SEO analysis: how to analyze your website in 7 steps

An SEO analysis is the structured review of how a website is found, crawled, indexed and chosen by search engines and AI assistants, with the goal of deciding what to fix first. The starting point is always your own data: the Search Console Performance report gives clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position for every query and page, which no third-party tool can measure as precisely for your site. I have run this method for seven years, first in the SEO agency I founded and sold, then while building Sorank, and the order of the steps matters more than the tools.

What is an SEO analysis, and how does it differ from an SEO audit?

An SEO analysis is a diagnosis focused on decisions: it reads the data you already have to find where traffic is lost and why. An SEO audit is usually broader and more technical, a page-by-page inventory of errors produced by a crawler. In daily use the two words overlap, and a good analysis includes a light technical audit as one of its steps.

The difference shows in the deliverable. An audit often ends with hundreds of warnings of equal weight. An analysis ends with a ranked plan: three to ten actions, each tied to a page, a query and an expected effect. If you need the technical vocabulary, our glossary entry on the technical SEO audit defines each term.

How do you run an SEO analysis in 7 steps?

Run the seven steps in order, because each one depends on the previous: a page that is not indexed cannot rank, and a page that does not rank cannot be cited by AI Overviews. The table summarizes the question each step answers and the tools that answer it.

Step 1. Are your important pages indexed?

Indexing is the first check because nothing else matters for a page Google has not indexed. Open the Page indexing report in Search Console: it lists indexed URLs and the reason each excluded URL is excluded. Google states that "most sites have at least a few unindexed pages", so the goal is a narrower one: every page that sells or ranks must be indexed.

Check your homepage, category pages and best articles one by one with the URL Inspection tool. Then read the exclusion reasons: a noindex tag left after a redesign, a canonical pointing elsewhere, a page blocked by robots.txt or a page discovered but never crawled. The site: operator gives a quick estimate, but Google's own documentation says the list of URLs returned by site: is not always exhaustive, so treat it as a sample.

Step 2. What does the Search Console Performance report tell you?

The Performance report shows which queries and pages bring clicks, and where impressions do not turn into visits. Its four metrics are clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, with filters by query, page, country, device and date. Compare the last three months with the same period a year earlier to remove seasonal effects.

Three readings produce most of the actions:

• Pages in average positions 5 to 15 on queries with many impressions: they are close to the top and usually need an improved title, a fuller section or a few internal links.
• Queries with many impressions and a low click-through rate: the title and meta description do not convince, or a rich result answers the query directly.
• Pages that lost clicks year on year: compare the queries lost with the content of the page to find what changed.

Clicks and impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted in the Performance report under the Web search type, according to Google's documentation on AI features. Since 2026, a separate generative AI performance report also shows how often your pages appeared in these features, by page, country, device and date, with impressions only: no clicks and no breakdown by query.

Step 3. Is the site technically sound, and does it pass Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals measure loading, responsiveness and visual stability with three metrics and fixed thresholds. According to Google Search Central, a good experience means a Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) within 2.5 seconds, an Interaction to Next Paint (INP) under 200 milliseconds and a Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) under 0.1. Google says these metrics align with what its core ranking systems seek to reward, alongside other page experience aspects.

Run your main templates (homepage, category, product, article) through PageSpeed Insights and read the two blocks separately. Field data comes from real Chrome users over the previous 28 days, and a page passes the assessment when the 75th percentile of all three metrics is good. Lab data comes from a simulated Lighthouse load and is useful for debugging; its performance score is good from 90 to 100, needs improvement from 50 to 89 and is poor below 50.

Complete this step with a crawl of the site for broken links, redirect chains, missing canonicals and orphan pages. Screaming Frog is the reference desktop crawler; our comparison of the best technical SEO tools covers the alternatives by budget.

Step 4. Are your pages well optimized on-page?

On-page analysis checks the elements Google reads first on each page: title tag, meta description, a single H1 containing the main keyword, a logical H2 and H3 hierarchy, image alt text, internal links and structured data. These elements are quick to fix and often explain why a page ranks below a weaker competitor.

Work page by page on the URLs selected in step 2. The free Sorank Chrome extension displays on-page recommendations on any page you visit, and the free on-page SEO audit gives the same check from a URL. For heading structure specifically, the heading analyzer shows the full H1 to H6 tree, which reveals skipped levels and multiple H1s at a glance.

Step 5. Does your content cover the right queries without cannibalization?

Keyword cannibalization happens when several pages of the same site compete for one query, and Google alternates between them instead of ranking one strongly. In the Performance report, filter on an important query and open the Pages tab: if two or more URLs share impressions on it, you have a candidate.

