The key to success with a website or blog is to ensure you rank highly in search engines, this results in receiving plenty of free search traffic. A critical step that can help you achieve this is analyzing web pages to pinpoint areas for improving content or resolving SEO issues.
It’s time to unlock the secrets to achieving higher visibility, increasing traffic, and ultimately, finding greater online success. Let’s dive into the topic of analyzing web pages to boost your SEO!
Table of Contents
Introduction to SEO
SEO is not just about numbers and statistics, it’s about inspiration, courage, and encouragement. SEO can help businesses and bloggers reach their full potential and achieve their wildest dreams.
With SEO you can:
- build credibility and trust with your customers and readers
- establish yourself as an expert in your field
- make a positive impact on the world
- create a brand for yourself or your business
So don’t just view SEO as a technical task – see it as a means to inspire and empower both yourself and others.
Now, let’s consider why analyzing web pages is a good strategy for boosting SEO and growing search traffic to your site.
The Significance of Web Page Analysis
Web page analysis is the process of auditing a blog article or web page for issues – either content or technical – that could negatively affect SEO and your ranking potential.
It could be as simple as a typo or poorly written content, or it could be a site-wide technical issue. In any case, fixing these issues increases your chances of ranking well and, more importantly, offers a better experience to your readers.
Spelling mistakes can be quite off-putting because they make you question the credibility and trustworthiness of the website owner. If they can’t spare the time to review their website content for errors, what are the odds that their service might also be lacking?
Consider analyzing your competitors’ websites, it’s an effective way to gauge the level of competition in your niche.
For a small niche website without much competition, you may get away with middling content or a few technical glitches, but in a competitive niche, you will have to execute at a high level to stand any chance of ranking well!
Key Elements to Analyze on Web Pages
Let’s review the key elements on a web page that require analysis. After that, I’ll recommend some tools that can help us with this analysis because conducting this analysis by hand is too time-consuming and prone to mistakes.
But first, let’s talk about what issues we need to look out for.
On-Page SEO Elements
The web page title should not be too long (so it doesn’t get cut off in the search engine results page) and contain the primary keyword you’re targeting.
The meta description isn’t visible on the web page, but it’s crucial for Google because it appears in the search engine results page and plays a role in whether a searcher clicks your link. Read more about click through rates to understand the importance of title and meta description in affecting search traffic to your website.
Subheading (specifically header tags H2 and H3) are crucial for breaking down your content into manageable sections. They make it simpler for readers to navigate your content and help search engines understand your page’s content more effectively.
Keyword usage – make sure you use them throughout your content, not just in the web page title and subheadings. Add the primary or related keywords to the web page link, meta description, and in the body of the articles as well.
29 SEO Tips and Tricks to help you rank better in Google
Content Quality
No matter how fast or visually attractive your website is – if the content isn’t good your blog or website will not be successful.
People-first content – Google has stated your content should be aimed at people first – not search engines (Source: Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content). Once you have drafted the article then you can optimize for search engines before publishing.
Relevance – ensure your blog content satisfies your target audience. Good keyword research will help you identify those keywords to target. Understand search intent so you know the underlying motivation of each search query.
Length and Depth – I’ve discussed short form vs long form content before. In general, when the keyword is longer, your answer can be more specific (and shorter). It’s important to note that to rank on the first page of Google, long-form content is preferable.
Readability – Make sure your content is easy to read. Keep in mind that not all of your audience speaks English as their first language.
Internal and External Links
Linking is helpful for both your readers and search engines. Readers benefit by having related content on your site easily accessible via a link instead of searching for it or finding it through website navigation links.
Search engines also benefit from internal linking because it helps them understand how content on your website is related, especially when using anchor texts effectively.
External links are used to cite your sources or provide links so your readers can research a topic in more depth.
Images and Multimedia
A picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes. It’s true though, we absorb information much faster when presented with images rather than text.
Images also break up text content, giving the reader a break as they look at the image. Images can also convey relevant information to the reader – some people are visual learners, so images or infographics can be very helpful for them.
There is a problem with images though.
Images are much larger than blocks of text. In fact, most of the time needed to load a web page is spent on loading the images.
If you don’t take steps to compress and properly size your images, it can greatly degrade your site speed and therefore your SEO and ranking potential. Site speed is one of the most important ranking factors for Google.
I recommend setting a maximum size for your images and compressing them. Doing this manually can be a hassle, so I suggest using an image compression tool for the job. I recommend Imagify, you can compress up to 20GB for free each month. Paid plans are available if you need more.
For most small websites or blogs, you can use an image compression service for free, or you can manually perform this step if you prefer. Don’t overlook it though – otherwise, your website will be slow.
Tools for Web Page Analysis
There are a number of free and paid tools to help you with web page analysis.
First, a very useful tool from Google that should be in every website owners toolbox: Google Search Console.
- Track keywords, impressions and clicks to your website
- Find mobile usability issues
- Check the indexed status of your website
- Request indexing for a page
- Submit a sitemap
- Free to use
Although Google Search Console is great it’s worth investing in a more comprehensive tool for SEO analysis of your website that includes a detailed on-page SEO audit tool.
For those with a bigger budget I can recommend SEMRush and Ahrefs. Both are excellent tools that cover SEO, Keyword Research, Competition Research, Backlink profiler and much more.
For those website owners on a more modest budget a mid-tier tool is preferrable. I personally recommend SE Ranking as I use this tool myself. Other great mid-tier tools are available.
In the next section I’ll cover how to analyze and optimize web pages using an SEO auditing tool. I’ll use SE Ranking but other tools will function in a similar way.
Analyzing and Optimizing Web Pages
Automated analysis of your web pages is the way to go. Manual audits are completely impractical even for modest sized websites. A modern SEO audit tool will check over a 100 metrics for each page.
Here’s a section from an SEO audit report. It displays a lot of information, so I’ve dissected the output into smaller sections to enhance understanding. The green color signifies a passed test, while the other colors indicate issues of varying severity.
The screenshot below gives the overall health score for your entire website. It’s a historical score so you can see how the website health trends over time.
This screenshot below shows a radar chart displaying the page quality score by category.
In the screenshot above, some issues, such as the domain, require time to improve. The low score is attributed to the website’s relative youth in comparison to its top competitors.
A low indexing score indicates that article wasn’t found in the first 100 search results. This is normal for new content and especially for new websites.
An SEO audit report generates a to do list for issues found. You can mark off fixed issues on this report, change the severity or ignore an issue.
Below, you’ll find a screenshot of on-page metrics, providing comparisons to other top-ranking sites for your primary keyword.
You can give the web audit tool I used for these examples a try on your own. Plus, it’s completely free to use.
Final Thoughts on Analyzing Web Pages
Thanks for reading! I hope you found this article useful. Here is a quick recap:
- Web page analysis will help you boost your SEO and user engagement
- Check on-page SEO elements
- Content Quality (readability, spelling and grammar)
- Internal and External links
- Images and Multimedia
- Use an SEO audit tool to automatically find SEO issues on your site
If you found this article helpful, we’d love to hear from you. Please consider leaving a comment or sharing it on social media using the buttons below. Your support means the world to us!
