Today I will present you some tips and tools, that give you the possibility of making an SEO analysis of your own but also the competition’s website.
In the process, I will exclusively refer to tools, that are available free of charge.
Obviously the significance of the analysis can’t be compared to professional SEO tools like Sistrix or Xovi.
In case you want to analyze your website yourself before hiring an SEO expert, this post will surely be of help.
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.
When you find out how many visitors your competitor has per month, you can assess the competitive landscape.
By using the Competitive Intelligence Tool SimilarWeb, you can see the approximate number of website visitors.
I recommend using SimilarWeb’s chrome extension so that you can analyze the respective website with just one click.
Not only can you look at the number of website visitors, but you can also see which channels the visitors come from.
Just click on the menu item “Source” and you can see, where the visitors come from.
This displays the importance of the organic search engine traffic in regard to the respective website.
When you click on the menu item called “Search”, you get a brief overview of the most popular keywords.
Keep in mind, that this is the free version of SimilarWeb. If you want to get a more profound insight, you have to take out a paid subscription.
Domain authority & page authority
The domain authority is a key figure between 1 and 100, that displays a website’s relevance and also its credibility.
The higher a website’s domain authority, the higher its relevance and credibility.
A whole string of factors has an influence on the domain authority, like, inter alia, a domain’s age and also the number and quality of the backlinks. The page authority is the domain authority’s counterpart, but it’s for each subsite. In order to analyze the domain and page authority you can use the Moz Chrome extension. Just install it and open an account with Moz and then you can find out about the domain authority and page authority of all websites – with just one click.
Number of index-based websites
When it comes to search engine optimization it isn’t sufficient to just optimize the website content. You also have to make sure, that the respective pages are indexed by Google.
To see how many of a domain’s pages have been indexed by Google, you just have to type the following command into the Google search: site:domain.com.
Consequently, Google will show how many of that domain’s pages are included in its index.
Determine a website’s loading time
Users as well as Google prefer fast websites. That’s why it’s important that your own website can be loaded within a few seconds.
To determine your website’s loading time, I recommend using Pingdom.
Just access the page, choose an URL and also the place of the test (I recommend Stockholm) and consequently Pingdom shows you the requested website’s loading time.
Furthermore you gain insight on how you can optimize your website’s loading time.
Here’s a common advise: Make sure your images are compressed and loaded downstream.
Control your rankings
An important aspect of the SEO is to keep an eye on your page’s current rankings. There are many great and cost-effective solutions, that take charge of the monitoring of your rankings. In order to find out, which keywords lead the visitors to your page, you have to access the Search Console. Under Search requests -> Search analysis you can find an evaluation of your organic visitor and their search requests.
Furthermore you can filter the results according to your ideas. This way, you can see which search terms acquire how many visitors. Moreover, you can look through the selection of “pages” in order to find out, which subsites win the majority of the visitors through the organic search. The Search Console also shows you the average position for the chosen keywords.
In case you’d like a daily analysis of your keywords, I recommend typing the search requests into a monitoring tool. For IOS users I recommend the App SerpChimp Seo and SERPmojo for Android. That way, you can stay up-to-date regarding your keywords’ ranking progression even while you’re on the move.
Besides your own keywords you can get an overview of your competition’s most important keywords. To do that, you should use Xovi’s free tool Domainvalue.de.
Just type in the competition’s URL and consequently you get a brief overview of your competition’s keywords including rankings. Since the overview is extremely constrained, you make use of Google AdWord’s keyword planner.
There you can find the option “Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category”, so that you can look at a website’s relevant keywords.
Simply type in the URL, that you want to analyze and Google AdWords directly presents you a series of the website’s keywords. Google AdWords doesn’t show you the position of individual keywords though. To get a closer look of the keywords’ positions you can use Ranking-Spy. Obviously it doesn’t provide you with a complete listing of the competition’s keywords, but it can help you get an initial overview.
Analyze the backlink profile
Even in 2017, backlinks still rank among the three most important ranking factors. Without links it will be difficult to get a top position in regards to competitive keywords. Before initiating the search for new backlinks, you should examine your existent backlinks on a regular basis. In order to see which backlinks your website has, you have to use the Search Console. Under the tab “Search requests” you can find the option ”Links to your website”.
There you can find all pages, that link to your page. You can also have a look at your most-linked-to content and see how your data are linked. You should keep an eye on your linkings on a regular basis and remove disliked linkings via the Search Console if necessary.
Under “Links to your website” you can find the option “Intern links”.
There you can look at your intern linkings, i.e. how you link the respective pages to your website.
Regarding the intern linking, it applies, that your page’s most important content should get most of the intern links.
In case you wish to have a closer look at your competition’s backlink profile, the Search Console Access isn’t necessarily needed.
Backlink-Tool.org makes it possible for you to analyze the backlinks of all websites. That’s how you can easily find new cooperation and backlink partners respectively.
Identify 404 errors
A 404 error is a status code, that displays that the requested page isn’t available.
404 errors often occur regarding seasonal offers and the redesign of the URL structure.
To get an overview of your page’s 404 errors, it obviously makes sense to use the Google Search Console. In the tab “Crawling” you can find the option “Crawl errors”.
There you can have a look at all 404 errors, that Google found on your website.
By clicking on the shown URLs you obtain information on when the 404 error has been detected the first and also the last time.
Furthermore you can take a look at the sites that link to the 404 errors via the option “Linked via”.
With just one click you’re able to download the 404 error pages and can then edit them for the operative optimization.
In keeping with this topic, I ruminated about the future of Google SEO.
