There are many free / paid SEO analysis tools out there that provide pretty good job SEO analyzing your site.
However, relying 100% of your SEO efforts on these tools is like trading stocks based on price without understanding how to analyse them.
Below is the protocol we utilize to analyze a site. This maybe little too much information or too detail for non-SEO professionals. If you are interested in us doing the SEO site analysis for you, please sign up to our service.
DigitalReadyMarketing.com SEO site analysis protocol
1) Gather SEO tools required
First step is to gather all the necessary tools. We have listed the paid service as well as free ones. Some of the paid services also provide free version so depending on the scale of your site, you might even be able to get enough information about your site.
Google Search Operators
It’s totally free yet a super powerful SEO tool. Google essentially has created a library of your site and by using these operators, you can zoom in and out of your site at ease to find what you are looking for.
Chrome incognito window
This tool allows you to browse a site in private mode. Since some websites provide personalized experience by tracking cookies, this tool will allow you to visit the site in its default mode.
Crawling tool
We utilize this tool to better understand the on page issues at site wide level. This tool allows us to send a spider to gather information from the entire site. You can also make it to mimic search engine spiders to see if there is any crawling issues on your site.
- Free
Xenu is one of the best free crawling tools out there. Don’t underestimate it just because it is free. Many SEO professionals do still use it to this day.
- Paid
Screaming Frog is one of the best paid crawling tools out there. It is not cheap but there are so many things you can do with it (you can also use it to generate Sitemaps!)
Speed testing tool
We only utilize free tools for testing speed because we only want to get a sense of how many files need to be loaded and not a comprehensive server level testing. If your site has international presence, you might want to try Webpagetest, which is also a free service but allows you to change the location where you are testing from.
- Free
Pingdom and Google PageSpeed Insights
Browser Tools
These tools allow us to check on websites from the browser. All these tools are free (some might have paid version) and they are really useful!
- Free
Web Developer Toolbar for Chrome or Firefox is a must have if you are serious about SEO. It allows you to turn on and off various elements of a site, check what the site looks like on different browser sizes, highlight certain site elements and much more!
Meta SEO inspector for Chrome allows you to easily inspect critical on page SEO elements for the page you are investigating. You can also use Browseo which is a free web based service.
Back link analysis tool
These tools provide back link profile of a site, which is a off page SEO analysis tool but can also be used for on page SEO analysis (for example, using the spider from one of these service for internal link analysis).
- Free
OpenLinkProfiler.org is probably one of the best free back link analysis tools our there. Even though it doesn’t have as comprehensive back links for the site you want to check, it still provides enough valuable insights for you to take SEO actions.
- Paid
Majestic, Ahrefs, or Open Site Explorer are the big three services when it comes to back link analysis. Majestic seems to index more links compare to the other two but each service provides other unique services that you can’t really go wrong choosing any one of these.
2) Start with high level overview
Use Google Search Operators to get a sense of what is going on with the site. Are there duplicate content? (http:// vs. https://, www. vs. no www etc) Are there many sub-domains?
Do you see a lot of title duplicates? Are the meta description within the recommended limits?
By doing this initial scan, it will provide a good sense of how much SEO needs to be done on the site. Here is the page that explain all these in more details.
3) Go through the DigitalReadyMarketing.com SEO site analysis check list
Our check list not only look for site architecture, but also server communication, page speed, mobile SEO, video SEO, PDF SEO, and more.
Become our member to get a copy of the check list.