Have you ever wondered how your website is doing in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) game?
Well, you have already taken the first step. That’s right, a good deal of companies don’t worry about or check their search engine performance. One of the easy places to look is right in your analytics package. Since Google Analytics is commonly found in smaller companies, I will use their analytics package as an example. You could look at a couple of different reports to see if you are doing well.
Step 1 – Check your analytics for the last 12 months and then compare that to the previous 12 months. You can find this report under Acquistion > All Traffic > Channels. Are you numbers up or down? With all of the algorithm changes in Google, you want to make sure any SEO benefits you had been getting, you are still getting. Are your numbers down? It’s time to go to step 3.
Step 2 – If you have seen an increase in search traffic, it might be good to see how you are doing compared to other companies in your industry. It might be one thing to have better numbers, but what if the rest of the industry is seeing 10 times more traffic than you are. In the Google Analytics reports, look under Audience > Benchmark > Channels.
In the top right of the report, you can set your industry. The default industry is the one that you set in your Admin panel when configuring Google Analytics. What Google will provide you with is an assessment of where you are compared to other similar sites.
As you can see in the chart below, the Organic Search for this website is WAY under the industry average. Anything in read over 9% is a flag to take some action and make improvements to up your SEO traffic.
Step 3 – SEMrush provides free search audits to provide feedback on the health of your website. I offer this service on the bottom of my homepage for Free as well.
This audit will give you insight into common issues such as duplicate content, language declaration tagging, meta information and broken links that can impact your search ratings. The example shows a result of 86%, which isn’t bad. However, just remember that your competitor might have a score of 92%, so they have an advantage when their website gets indexed.
Although this review is only a glimpse at the results of about 25 pages of your website, it is a good indicator if you need to dig deeper into technical issues impacting your SEO.