How to analyze SEO-strategy at the start of the project

Modern search engines became rather smarter than they used to be five years ago. Now, filling the text with lots of various keywords and just waiting for site's hitting the TOP of the results page is not enough. The content on the site has to be useful, readable and up-to-date.

Search engines track the user's actions on the pages. They analyze whether the text has been read till the end, how much time has the user spent on the page and so on. If the text on the site doesn't answer the reader's questions, that means, it appears useless and won't set the top-positions of the list of search results.

What is important is that SEO-strategy has to be adequate. It has to meet the main goals of the website's promotion and satisfy the needs of search engines. The site SEO-analysis helps to assess the main aspects of a promotion campaign, identify all the strategy's up- and downsides. Finally, the received data will be the basis for the development of the new strategic plan.

Different site owners and webmasters may have different goals which influence the way they approach the promotion. However, the first thing we have to do is check whether the previous strategy is suitable for realizing your current goals. Generally, they are expressed in figures, for instance:

• if it goes about online-shopping or services — increasing sales rates or investment return (ROI);
  
  
• in case of informational resources — increased coverage.
  
  

According to your target figures, we can see how satisfactory is the former strategy. The previous statistics can help to analyze the current status of the site. Moreover, it may help to identify the possible ways of improving the site's traffic, conversion, etc.

At the very start of the project, it is important to understand how the content of the given resource satisfies the planned version.

The basic site SEO indicators are the number of keywords, availability of meta tags on all the pages, relevance to the target audience, proper innerlinking and extensive link mass.

Pay attention to the semantic core — keywords and phrases which had been used before to make the site hit the TOP of the SERP. These words help users to find the needed web-resource. If the «keys» are irrelevant to the project goals or don't meet other requirements, they have to be replaced. Properly collected semantic sore positively influences the traffic and the given data helps to determine the current and the future coverage.

In order to assess how proper is your semantics and which keywords have the highest frequency rates, you can use Serpstat service. Choose «Domain Analysis» → «SEO Research» → «Positions».

Enter the site with subdomains and the service will generate a list of the related keywords. In the table you will see:

Quite often, properly optimized meta tags are the key factor which influences site ranking. If the main topic of the site is changed, consequently all the Titles, descriptions and H1 headings have also to be changed.

Site content must answer the most common questions of the target audience and meet its needs and requirements. Also, style of writing, topics of the texts and so on have to correspond to the audience type, age group, etc.

In case if the target audience is shifted — the whole content is also to be changed. If the audience remains the same, the content has to be verified whether it's relevant or not.

Assess how properly are adjusted inner links and check if they are there in general. It is important for informational resources to ensure that the links in the text could direct a reader to the needed page which includes related materials or information.

In the case of the online store, it worth adding some links referring to the related products and categories, payment methods, delivery terms and so on.

Determine how big is the project's link mass and what methods were used for reaching such a result. Buying backlinks and other forbidden by search engines methods of getting hyperlinks may result in serious sanctions, dealing with which presupposes additional forces and wastes.

In order to assess the backlink volume, you can use «Backlink Analysis» by Serpstat. After entering a domain and choosing one of the search engines, the service will generate a report including the amount of referring domains, pages, IP addresses and subnets, dynamics, anchors, site's trust rank and many other useful pieces of information concerning the entered domain

Analyzing the previous site's SEO strategy is a source of basic data for the development of a new plan.

It is needed to take into account and analyze all the key performance indicators (KPI SEO): from keywords in the text and meta tags to the innerlinking and data protection.

The received information will help to identify various downsides, determine effective ways of their elimination and create a new plan of the project development.