Today I'm presenting some tips and tools that you can use to analyze your own website (and those of your competitors) for SEO. I am only referring to tools that are available free of charge. Of course, the informative value of the analysis is not comparable with professional SEO tools such as Sistrix or Xovi. So if you want to analyze your website yourself before hiring an SEO expert, then this article will certainly help you.
How much traffic does my competitor have per month?
An important key figure for analyzing your competitor's online success is the number of monthly website visitors. If you know how many visitors your competitor has per month, you can better assess your competition. With the Competitive Intelligence Tool SimilarWeb you can see the approximate number of website visitors. I recommend the Chrome extension from SimilarWebso that you can analyze the respective website with just one click. Not only can you view the number of website visitors, but you can even see which channels the visitors are coming from. Simply click on the "Source" menu item and you can see where the visitors are coming from. Here you can see, for example, how important organic search engine traffic is for the respective website. If you go to the "Search" menu item, you will also get a small overview of the most popular keywords. Please note that this is the free version of SimilarWeb. If you want to gain a deeper insight, you have to take out a paid subscription.
Domain Authority & Page Authority
Domain authority is a key figure between 1-100, which reflects the relevance and credibility of a website. The higher the domain authority, the higher the relevance and credibility of a website. A number of factors have an influence on domain authority, including the age of a domain and the number and quality of backlinks. Page authority is the counterpart of domain authority, but for the individual subpage. To analyze the domain and page authority, you can use the Moz Chrome extension use. Simply install and open an account with Moz and you can find out the domain authority and page authority of all websites with just one click.
Number of indexed websites
When it comes to search engine optimization, it is not enough to simply optimize the website content. You also have to ensure that the respective pages are indexed by Google. To see how many pages of a domain Google has indexed, simply enter the following command in the Google search: site:domain.com. Google will then show you how many pages it has from the domain in its index.
Determine the loading time of a website
Fast websites are used by users as well as by Google preferred. It is therefore important that your website loads in just a few seconds. To determine the loading time of your website, I recommend that you use Pingdom to use. Simply call up the page, select a URL and the location of the test (I recommend Stockholm) and Pingdom will give you the location time of the desired website. You also get insight into how you can optimize the loading time of your website. A general tip: make sure that your images are compressed and loaded afterwards.
Controlling your rankings
An important part of search engine optimization is keeping an eye on the current rankings of your site. There are some great and inexpensive solutions for monitoring your rankings. To find out which keywords bring visitors to your site, go to the Search Console. Under Search queries à Search analysis you will find an evaluation of your organic visitors and their search queries. You can also filter the results according to your preferences. This allows you to see which search terms are acquiring how many visitors. By selecting "Pages", you can also see which subpages attract the most visitors via organic search. The Search Console also shows you the average position for the selected keyword.
If you want to have your keywords analyzed daily, I recommend entering the search queries into a monitoring tool. For IOS users, I recommend the app SerpChimp Seo and for Android SERPmojo. This way you can keep up to date with the ranking progress of your keywords even when you are on the move.
In addition to your own keywords, you can also get an overview of your competitors' important keywords. We used the free tool for this Domainvalue.com from Xovi. Simply enter the URL of the competition and you will receive a small overview of your competitors' keywords including rankings. As the overview is extremely limited, we use the Google AdWords keyword planner.
There, we have used the option "With the help of a word group, a website ....." to look at important keywords on a website. Simply enter the URL to be analyzed and Google AdWords will show you a series of keywords for the website. Google AdWords does not show you the position of the individual keywords. You can then take a closer look at these again with Ranking-Spy. Of course, you won't find a complete list of competitor keywords here, but it can give you an initial overview.
Analyze backlink profile
Backlinks are still one of the three most important ranking factors in 2017. Without links, it will be difficult to achieve a top position for competitive keywords. However, before you start looking for new backlinks, you should regularly take a close look at your existing backlinks. To see which backlinks your website has, we also use the Search Console Under the "Search queries" tab, you will find the option "Links to your website".
There you will now find all the pages that link to your site. You can also view your most linked content and how your data is linked. You should regularly keep an eye on your links and, if necessary, remove unpopular links via the Search Console.
Under "Links to your website", you will find the selection option "Internal links". There you can take a look at your internal linking, i.e. how you link the respective pages on your website. With internal linking, the most important content on your site should receive the most internal links.
If you want to take a closer look at the backlink profile of your competitors, you don't necessarily need Search Console access. With the Backlink-Tool.org you can analyze the backlinks of all websites. This allows you to find new cooperation or backlink partners without much effort.
Identify 404 errors
A 404 error is a status code that indicates that the desired page is not available. 404 errors often occur with seasonal offers and when redesigning the URL structure. To give you an overview of the 404 errors on your site, we used the Google Search Console, as you would expect. Under the "Crawling" tab, you will find the selection option "Crawling error". There you can now view all 404 errors that Google has found on your website. By clicking on the URLs displayed, you will also receive information on when the 404 error was detected for the first time and the last time. You can also use the "Linked via" option to see which pages link to the 404 errors. With just one click, you can download the 404_error pages and prepare them for operational optimization.
In keeping with the theme, I have been thinking about the The future of Google SEO made.
