SEO website check: SEO reports made easy

In every project - no matter if it is marketing, technology or classic project management - the following three basic rules have proven to be successful for me:

1. Formulate a goal for every action you intend to take.
2. Put a KPI behind it so that the whole thing is measurable.
3. Make, analyze, interpret, optimize.

And exactly in this order.

The chances are 50/50 that something tasty will come out of it. Or it may not taste good. Not at all. Sometimes you can use some spices to prevent the worst from happening later. But sometimes it is simply too late. Conclusion: throw it away. Being hungry. Without a strategy and without goals, after an SEO website check you can't know how successful you actually are. What do you want to achieve? By when and how do you want to achieve it? When the vision and the path are clear, nothing can stop you.

KPIs - Key Performance Indicators - are key figures with which the performance of measures can be determined. Many people are afraid of this. After all, they are not only evidence of success, but also of failure. I say: Reduce weaknesses. Building on strengths. This is the only way to become better.

The dish on the plate looks good at first sight. The portion fits, the colours shine, it even smells good. But you will never know if it tastes good without tasting it. It's the same with success measurement in the SEO area.

Let me give you a concrete example: You have decorated your content with a few keywords that you quickly copied from your competitors. Suddenly you generate more traffic. But the new users do not convert. And yet you continue writing. But the numbers do not get better. Frustrating.

But don't despair, because we have the solution.

Ultimately you should ask yourself the following three questions for your SEO website check:

1. Which KPIs make sense for SEO analyses?
2. Which SEO tools help me to measure success?
3. What do I need to look out for in SEO reports?

For a quick overview, I have compiled a small list of the most important KPIs for weekly SEO website checks:

• SEO Visibility - How visible am I compared to organic competition?
• SEO Rankings - How have the rankings of the top keywords developed? Are there significant ranking changes of important keywords?
• Organic Traffic - How much traffic did I generate via the organic channel?
• User signals - How do the users behave? What about Clickthrough Rate, Bounce Rate, Time On Site, Pages per Session? Does something look suspiciously bad? Do the user signals indicate inferior content?
• CVR & Revenue - How do my users convert and how much revenue do I generate through SEO traffic compared to the other channels?
• Indexing Status - How many pages have I submitted via my sitemap and how many have already been indexed? Were any pages accidentally set to "noindex" or even blocked for bots via robots.txt?
• Crawling statistics and errors - How often and how effectively do bots crawl my site? Are there 4xx or 5xx error messages? Were they forwarded accordingly via a 301 redirect?
• Domain Popularity - How often and how is my website linked?
• Domain Authority - What about brand awareness? How good are the links of the referring websites? Is the thematic relevance correct? What about the geographical proximity? Do the referring websites have a high (ideally higher) visibility and a strong page authority, i.e. is the site itself well and often linked on the web? Have I lost relevant backlinks?

These KPIs help you to get an overview of your SEO performance within a very short time. Deep dive SEO analyses such as a detailed SEO audit are recommended to be carried out only once a month, as visible results in the SEO area are often a bit slow. Now we come to the best SEO tools and other revealing KPIs, which I have selected based on the most important SEO factors.

There are SEO tools like sand on the beach. It's best to try out different online marketing tools yourself, as everyone has their own preferences. SEO is known to be a combination of technical cleanliness, content quality and web authority, so I highly recommend the following three SEO tools:

• Technical SEO with Screaming Frog. Great for analyzing IT hygiene: index status, canonical tags, crawlability, URL structure and SSL encryption, internal links, metadata and image optimization. I also recommend PageSpeed Insights, Google Test My Site and Pingdom to check your site performance regarding loading times, mobile optimization and usability.
• Onpage SEO with Searchmetrics. Great for analyzing keyword performance: development of SEO visibility compared to competitors and Google Updates, keyword rankings, content performance, competitor analysis.
• Offpage SEO with ahrefs.com. Great for analyzing the backlink profile: Relevance and quality as well as number of single backlinks and referring websites, target pages and anchor texts, new vs. lost backlinks, benchmark.

Must-have SEO tools still remain Google Search Console and Google Analytics to quickly identify technical errors with regard to response codes, sitemap and robots.txt, to find out with which keywords your content generates (clicks) or could generate (impressions) traffic and how users interact with your website (click rate, jump rate, dwell time, pages per session, conversions). Unfortunately, these tools are too often underestimated. However, a combination of both tools can reveal even more valuable information than with third-party tools!

If you have done your homework, you have now found out a lot about your website. So far, so good. How about now? It is helpful to make at least one statement per KPI. Always be honest with yourself and transparent. You can then combine your statements per SEO area to answer the following 3 questions:

1. Has it got better or worse?
2. Why did it get better or worse?
3. What can I do to optimize it?

The result of this SEO website check should be a well-founded list of possible recommendations for action for the various stakeholders. As you can see, for a long-term strong SEO performance a well-founded SEO reporting is essential. To conclude, I would like to give you the following 3 tips

1. First wait and see. Looking at website rankings every day makes little sense. With search engine optimization, it can take a few weeks or months until noticeable success is visible. I recommend weekly Quick SEO reports and a comprehensive SEO analysis once a month.
2. From rough to fine. Do not get lost in the numbers. Divide the KPIs into the three SEO areas - Technical SEO, Onpage SEO and Offpage SEO - and take a rough look at your Tech Score, SEO Visibility and Domain Authority before you start to look at each KPI in detail.
3. Benchmarking. The competition never sleeps. While it's helpful to do an SEO website check, it's more effective to compare yourself with organic competition. By this I mean websites that try to position themselves on Google & Co. with similar keywords. If you are an online shop, pure content platforms can also be serious competitors. If you are active in the B2B sector, B2C websites can also be exciting for you in terms of keywords.

In the SEO area, we now know the most important ranking signals, but Google would not be Google if it did not keep us SEOs on our toes. Therefore: Away from the herd instinct. Test, observe, interpret. Because you never stop learning. As Albert Einstein said: "I have no particular talent, I'm just passionately curious."

In this sense, good luck with your SEO website check and stay curious!

By the way, did you know that Youtube is the second largest search engine? Search engine optimization for Youtube is therefore also very exciting. How Video SEO works you can learn here.