"How many times have we heard any of these phrases? Or, more importantly, how many times have we heard the word SEO in terms of digital marketing? Probably, the answer is... a million?
However, the worst thing about hearing everyone talking about SEO analysis is not knowing how to carry it out or making mistakes, especially at the beginning. Don't worry, it's happened to all of us! That's why we're going to use this post to clear up your doubts about what SEO is and what it isn't and how to carry out an SEO analysis.
what is an SEO analysis?
An SEO analysis consists of reviewing the factors of our website that affect its positioning in search engines such as Google. These factors can be: the loading speed of our website, the level of optimisation of the images that appear on it, the existence of duplicate or repeated content, etc.
This will be very useful when we want to carry out an Inbound Marketing project for our company because, first of all, it is important to know where our website is at. Knowing the factors that may be influencing our SEO positioning will allow us to correct and improve them to give a better position to our brand and therefore greater visibility.
To carry out our analysis, it is important to have tools that allow us to know the number of visits we receive on our website, what our bounce rate is, etc.
Google's own SEO tools could be very useful: Google Analytics, Google Search Console or Google's own search engine where we can search for our brand and see in which position or in which place it appears when we search for terms related to it.
It is also important to know that we can do two different SEO analyses, depending on the factors we want to analyse.
- On-page SEO analysis: this consists of checking the current state of the factors that affect the positioning of our website in Google. Some of them could be, as we have already mentioned above: the loading speed of our main page, the level of optimisation of the images, if there are a large number of duplicated or repeated elements, etc. In other words, the on-page SEO analysis, as its name suggests, is about knowing the factors that are affecting it internally and on which we can act directly.
- Off-page SEO analysis: This analysis consists of reviewing and analysing the external elements that influence the positioning of our website and on which we cannot act directly. However, although we cannot act directly on them, it is important to know them and see in what indirect way we can do something to change them. For example, having a high number of negative reviews will mean that our content will not be shown among the first in the search results. Or, on the contrary, if our website is being linked many times with quality content, our positioning on the Internet will be favoured.
Main SEO mistakes
Once we have started to know the situation of our website, we will start to discover which are the mistakes we are making and that are leading our page to a bad SEO positioning. Some of the most common mistakes are:
- Loading speed: This is one of the most important points to start with. Knowing how long our page takes to load when a user enters is essential to correct our mistake. If the page takes a long time to load we can make some changes such as: use images that look good but have little weight, choose the right hosting where we will host our website and clean up the labelling and programming languages (CSS, HTML, etc.)
- Structure of the headings: For Google to consider our page of quality, it must contain headings and titles. The title tags, h1, h2, h3, h4, and so on are a way of knowing what information is included on the page and in what order they appear. If, for example, the h1 is repeated or the title is left blank, Google will have trouble knowing what content is relevant when it comes to positioning us.
- Friendly URLs: This means using URLS that are short, descriptive and tell the user what they will find on our website.
- External links: The more external links from other websites that link to our website, the more authority Google will give us, which will position us among the first results.
- Duplicate content: Google favours originality, therefore, it is important not to repeat the same thing we have already written over and over again or copy content from another website in an exaggerated way, as then the search engine will not highlight us among hundreds of pages that are talking about the same topic as us.
- Filling in the Alt attribute of images: This is one of the most frequent SEO mistakes. If we do not fill in the Alt attributes of images, Google will find it more difficult to know what we are talking about. Therefore, it is not only important to fill it in, but also to add relevant information about the subject we are dealing with or about our brand.
why is it important to position ourselves correctly?
Once we know what SEO analysis is and we know what are the main mistakes that are usually made, we are ready to position our brand correctly in Google.
It is very important for our Inbound Marketing strategy to be positioned in the network and that our visibility is good as this will directly influence our online reputation. In addition, appearing in the first results when someone searches for terms related to our company will help us to grow as a brand as it will give us special recognition and we will show the user that we are experts in our sector and we know how to do things correctly and intelligently.
