SEO Analyse: What It Is and How to Do One Yourself

You know your website should bring in more visitors, but you have no idea why it doesn't. An SEO analyse is how you find out. In short: an SEO analyse is a structured check of your website's technical health, content, and authority, so you can see exactly which issues are holding back your rankings — and which fixes are worth doing first.

What does an SEO analyse actually look at?

Search engines decide where to place you based on hundreds of signals, but almost all of them fall into three buckets:

• Technical: can Google crawl, render and index your pages quickly and without errors?
• Content: do your pages answer the questions people actually type into search?
• Authority: do other websites link to you, and do you look like a credible source in your field?

An SEO analyse walks through all three and produces a list of concrete problems. Not "improve your content", but "your service page has no H1, loads in 6 seconds on mobile, and targets a keyword nobody searches for".

That difference matters. A report full of scores and colour codes is interesting; a list of tasks you can hand to yourself or your web developer on Monday morning is useful.

Why do you need one before you change anything?

Most small business owners start fixing before diagnosing. They rewrite the homepage, add a blog, buy a few links — and see nothing change, because the real problem was a `noindex` tag left over from the site build, or pages that were never linked to from anywhere.

An SEO analyse gives you three things:

1. A baseline. You can only prove progress if you know where you started.
2. Priorities. Some issues affect every page on your site; others affect one page nobody visits.
3. A plan you can defend. When you spend money, you know what you're paying for.

Step 1: check whether Google can find you at all

Start with the basics, because this is where the biggest wins usually hide.

Search for `site:yourdomain.com` in Google. The results roughly show which pages are indexed. If your webshop has 120 product pages and only 14 show up, that's your first problem.

Then connect Google Search Console if you haven't already. It's free, and it tells you which queries you already appear for, which pages get clicks, and which pages Google refused to index and why. Look especially at:

• Pages excluded as "Discovered – currently not indexed" or "Crawled – currently not indexed"
• Mobile usability issues
• Sitemap errors

A plumbing company we could imagine as a typical example might find that its five city landing pages are all excluded because they're near-identical copies of each other. That's one insight worth more than a month of blogging.

Step 2: run a technical health check

Next, look at the mechanics. Open a handful of your most important pages and check:

• Speed on mobile. Use PageSpeed Insights. Oversized images are the single most common culprit in small business sites.
• Title tags and meta descriptions. Each page needs a unique title of roughly 50–60 characters that includes the term people search for.
• Heading structure. One H1 per page, H2s that break the content into logical sections.
• Broken links and redirect chains. Old pages that were deleted without a redirect leak both visitors and link value.
• HTTPS and canonical tags. Your site should be reachable at exactly one address, not four variants.

This is the part of an SEO analyse that's tedious by hand. An automated audit — the kind SEOHero runs across your whole site — surfaces these issues in one pass and turns them into a to-do list, which saves you an afternoon of clicking through pages.

Step 3: analyse your content against real search demand

Now the interesting part. For each important page, ask three questions:

1. Which search term is this page for? If you can't name one, the page has no job.
2. Does the page match the intent behind that term? Someone searching "cost of a new boiler" wants a price range, not a contact form.
3. Is it better than what already ranks? Open the top five results and count what they cover that you don't.

A hairdresser targeting "hair salon Utrecht" needs opening hours, prices, photos, directions and reviews on the page. An advisory firm targeting "what does a bookkeeper cost" needs actual numbers and examples. Content analysis is mostly about honesty: does your page really deserve to outrank the others?

If you're just getting started with this, the practical walkthrough in SEO tips for beginners covers the fundamentals in order.

Step 4: look at authority and internal links

You don't need thousands of backlinks. You do need to know whether anyone links to you at all. Check Search Console's "Links" report to see your referring domains and which pages attract them.

Then check your internal links, which you control completely. Every important page should be reachable from your menu or from other relevant pages in a click or two. Orphan pages — pages nothing links to — are invisible in practice, even if they're technically indexed.

Step 5: don't forget AI answers

An SEO analyse in 2024 and beyond covers more than Google's blue links. People increasingly get answers from AI assistants and AI overviews that summarise sources rather than list them. Being quotable matters: clear definitions, structured headings, concrete facts and a recognisable brand name all help.

The mechanics overlap with classic SEO, but not completely — the piece on the difference between SEO and GEO explains where the two diverge and what to do about it.

How often should you repeat the analysis?

A full SEO analyse once or twice a year is enough for most small sites. A light check — rankings, indexing errors, traffic per page — is better done monthly or weekly, because problems like a broken redirect or an accidental `noindex` cost you traffic every day they exist.

Webshops and sites that publish frequently need shorter cycles than a five-page brochure site.

Your SEO analyse checklist

Work through this in order:

1. Confirm your pages are indexed (`site:` search plus Search Console coverage).
2. Check mobile speed and fix oversized images first.
3. Give every page a unique title, meta description and single H1.
4. Assign one clear search term to each important page.
5. Compare your top pages against the current top five results.
6. Fix broken links and orphan pages; link important pages from your menu.
7. Note your referring domains and where they point.
8. Make your key facts easy for AI tools to quote.
9. Write down three priority fixes and a date to re-check.

In short

An SEO analyse isn't a report you file away — it's a diagnosis that tells you what to do next. Start with indexing, work through technical issues, then content, then links. Fix the things that affect every page before polishing individual sentences, and re-measure after a few weeks so you know what actually worked.