For each case, decide between three options: merge the two pages and redirect the weaker one, rewrite one page to target a different intent, or strengthen the main page with internal links pointing to it. Then look for the opposite problem, content gaps: queries where competitors rank and you have no page at all. Semrush and Ahrefs list these gaps by domain; Search Console shows the early signs, queries with impressions but no dedicated page.

Step 6. Who links to your site?

Backlink analysis measures which external sites link to you, to which pages and with which anchor text. The Links report in Search Console lists top linking sites, top linked pages and anchors for free. Ahrefs, Majestic and Semrush add history, competitor comparisons and authority scores.

Look at three things: whether your money pages receive any links at all, whether a few competitors are linked from sites that ignore you, and whether the anchor profile looks natural. Link acquisition takes months, so this step mostly feeds the long-term part of the plan.

Step 7. Is your brand visible in AI Overviews and ChatGPT?

AI visibility is the share of relevant questions for which AI assistants mention or cite your brand. It has become a step of its own because AI answers now sit above the links: a Pew Research Center study of 900 US adults found that users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, against 15% without one.

Google states that no special optimization is required for AI Overviews and AI Mode: a page must be indexed and eligible to appear with a snippet. Steps 1 to 5 therefore already serve this step. To measure it, write ten questions your customers ask, test them in Google and in ChatGPT, and note who is cited. The free AI Overview checker does this for Google. Sorank automates it: the software creates the questions your customers ask and asks them every week to ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini (plus Perplexity and Grok on the Pro and Business plans), to show whether your brand is mentioned and who is cited instead.

How do you run a Google SEO analysis with Google's own free tools?

A Google SEO analysis can be done entirely with six free Google tools, which cover steps 1 to 6 without any subscription. Each answers one precise question:

1. Google Search Console: indexing, performance by query and page, Core Web Vitals report, Links report, manual actions. The core of any analysis.
2. PageSpeed Insights: field and lab data for Core Web Vitals, page by page, with the list of diagnosed problems.
3. Rich Results Test: checks whether a page's structured data is valid and which rich results it can produce.
4. Google Analytics 4: what organic visitors do after the click (engagement, conversions), which Search Console cannot see.
5. Google Trends: seasonality and the relative interest of two phrasings, useful before rewriting a title.
6. The site: operator: a quick sample of indexed pages and a way to spot unwanted URLs (filters, test pages) in the index.

The limit of Google's tools is the outside view: they show your site well and your competitors not at all. That is where paid suites such as Semrush, Ahrefs or SE Ranking are useful, for competitor keywords and backlinks.

How do you turn an SEO analysis into a prioritized action plan?

Rank each finding by expected impact divided by effort, and keep the plan to ten actions or fewer. An analysis that produces eighty recommendations produces no action. Score each finding from 1 to 3 on impact (traffic or revenue at stake) and on effort (time, developer needed or not), then start with high impact and low effort.

Write each action with an owner, a target page, a date and the metric that will prove it worked (clicks on the page, position on the query, mention in AI answers). Re-run the analysis every quarter: SEO results generally take 2 to 4 months to show, so a monthly full analysis mostly measures noise.

What can software do in an SEO analysis, and what stays your job?

Software handles the repetitive, measurable work; people keep the decisions. Tools read data faster and more often than any person: indexing reports, crawl errors, keyword lists, competitor gaps, AI mentions. They cannot decide whether a page should be merged with another, negotiate a link with a partner, plan a migration or arbitrate between two business priorities.

Sorank sits on the execution side of the plan. The software reads your site, finds the competitors visible on Google and in AI answers, extracts their keywords, sorts them by priority and fills an editorial calendar; it then writes the articles (with internal links, sources, FAQ, meta tags and JSON-LD schema, plus an anti-cannibalization check) and publishes them automatically to more than 10 CMS, including WordPress, Shopify, Webflow and Wix. It does not run a technical audit of your site: on-page checks go through the free Chrome extension, and technical fixes stay with your developer. If you prefer to delegate the whole diagnosis to people, our guide on choosing an SEO audit agency lists the questions to ask before signing.

Conclusion: what should you do after your SEO analysis?

A useful SEO analysis follows seven steps in order, from indexing to AI visibility, and ends with a ranked plan rather than a list of errors. Start with Search Console this week: check the indexing of your ten most important pages, then work on the pages in positions 5 to 15, before spending anything on paid tools. When the plan calls for steady content production and AI visibility tracking, Sorank does that work on autopilot: the Essential plan costs $99/month, or $49/month billed annually, with a 3-day free trial and a 90-day money-back guarantee. See Sorank plans and pricing.