How to check the SEO of your website yourself

Search Engine Optimisation is all about optimising your website to rank in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) and drive relevant traffic. There are multiple benefits of SEO.

It’s a very important service for a website. It helps to grow a business online. It demands practical skills that come from practice. Those businessmen who are busy cannot work on SEO, therefore, they either keep an internal team or hire SEO agency. In both cases, they need to check SEO progress. 

There are multiple ways to check the SEO of your website. I’ve listed some of them and the metrics that you need to keep track to know the progress.

• Keywords Rank:

The ranking of the keywords is the primary goal that you have to track. Whenever you outsource your SEO project or do it yourself, you have to know the keywords that your website has to be ranked. 

Use Primary as well as LSI keywords in your website and optimise your site to rank on those keywords. 

To track the progress of your keyword ranking, use Serpbot tool or you can manually do this in search engines. There are many other tools (both free & paid) that show your keyword ranks accurately. You can also use Search Consoles popularly known as Webmaster tools.

This way you can know the SEO efforts and ways to improve.

• Visitors:

There are two types of visitors mainly, new and returning visitors. Both are important metrics and you can actually know the SEO progress with these data. 

Why we do SEO? Just to rank on Search Engines? Obviously no. 

Most of the website owners want to rank to drive traffic to their sites hence visitors data improvement is a big goal. 

Mere ranking on popular keywords cannot get you most of the website visits, there are many other factors that are to be considered. Some of them are tile and meta description copy, your website user experience, highly engaging content, and many more. 

So the conclusion is that if your visitors are increasing, it directly means that your SEO activities are going in the right direction.

How to check your website visitors?

Use Analytics to track this data. You can use Google Analytics, Bing Analytics, Omniture, etc. Most of them are free. All you need to do is add a tracking code you get from Analytics to your website and your analytics will track your visitors.

• Free Tools:

If you do not have enough budget for SEO then consider using free SEO tools available online. These tools generate SEO Audit insight reports that you can use to optimise your website for better ranking and visibility. Some of the tools available for Free are:

1. Ubersuggest – From Neil Patel
2. Woorank 
3. Seositecheckup
4. Lighthouse Report

• Backlink Profiles:

Backlinks are also important in SEO. There are primarily two types of backlinks: No-Follow and Do-Follow backlinks. The difference between them is that in do-follow links, search engine bots consider them and follow the link while bots ignore no-follow links. No-follow links help to generate traffic and Do-follow links help to generate traffic as well as improves the ranking of your website.

So the main to benefits of creating backlinks are:

1. It helps generate traffic
2. It improves your Search Engine Rankings
3. Backlinks improve social signals.

So, how you can check backlinks of your website? Well, there are multiple tools available. Some of the tools are free but you can only see the backlinks in limited numbers. To check all the backlinks of your website, you have to opt for paid tools like Ahrefs and Semrush. 

Google Algorithm penalizes websites that have too many backlinks from irrelevant spammy websites so you have to be very careful in building links. 

Now you may think that your competitors can build bad links to punish your website. The answer is yes they can. Now the question is how you can protect your website from such an attack. You can Disavow (a technique to remove spammy links) those spammy links that you think might harm your website.

This is one reason all website owners need to be aware of their backlink profiles and to check that, you have to use tools available like Ahrefs, Semrush.

• Check Duplicate Content:

There are websites & blogs that do not try to build a single link though get thousands of shares because of content only. Content is the real king that can make or break your SEO. It is a crucial marketing tactic to engage your visitors and capitalise the traffic. 

But content can also harm your Search Engine Optimisation efforts adversely. Duplicate content aka Plagiarised content can be a dangerous game you must avoid at all cost. Search Engines have algorithms that check duplicate content and if found, can penalise your website. 

Business owners often hire writers for their web content but they should make sure that the content must be unique and fresh that also help their customer’s problems.

Fresh and in-depth content can help grow your website traffic and ranking in SERPs.

So, how to check whether the content on your website is unique?

There are tools (both free & paid) available online that show you uniqueness in your content. Some of the free tools are Siteliner, Copyscape, Smallseotools, Duplichecker, and many more. 

These tools available are easy to use and any average Joe can use them. 

Conclusion:

Checking your SEO status and tracking KPIs are not that difficult task and you can do it yourself with the help of tools that I’ve discussed above. The difficult task is the actual SEO works that take time, skills, and efforts but I and my team can collaborate & make it easy for you. Having more than 10 years of experience in web development and digital marketing, we can get your website on top of popular keywords in your domain. Feel free to contact i Developers team now.