What is your website’s stage of SEO maturity? The level of analysis you’re conducting can be a great way to gauge how far along your strategy is on the curve.
Basic SEO analysis helps you understand whether your site is fundamentally equipped to succeed in search. Delving into more advanced and nuanced analysis is where you can start to focus and differentiate from the field, driving real results in crowded markets.
Many of the more basic techniques for assessing your site’s SEO health and performance can be handled with help from free tools and simple processes. From there, you can start leveraging more advanced methods supported by seasoned expertise, powerful technology and strategic oversight.
Let’s dive into the insights, opportunities and outcomes you can expect when using basic and advanced SEO analysis.
What is basic SEO analysis?
These relatively basic SEO practices have become much easier for any digital marketer to handle thanks to evolving tools and technologies.
Although an expert hand is valuable in getting the most out of an audit or keyword research, any marketer can start gathering data and insights with the help of SEO analysis tools like Moz, Semrush, Google Analytics, and more. Here are a few basic processes and techniques to consider:
SEO audit
The best way to get a core understanding of your website’s current strengths and weaknesses is through an SEO audit. There are countless free and paid tools that can help with this process. They might systematically evaluate things like keyword optimization, backlink profiles, structural issues, and external signals. These audits give you a baseline view of your site’s SEO health.
Keyword research
Online tools can also help you research keywords that prospective customers are searching for, providing information like keyword volume and difficulty. This can serve as a starting point as you identify the topics and themes that will direct your content strategy.
Content analysis
Analyze your site’s content library to identify gaps, redundancies, internal linking issues, readability, and more. While useful, basic content analysis tools have key limitations such as surface-level insights, context blindness, and limited customization capabilities. For larger brands with extensive legacy content, more sophisticated solutions are needed.
Technical SEO analysis
Is your website mobile-friendly? How fast do your pages load? Is the structure easy for search engines to crawl? These are the types of insights produced by a technical SEO audit, for which tools like Google Search Console and Screaming Frog can be handy. However, prioritizing and implementing these fixes is a more complex undertaking.
What is advanced SEO analysis?
Ready to take your SEO strategy to the next level? These SEO analysis techniques tend to require advanced tools and expertise, but can help you elevate and differentiate your web presence in the modern search landscape.
Crawl enhancement
The methods search engines like Google use to crawl websites are complicated. They must prioritize which pages to crawl, how often to revisit them, and how to allocate limited crawl budgets efficiently — especially on large enterprise sites with hundreds or thousands of pages.
Factors like duplicate content, dynamic URLs, poor internal linking, and technical errors can create significant barriers leading to crawlability issues.
Crawl enhancement focuses on improving how efficiently search engine bots navigate and index your site. This ensures that important pages are discovered and ranked while minimizing wasted crawl budget on low-priority or irrelevant content. SEO experts use techniques like log file analysis or canonical page audits to surface issues and opportunities.
Schema markup
This refers to a type of structured data added to your website’s HTML, providing search engines with more context about your content and enabling rich search results like FAQs, reviews, and product details. Schema markup strengthens SEO by making your content easier for search engines to interpret and categorize, improving visibility and click-through rates.
E-E-A-T audit and analysis
When deciding which content to serve on SERPs, Google is less concerned with “how many times does the target keyword appear” than “how trusted and credible is the source?”. The latter is more difficult to assess, especially because it concerns your entire domain rather than a single page. No single tool will give you the full picture.
SEO specialists can analyze how well your website conveys the qualities of expertise, experience, authority and trust, even providing a score to benchmark your current standing. The actionable insights that come out of an E-E-A-T audit are capable of improving overall search performance and conversions.
Strategic keyword vetting and prioritization
Free and basic tools are helpful for preliminary keyword research. But for a more strategic and impactful keyword strategy, you’ll want to go deeper. Assess search intent, competition levels, and potential ROI for each keyword, and align them with your content strategy and business goals.
This process involves analyzing keyword clustering, funnel stages, seasonality, and user behavior to prioritize high-value opportunities, ensuring efforts focus on terms most likely to drive qualified traffic and conversions.
Intent gap analysis
A strong SEO content strategy is about comprehensively answering the range of questions your buyers and decision influencers have throughout their journeys. Intent gap analysis goes beyond just keywords to identify discrepancies between what your site is providing, and what users are truly seeking.
Backlink quality and disavow process
Not all backlinks are created equal. In fact, some are perceived by search engines as spammy, and they can actually be harmful to your domain’s SEO profile. Advanced SEO analysis can identify toxic links, understand their impact on rankings, and initiate a disavow process that instructs search engines to ignore certain backlinks.
Video and image optimization
Multimedia can be optimized for search just as text-based content can, but there are specific steps and considerations involved.
To optimize images for search, marketers use techniques like adding descriptive alt text, using clear file names and compressing images for faster loading. Advanced strategies include leveraging structured data, utilizing next-gen formats like WebP or AVIF, and creating an XML image sitemap to help search engines index images more effectively. There is also a full set of techniques for optimizing video on YouTube and on your site.
International SEO and localization
If your web presence spans multiple countries or continents, it’s important to ensure the content is optimized regionally for SEO, giving it the best chance to get discovered by audiences within the target geography.
International SEO goes well beyond simply translating language — you’ll want to send deeper signals of relevance to search engines, like region-specific data, insights and examples. There are also a number of technical considerations that should be factored into your plan.
Elevate Your SEO
When to start using advanced SEO analysis
If you’ve already nailed down the SEO basics, and you’re ready to take the next steps, a strategy informed by advanced SEO analysis can separate top performers. These are some indicators it might be time to take action:
- Stagnating or declining organic traffic
- Lack of attributed conversions
- Ineffective keyword targeting
- Competitive pressure
- Low engagement metrics (time on page, bounce rate, key events)
The best thing you can do at this point in your SEO journey is reach out to experts who can help guide you through these advanced measures and help you take your website to new levels. At TopRank Marketing, we offer advanced SEO analysis and can tailor a strategy to your company’s needs. Get in touch today to start standing out online!
