keyword analysis identifies the keywords that you should be focusing on and where they should be put in your website. Placing main keywords in high visibility areas like headings and metadata will ensure that search engines see them.
Link analysis
In the early days of internet searches, Google was looking for a way to guarantee the quality of their results. They understood that by relying entirely on keywords would see websites ‘keyword stuffing’—hiding keywords wherever they could on their site in order to climb to the top of the rankings. So they came up with a clever solution: they examined links.
Their thinking was simple: the more links from external sources to a website, the higher quality that website is. It’s the reason that you constantly see Wikipedia at the top of searches—they don’t particularly care for keyword optimisation, but as arguably the internet’s most trusted source of information, other websites link back to Wikipedia all the time, greatly increasing the site’s legitimacy. If you hadn’t already noticed, I linked to a Wikipedia article in the paragraph above.
Link building plays a key role in SEO. Analysing your website’s links, both internal and external, is vital in understanding how ‘respected’ your website is by search engines. Content often plays a key role in improving your link performance, as you need to give other websites a genuine reason to link to you.
Website analysis
How well is your website constructed? Search engines send out ‘web crawlers’ that systematically browse the internet and index its contents. The ease with which they gather the necessary information is a factor in SEO.
Think of it as a shopping trip. For a web crawler like Googlebot, a well-built website will be like browsing a new supermarket—everything is well stocked, clearly labelled, and placed in an easy to understand layout. A badly built website is like shopping at a garage sale—no organisation, no labels, and odd items thrown any and everywhere.
Website analysis focuses on the backend of your website. It helps you understand how easily a web crawler can navigate your site to find the information it needs. It then provides you with a list of improvements you can make to improve this infrastructure.
Brand monitoring
How well known, popular and trusted is your brand, not just from Google’s point of view, but in the eyes of potential customers too?
Comprehensive brand monitoring provides a more holistic view of your online presence—it looks not just at your website, but at review aggregators like Google, Facebook, Trustpilot and Glassdoor, and analyses the overall online performance of your brand. It helps you to understand how your brand is viewed from the outside and shows ways you could enhance that perception. These insights help you to develop an effective cooperation policy.
Competitor analysis
Say you get a 70% score on a test. Sure, it’s a pass, but the result doesn’t mean much until you know how well everyone else did. Likewise, you don’t truly know what your SEO analysis means until you compare yourself against your competitors.
Competitor analysis uses similar techniques as above to understand how your digital footprint measures up against that of your direct competitors. It looks at where these companies are currently ranking, and what they’re doing to get there.
Keyword rankings
And now to the main event. Once you’ve gathered all of these analyses together, it’s time to put your knowledge into action. The ultimate goal of SEO is to get your website ranking higher on search engines for the relevant keywords, so once you’ve analysed each of the contributing factors, it’s time to analyse the results of your efforts.
Good keyword ranking analysis will be regular (ideally being performed daily) and comprehensive. It will track your position on multiple search engines, and provide you with the insights you need to improve your ranking. It will show itself to be valuable by pushing you up the rankings over time.
Using Semalt Analytics to check your SEO performance
Semalt Analytics ticks every one of the boxes above. A professional-grade webmaster analytics tool, it has been designed to offer you a clear view of your current SEO situation and to generate unbeatable insights that will see you climbing the search rankings for the most relevant keywords.
Semalt Analytics works by:
- Gathering website data
- Generating a detailed report regarding the SEO position of you and your competitors
- Providing a list of keywords that will optimise your site and increase traffic
- Supporting your SEO efforts on up to five different search engines
- Analysing rankings in real-time and delivering a daily SEO report
- Assigning a personal analysis manager to supervise the entire process
Semalt Analytics delivers you the information. What you do with those insights is up to you. You can act on them yourself, or you can consult a Semalt SEO specialist, who can guide you through putting this newfound knowledge into action.
Search engine optimisation is a constant battle. The goalposts are constantly moving, and competitors are forever looking to overtake you. But by understanding the rules of the game, and by using a smart tool that grants you the best chance of success, you’re far more likely to come out of the battle victorious.
So why wait? It’s free to get started with Semalt Analytics—you can add your website to PRO Analyze right now without paying a cent, and find out exactly how your business can achieve SEO success.