Online marketing has become the gold standard. Many companies are shifting their budgets so that SEO, SEA and social media get a much bigger piece of the pie. And as with classic advertising, you therefore have to pay very close attention to where and how much money is spent. Hardly any other area in the company can become a bottomless pit so quickly. For this reason, a potential analysis is carried out before every campaign or other activity. We show how this works in the area of SEO.
The SEO potential analysis – this is how it works
When it comes to SEO, Google is the absolute eye of the needle. Online marketers base their activities on the rules set by Google. Due to their 20 years of dominance on the market, experts now know relatively well which factors are important and which are less so. Of course, their weighting changes from time to time, but the rough framework stands.
Some of these SEO factors are in the hands of the website operator. These are the on-page measures. These include content, keyword density, meta texts, images, ALT texts, loading times and other technical measures.
The first part of the SEO potential analysis thus includes an evaluation of the above-mentioned aspects. Special tools are usually used for this, such as MOZ, Semrush or Ahrefs, etc.
It is very common to always include the competition. Good SEO tools analyse these things at the same time. For example, evaluations are made of which keywords occur more frequently among competitors. In other words, those that are in 1st or 2nd place for a particular search term. With the help of applications such as Searchmetrics, one’s own content is then adjusted so that it integrates the most important elements of the competition.
In the second step, the external factors are added, the so-called off-page measures. Essentially, these are backlinks from other pages. Actually, this also includes shares in social media, including Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube and Instagram, etc. However, for Google ranking, it is the backlinks that have been proven to be the most important.
The analysis of backlinks is in many cases the crux where everything is decided. Long-established players on the market have a big head start in this respect. Their content has been present on the web for years. In some cases, natural links have formed that come from really enthusiastic readers. However, SEO agencies also buy additional links in order to stabilise their leading position.
This step shows the true potential of SEO measures. When it becomes apparent that the top 5 positions are full of backlinks from top sites, then it is clear that it will be a rocky road to outdo them. Overtaking such competition is extremely difficult. Therefore, it is quite possible that SEA will be the cheaper method to play a significant role for certain keywords. However, if it turns out that the competitor sites are unprofessional and have weak backlinks, then SEO offers great potential to bring sustainable traffic to a site.