Content and indexing issues are the most common problems affecting SEO. Most websites suffer from duplicate content, keyword stuffing, awkward, SEO-unfriendly URLs, and other crawling issues that reduce your search results ranking.
You’ll want to analyze your site for pages that are weak in content, which will be evident by the lack of visitors. You’ll also want to review your site regularly for indexing issues that may be obscuring valuable content on your site.
A comprehensive strategy is needed to assess the key areas of concern as well as SEO tools for effecting, maintaining and monitoring changes.
Digital marketers at Branded3.com recently shared some great ideas for conducting an analysis of your website in less than ten minutes. To perform a ten-minute site analysis you’ll first need the following SEO metric tools:
Google Analytics: Google Webmasters provides web administrators and webmasters with a diverse suite of free online metrics tools for monitoring website performance, including Google Analytics. You can download and install it for free to help you monitor traffics. Once your website is assigned a Google Tracking Code, Google Analytics provides daily, weekly, and monthly monitoring of click-throughs, bounce rates, number of visitors, demographics and other key factors. Visual graph displays make it easy to interpret the information.
Google Search Console: The Search Console is an indispensable tool for digital marketers and SEO experts who rely on keyword information to drive their campaigns. By offering you a consumer’s perspective of your site, Google Search provides insight into the performance of your keywords. You can track the performance of promotions and changes to your site, monitor your site for malware issues and edit content on your website without interruption to your site’s performance.
XML Sitemap: A sitemap is a tool for organizing and indexing the URLs on your site. Sitemaps can include important metadata (date the page was created, how often the page is updated, etc) about each URL, to make it easier for Google to crawl and index your pages. Without a sitemap, your content can easily be overlooked by search engines seeking out the most up-to-date, relevant content. Google provides further details about the benefits of a sitemap for websites with a lot of content.
You can check Google’s Index Status Report to view an accurate tally of the URLs indexed for your website, which is constantly changing depending on the accessibility and frequency of your updates. Using four separate columns in an Excel spreadsheet, you can create a bar graph that illustrates:
- A) Total number of URLs submitted on the sitemap
- B) Total URLs indexed
- C) Total pages receiving Google traffic (found in the Google Analytics dashboard)
- D) Total number of indexed pages (found in the Index Status Report of the Google Search Console)
The ideal goal of an optimum-performing website is to achieve a balanced ratio of pages indexed by Google to the number of pages receiving organic traffic from Google. If there is an even distribution of quality content across the pages of your site, your ratio will be fairly even (1:1, 10:13). Your website has a strong presence with Google if the number of pages receiving traffic from Google matches closely with the number of pages or URLs listed in your sitemap.
For a diagnosis of your website performance and more great SEO tips, trust in a true SEO expert and feel free to reach out and get in touch with me today.
