In this guide experts from our SEO Agency will tell you more about SEO testing and SEO analysis. You will learn what it is, why it is important and which I think are the best tools for SEO testing and SEO analysis in the market today.
What is SEO Testing and SEO Analysis?
An SEO test or SEO analysis is an evaluation of how your company performs in SEO. This means that you do a review of your site to see that it is well optimised for ranking high on search engines.
To do this review, you use various digital tools to perform an analysis from both a technical and content perspective. It is often about making sure you have optimised images and texts for search engines and that you scan to see how you and your competitors rank on the most important keywords for your business.
Why it is important to do an SEO analysis
The most important reason why you as an entrepreneur should work actively with SEO is to make sure that your company’s website takes the highest rankings on search engines like Google for the keywords that lead potential customers to you.
It also helps you to always be one step ahead of your biggest competitors. When doing an SEO analysis you can get answers to important questions such as:Are people searching for the keywords we think are important to our business?
Do we rank on important keywords ?
How do our direct competitors perform?
Is our website optimized for Google?
Do we have competitors in the search results we are not aware of?
What to consider when choosing tools
When choosing tools for your SEO work, you should consider what purposes are most important to you and your business as well as how much budget you have available to spend on SEO. There are both free tools and tools that you pay for.
If you want to invest in your SEO, I definitely recommend one of the tools you have to pay for as these tools are often more structured in terms of compiling data.
In the end, they save you considerable time compared to the simpler free tools. In the paid tools, the data is also more reliable which helps you to make more accurate decisions for your business.
The top 20 tools for SEO analysis and SEO testing
Google Keyword Planner
It’s always good to start from Google’s own tools. Google Keyword Planner is one of the simplest and most effective tools for finding new keywords for your site.
You can use this tool to see if you are really using all the keywords that your site should rank for or if there is room for optimisation with new strong keywords. Using Google Keyword Planner is completely free if you have a Google Ads account.
Here is our Step by Step Keyword Analysis Guide
Buzz Sumo
Buzzmo is a great tool for finding articles that are popular in various social networks. Above all, this tool gives you information about which headings within a topic work well in that they generate many clicks.
Use this tool to see how well your content is performing on social media compared to your competitors’. Maybe there is room for you to improve your content to have a greater impact on social media?
Moz Keyword Explorer
Moz Keyword Explorer is a tool you pay to use ($ 99 per month) but which I have to say is one of the best tools for SEO.
What I really like about Moz is that you can easily find more unique search terms that are relevant to your target audience.
It is a good tool to make sure your website is showing on more keywords that your target audience is using.
To do an SEO analysis, Moz Keyword Planner is good for seeing how many percent of searches on a keyword generate a click in the organic search result.
Moz also has something called “priority” which acts as a kind of scoring system that you can use to analyse how valuable the keywords you are using are.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is the famous tool of many SEO experts and definitely mine too. It is a simple tool for finding new keywords but also for analysing your website’s performance in terms of SEO. It’s a Great tool for Link building.
You can quickly see how different your pages rank for different keywords and see if you have recently climbed up or down in position.
In Ahrefs you can also quickly see how many external pages are linking to you, if you have lost some links and how well your page is structured for search engines to like it and rank it high.
Although Ahrefs costs around $ 99 a month, I would really recommend that you invest in this tool if you want to make a serious investment in SEO.
Deep Crawl
DeepCrawl is a really good tool to help you with your SEO analysis. The tool gives you a deep dive into all the information regarding any quality problems with your website which in turn can cause search engines not to like it.
Examples of problems that DeepCrawl can help you identify are if you have used too little text or have problems with your metadata. DeepCrawl costs $ 80 a month.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a classic SEO tool that helps you scan your site to detect any problems with your metadata, the size of the images or the titles of your various pages.
You can use Screaming Frog for free up to 500 URLs, after which you must upgrade to a paid version. However, you can get quite far in your analysis on the free version.
SEMRush
SEMrush is a great tool for both finding new keywords but also analysing your website for SEO. For example, you may discover new opportunities for backlinks.
With SEMrush you can also easily keep track of what your competitors are doing to learn from their strategies.
Link Miner
Link Miner is a free Chrome extension created by one of the SEO world legends Jon Cooper. I think it’s a good tool for quickly finding broken links. It is a simple, easy and useful tool for you to use for your SEO analysis.
SEOCockpit
An important part of your SEO analysis is to keep in mind that you are optimizing for as many relevant keywords as possible.
By using a tool like SEOCockpit, you can quickly find smart synonyms for the keywords you already use.
Prior to Check
Forecheck is actually an award-winning tool that you can use to scan your site to identify various quality problems.
Forecheck quickly finds errors such as 404 problems, problems with your server, missing metadata and titles, or problems with redirects. Forecheck has a free version that you can test.
Snippet Optimizer
A good tool to see how the metadata and meta titles you actually have will look in the search engine. It’s a quick way to do an analysis and a good quick test before putting new pages live.
Majestic
Majestic is probably one of the most popular tools for evaluating links. By using Majestic you can do a quick analysis of how many links you have to your site, the quality of the links and how they ultimately help to improve the ranking of your entire website.
BuiltWith
With Builtwith, you can see which platforms your competitors are using to build their sites.
This can be a great way to also reflect on whether you are using the right platform yourself or if you can learn something new from your competitors.
KWFinder
Another tool for searching for new keywords. Here you can also find good long-tail keywords. KWFinder gives you good and easy-to-understand statistics on search volume and trend. It’s that good tool to see if your site covers the keywords it should and possibly find new ones where needed. KWFinder costs $ 29 a month.
AnswerThePublic
A free tool that is very good at brainstorming new keywords is AnswerThePublic.
You just type in one keyword in their search box and then come up massively with suggestions on related keywords in a variety of combinations.
If after your SEO analysis you have seen that your main competitor is performing better, you can use this creative tool to generate new ideas.
MOZ Link Explorer
This is one of the biggest and most accurate tools for analyzing links, the authority of your page and your page’s backlinks. You will find over 35 trillion links here.
You can use a free version of Link Explorer that gives you 10 searches and 50 rows of data each month.
You can also use it as an extension in Chrome, for example, to get data directly when you visit other pages such as your competitors’.
Backlink Checker
One tip is that you also use Ahref’s free tools to check your backlinks. In fact, I think this tool is really good even though it has its limitations compared to their more complex version which of course also costs.
You can check up to 100 links for free and your search is somewhat limited in which filters you can use.
But to do a quick check of your backlinks or if you have a tight budget for your SEO then I really recommend Backlink Checker.
Zeo Mobile First Index Checker
When doing an SEO analysis, it is also important that you check how your site is performing on mobile. Today, most people use their mobile phones to access search engines.
Google has even switched completely to mobile-first indexing. I think the absolute best tool to see how your site ranks for mobile users is by using Zeo Mobile First Index Checker.
SEO Minion
This is a popular tool that works as a Chrome extension. I like this tool because it gives you a lot of data quickly.
For example, you can easily get information about on-page SEO and find broken links on your page.
SimilarWeb
My final tip will be what I think is a good tool for doing an SEO analysis of your competitors.
Keeping track of your competitors’ SEO strategies is a very effective way to also analyze and improve your own results.
With SimilarWeb you can, among other things, analyse your competitors’ traffic and their best performing pages.
