What is an SEO website checker and how does it work?
Search engine optimization (SEO) checking tools are built to automatically crawl anything from a single web page to a whole website. They simulate the way a search engine crawls your site in order to quickly spot any errors or areas for improvement.
The Siteimprove SEO Checker uses a proprietary algorithm that’s been developed in-house. When you use Siteimprove's SEO Checker, the tool scans a site, identifies common SEO issues in seconds, and then ranks them by importance and how difficult they are to fix.
Why you should use an SEO Website Checker
Paid advertising, social media, and other digital marketing strategies all send traffic to websites, but the majority of website traffic comes from search engines. In fact, SEO delivers 20 times more traffic than PPC. But search engines still need help to send traffic to your website. Optimizing your site’s SEO delivers key information to search engines so they can properly index and display your pages – so you can rise through the search ranks. But SEO is an ever-changing field and knowing where to start can be daunting.
Manually auditing hundreds – or even thousands – of pages across your website for SEO issues takes time, resources, and expertise. So if you want to drive more traffic to your website – and who doesn’t – using a specialist tool that takes care of the heavy lifting for you, like the Siteimprove SEO Checker, is a great place to start. The free SEO website checker runs 14 test, which gives you a preview of the full version of Siteimprove SEO, which runs over 70 tests for common SEO issues.
What exactly does the Siteimprove SEO Checker do?
The full version of the Siteimprove SEO Website Checker runs a total of 70 individual checks, split into 10 distinct categories:
- Error codes: This tests for error response codes like the 404 (page not found) or 500 (internal server error).
- Redirects: This spots permanent 301 redirects and issues like redirect chains (where users are automatically redirected via several pages to get to the one they need).
- Links: This highlights link-related issues like broken internal links and outgoing links to unsafe domains.
- Images: This flags image issues like missing alt text or large images that need to be optimized for faster page loading speeds.
- Pages: This is a broad category for almost 20 page-level checks. It flags issues like pages with too many internal links, missing Open Graph tags, and pages that are excluded from the sitemap.
- Headings: This checks for issues related to headings like where a page is missing an H1 tag or has more than one H1 tag.
- Meta: This highlights items related to meta titles and meta descriptions, such as where they’re missing altogether or are too long for Google to display in full.
- Mobile: This tests your site for mobile-readiness. For example, it looks at whether the site loads quickly on mobile devices and whether it can be operated via a touchscreen.
- Readability: This flags readability issues, like content that is difficult to comprehend or pages that are too thin (word count below 500).
- Other: This catch-all category scans for 14 additional SEO blockers like missing robots.txt, user-unfriendly URLs, and pages that take too long to load.
Check your website's SEO performance with Siteimprove's free SEO checker
SEO is an absolute must for your website, but with all its complexities and industry jargon – keyword research, backlinks, content optimization, competitor analysis, and more - it can be hard to know where to focus your efforts for maximum impact. So, before you dive in, it’s a good idea to learn where your website stands, so you can prioritize your SEO issues with ease.
Use the Siteimprove SEO Checker to test any page on your website for common SEO blockers, separated into four essential SEO categories: technical, content, user experience, and mobile.
- View your unique page SEO score
- Receive an email detailing your results to share with your team
- See an immediate snapshot of your page’s SEO issues – split by category
- Read a clear explanation of how each SEO issue affects your user
How to read your Siteimprove SEO Website Checker report
The SEO test report you get from the website checker gives you a top-level SEO Score along with recommendations for next steps.
The SEO Score is an overall measure of how healthy your site is in terms of SEO. Yet this score alone isn’t enough for you to act on in any meaningful way. To make things actionable, you’ll receive a detailed list of issues as well as clear explanations of what they mean and how you can fix them.
To further help you address these issues, issues are grouped into four categories:
- Technical
- Content
- User experience
- Mobile
For each of these, you’ll get an importance rating (how critical it is to fix) and a difficulty score (how much effort and technical knowledge is needed).
What to optimize with your SEO site checker
What you’ll have to optimize will depend on your specific site and its current SEO health.
Generally speaking, you’ll want to address things in the following order of priority:
- Fix any major technical issues that stop search engines from crawling and indexing your site. Until these issues are resolved, most of your other SEO efforts are unlikely to have the desired impact.
- Fix content-related issues, as that’s what your visitors come to your site for in the first place.
- Fix user experience issues that prevent users from effortlessly navigating your site and finding what they’re looking for.
- Fix any mobile issues so that smartphone and tablet users can easily use your site.
Don’t worry: You don’t have to memorize any of this. The Siteimprove SEO Website Checker will give you a prioritized list of issues with improvement suggestions, so you’ll never be in doubt as to what you should tackle first.
How to monitor SEO progress
Website owners looking to improve their organic traffic will have to monitor several metrics. As a rule of thumb, you’ll want to at least track the following:
- Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rank: In what positions do your pages show up for their target keywords?
- Organic impressions and clicks: Want to know many people have seen your pages show up while making a search, and how many of them have clicked through to your site? Google gives you this information via Search Console, while Bing has Webmaster Tools.
- Organic visitors on your site: How has your organic traffic changed over time? Where are your organic visitors coming from and what devices do they use? Which pages do they visit? How does all of this align with whom you intended to attract and what you wanted them to do on your site?
These metrics are great at measuring the result or the output of your SEO efforts. But looking at the inputs that affect these metrics is equally important. That’s exactly what an SEO website checker is designed to do. It focuses on helping you fix site issues you can control, so that you’ll eventually see an improvement in your key SEO metrics.
In this way, the Siteimprove SEO Website Checker complements your SEO strategy by giving you a clear SEO score, an implementation roadmap, and a way to monitor your progress.
Siteimprove SEO Website Checker FAQ:
How long does it take to get my SEO report?
Less than 60 seconds!
After you input a page’s URL, the SEO website checker will automatically scan the contents of that web page. Within one minute, you’ll be able to see your SEO Score and view a free report in your browser.
Siteimprove will also send a free copy of this report directly to your email, so you have it for future reference.
Is the Siteimprove SEO website Checker free?
Yes. It’s completely free to get your web page SEO check. All you need to provide is a site URL and the email address you’d like your SEO report sent to.
How many tests does the Siteimprove SEO website Checker do?
The free Siteimprove SEO Checker runs a total of 14 individual tests for the most common SEO issues.
For those who need a more robust tool, the full version of Siteimprove SEO scans your entire site for 70+ SEO checks.