How to check a website for SEO?

The best way to check a site for SEO is, of course, audit performed by a professional. But what if we don’t need to analyze a particular site in depth, but only know its general search engine image? 

We can, of course, do a quick analysis ourselves with a few tools. A site in a general analysis (needed, for example, to know if and what SEO activities are carried out by competitors) is worth checking from three different angles – the amount and quality of content, organic visibility and link profile. 

Quantity and quality of content

This is the only parameter that we are able to check “by eye,” simply by going to the site and checking whether it has a blog/updates section, whether product descriptions are long and rich, and whether content is published regularly. We are able to evaluate each of these elements simply by looking at the site’s content. 

Slightly more difficult is the case of verifying the originality of posted content. Here it is necessary to use a tool that will help us with this. With our help comes CopyScape, a tool that up to a certain threshold of the number of checks is free.  Its operation is trivial, we don’t even have to create an account there. All we need to do is paste in the “Search for copies of your page on the web” field the address of the subpage on which we want to verify the originality of the content, and CopyScape will return to us in response all the pages where the same text appears. All copies will be highlighted in yellow. 

In this way, we can very easily check whether an online store creates its original product descriptions or copies them from the manufacturer or from other sites. In this case, after randomly checking a few products from different categories, we can already make general conclusions about the originality of the content. 

Organic visibility

In the case of organic visibility, we need to make use of tools from the very beginning of the analysis. For example, Senuto, about which we wrote more extensively here, will be helpful. The necessity to use external tools in the case of checking the visibility of a site is primarily due to the fact that such data for free in the tool Google Search Console can only be seen by the site owner. Thus, if we care about verifying the data of a site other than ours, we must use commercial solutions. 

As part of the basic analysis in Senuto, it is worth checking such elements as the number of keywords in the Top3, Top10, Top50, estimated traffic and Google Ads equivalent. Also important is the visibility graph over time, on it we can see how the visibility of the site has developed since its inception and track the dynamics of increases, which can tell us a lot about the frequency of SEO activities carried out so far. This graph can also allow us to infer when a page has been changed/refreshed, as in that case we usually see a very large but very short-lived drop in visibility while Google reindexes the page after a major update. 

Another element worth checking is, of course, the main keywords associated with the site and their levels of monthly searches. Senuto allows us to do this as well, so we can determine toward which specific subject areas, products or services the SEO efforts are being carried out. 

Inbound links profile

In the case of inbound link profile we have exactly the same situation as in the case of organic visibility – we need the help of a commercial tool, because such data for free is only available from GSC.

We can use MajesticSEO, which allows us to analyze the link profile in depth. However, for a basic analysis, we will mainly need parameters such as – the number of inbound links and the domains they come from, the trust flow rate, the link graph and graph, and the most frequently linked anchor texts.

The most important parameters we can use are the following.

Such data will allow us to assess the quality of the link profile we are building, the frequency of their acquisition, and to determine from which sources they come, which can be useful for further actions if, for example, we conduct a competitive analysis in this way. 

Summary

Basic analysis of a site for SEO, which is not an in-depth audit of it, is relatively simple if we have access to SEO tools. We can easily check if and more or less what activities were carried out for a given site. 

This basic analysis can be useful for SEO specialists as, for example, a competitive analysis, where we have many different sites to check. It allows you to draw reasonable conclusions with relatively little effort.

The analysis can also be used as a tool for SEO specialists.

It will also be useful for specialists selling SEO services, who, even without expert knowledge, will thus be able to assess whether a given potential client is already conducting some activities and how they are going, which can be a very good point to start sales negotiations.