What Your SEO Analysis Should Include
Many of my clients come to me for SEO work after they’ve already fallen for the “Free SEO Analysis” trap. Most often, someone has reached out to them attaching a free SEO report of some kind, documenting a grim outlook for the search-ability of their website (without any real detail), and an offer to FIX IT for the low low price of $xxx a month from now until eternity.
It’s not a fun part of my job to break it to new clients that the “analysis” they received was junk - just a generalized list of SEO tactics that the “expert” slapped the client’s logo on after sending the same thing to someone else. You see, anyone can make a list of SEO tasks, but it takes many hours of effort and some input from you, the client, to build an SEO analysis that’s a)customized b)prioritized and c)actionable.
Here are the things that EVERY SEO Analysis should include, at a minimum:
Keyphrase benchmarking - Here’s the thing I don’t understand about many SEO experts: They never benchmark your keyphrases before the work starts! So, when they’re done with their “magic”, they can’t prove that it did anything! If your analysis doesn’t benchmark keyphrases in your geographical target market, it’s probably a sham.
Keyphrase search volume - An SEO expert should first ask you what keyphrases are important for you to rank for, based on your industry knowledge. Then, they should take that list and use it to generate even more keyphrases that are related and might be worth targeting. Then, they should document the ACTUAL search volume of the entire list, to help determine which keyphrases are more fruitful than others, for your specific business. A keyphrase you thought was critical may only result in 5 searches a month, while another results in hundreds or thousands. Guessing is not an option here for skilled SEOs.
Keyphrase difficulty - There are many tools at the hands of working SEO experts that can spit out a “Difficulty” score for each of your target keyphrases. A difficulty score tells you - you guessed it - how hard it will be to rank for it, or in other words, how competitive it is. Sometimes, super competitive keyphrases aren’t worth the effort. (A bad SEO will fib to you about this, telling you all keyphrases are easily attainable with the right steps.)
Keyphrase organic click-through-rate (CTR) - Say that you paid an SEO good money to rank better for your primary keyphrase, and it worked! You went from #25 to #7 in the search engine results! However, then you find out that the keyphrase only has a 30% organic CTR because the page is littered with advertisers that buy all of the clicks! Your website is now pushed to the bottom, where STILL nobody is clicking on it. THIS is why you need to know the organic CTR of each keyword you plan to target.
Page-by-page content and metadata analysis - Once your expert has recommended some target keyphrases based on the above data points, they should identify which pages will be most likely to rank for each. You see, it’s foolish to try to rank for every keyphrase on every page, when only one page needs to “win”. Once a handful of crucial pages are identified, an SEO expert should document the changes that need to occur on that page and it’s source code to optimize it for that specific keyphrase.
Speed analysis - There are free tools out there that make this a breeze to conduct. These tools also provide instructions for speeding your website up. Speed, specifically mobile speed, is becoming more and more important to SEO every year. Ignoring it in your SEO plan is negligent.
Technical analysis - This includes website errors, URL paths concerns, No index tags, etc. All of the “oopsies” that search experts usually love to point out.
PRIORITIZED LIST FOR IMPROVEMENT - Seriously, if your SEO expert doesn’t help you to prioritize crucial items against nice-to-haves, then I would argue that they have no clue what the difference is. Find out where to start and where to put your budget first.
