An Easy Website Analyzer with a Short Trial Period

SEO SiteCheckup is an online SEO checker that is designed to promote a more complete, subscription based set of SEO tools called SEO Toolbox. Their SiteCheckup tool is free for your first use without inputting your email address, but to see the most complete results you do need to create a free account and start a trial period (no credit card is required however). The tool itself does pretty well for a free SEO analyzer, and in this video I’ll walk you through an overview and see how it stacks up on our SEO Audit checklist scoring system.

[Note: Check out the other SEO Checker reviews we’ve posted on our blog or on our YouTube channel]

For skimmers and video-phobes (or people that just don’t want to see me talking into a camera), a transcript is provided below.

Audio Transcript

Hi, you probably know that we’ve been doing reviews of tool- a class of tool that we call ‘SEO checkers’ or ‘website checkers,’ and these are basically free tools online where you can plug in your website address and then we’ll come back and give you an analysis of the SEO factors that relate to your site. And some of these are pretty good and some of them, not so much.

We’re gonna take the next one that we have in our queue of tools to review. This one is a pretty full-featured tool for what it is, known as ‘SEOs Site CheckUp.’ And so let’s go ahead and see what it gives us and walk through some of the results.

So the site that we’ve been using for this is a project site, let me go over here and show it to you. It’s called ‘Artisans of Colorado.’ And this is basically a site that has not been optimized for search, and a matter of fact, I’ve thrown a couple things into this page here, that I would like to see a tool pick up on as being negative factors. Just a couple of little tests to put things through.

So let’s go over here and see what we get when we run it through SEO’s Site CheckUp. SEO Site CheckUp basically will give you one free review of a website and then if you log in and create a free account with them, for what they call their ‘trial period,’ then it’ll give you a total of 15 site reviews, according to the information that I’ve read online.

Now, when you do this one, like for example, here I did ‘artisansofcolorado.com,’ and it didn’t ask me for an email address to do that, so I liked that feature, I like that I don’t have to plug in an email address. And when I sign up for a free account it doesn’t at that point, ask for a credit card, so I also like that it’s not asking for a credit card.

If you’re just doing a one-time check on a site, this would give you some decent information. Now, in this case, I’ve done it without logging in and it will present some ads here because it’s ad supported, so you can see an ad here for a ‘WP engine,’ in the main body of the page, and one on the right.

It gives you an overall optimization score on the left, in this case 77 out of 100. And then they’ll do a number of different checks and it gives you which ones have failed, which ones have warnings, and which ones have passed. One of the good things about it, it does have a nice PDF download. So if you click it and do the PDF download, it pretty much gives you all of the metrics that we’re gonna be looking at here, as we walk through this page.

It starts out with the most common SEO issues, for example it says, “Meta title, meta description.” Here again, I will give one qualification, which I always do on these tools, and that is none of them really will help you do SEO on your site if you know absolutely nothing about SEO. Now if you’ve got some basic knowledge, they’re very helpful, if you have no knowledge whatsoever, you’re typically gonna have to do a little bit of research as you go. Some of the tools help you with that, some of them don’t. I’ll show you where this tool might help with that.

The ‘title tag’ is extremely important [ed: here’s a link to a free course on optimizing title tags] , it is basically just reflecting it back to me. I would imagine if I had no title tag, it would fail me on this check.

The one thing it didn’t pick up on, is we do have duplicate title tags on this page, which is a no-no, and it doesn’t show me that a duplicate exists, which I would prefer that it does.

It’ll also show me the ‘meta description.’ That doesn’t help you rank higher, but it does influence the way this looks, and that is the snippet that comes back on Google search results page.

It’ll also give you some relevancy factors. In this case, relevance is okay. What are the primary keywords that exist on your site? Now in this case, this one is a little less robust than some of the others we’ve checked in, that it will only do single words in this analysis, and it won’t do two, three, or four letter phrases, as some of them will do that and I find that to be useful.

Then it does a quick and basic check whether the most used keywords appear in your title and meta description, which is useful. And it’ll give you a visual representation of kind of, what is this page going to be most relevant for, by showing you the words that occur the most on the page.

Now wherever it says, “Here get it now,” when you click on that it’s going to take you over to, basically a path where you can set up a free account, a trial account, and I’ll just- before we terminate this review, I’ll show you what it would look like if you do that.

It’ll also go down and give you a review of your ‘H1 headings,’ which is great. It says, “Your page contains H1 headings.” This is another area where I wish it would give me some guidance on the fact that there are two H1s and most SEOs, there’s a little controversy here, but, most SEOs would recommend that there only be one H1 on the page, and it does not alert me to that. Does show me what the H2s are.

It’ll give me whether there’s the presence of a robots.txt, and farther down it actually does a little further analysis on the robots.txt, which is good.

It also looks for the presence of sitemaps. Gives us an alert as to the sitemaps. And these are all technical SEO checks, basically.

It’ll look for broken links. Good thing there.

On the ‘image alt tags,’ this is where you’re actually gonna get some guidance on what’s important about this metric and how to fix it. So if I click on this ‘how to fix,’ it’ll bring up some more text information, also give me a little tutorial video here and I didn’t look at all the tutorial videos they had, but that one, for example, I looked at, and it was a reasonably good video, about three minutes, telling you about the ‘alt’ attribute and why it’s important, what you can do about fixing it.

Same thing with the ‘inline CSS.’ It’ll give you an explanation of why you might wanna take a look at these, the fact that CSS is being used inline and that’s kind of a technical term, and that’s why if you don’t know much about web development, you’re gonna need the little video to figure that one out.

So scrolling down farther, I don’t wanna go through every single one of these here, or I’ll make this a 20 minute video, and I’d rather not. So we’ll go down and take a look at- then the next section, when we get to this point, you’ll notice they’ll give you kind of a little clue, visual clue up at the top, that now you’re in the section of the site that deals with speed and it will give me an alert as to whether the size is too large or not.

I’ll also take a look at a number of technical factors that influence how fast the page comes up on search. Now if you’re non-technical, this is where it’s- you’re really gonna get into the weeds pretty quickly, in terms of stuff that you won’t understand. So, but, really they have no choice here, because to know how to make your page load faster, you really have to get into some technical information.

So where this would be useful, is if you ran this check and you download the PDF, then it’s very useful to send it to whoever does your website maintenance or your development, and say, “Okay, I see a few alerts on things, like your warnings on particular types of speed optimization techniques.” And you can have your developer give you an explanation as to why these are not being made use of or to just go ahead and make your page faster by addressing these issues.

So I won’t linger all over- over all of these because I would imagine most people watching this video are not professional developers, so we’ll go down here and take a look at the server and security. And here’s your little pop-up for a 14-day free trial.

And it’ll check to see if you’re running over ‘https,’ in other words, a secure protocol.

this ‘URL canonicalization test’ is good, I don’t see this on a lot of the SEO checkers, and that’s something that should be checked, on your site, even by a free checker.

Then you’ll go down here, and this is another thing that’s a must have nowadays, and that is, take a look at- it takes a look at whether the site is mobile friendly. Now in this case, it is picking up on the fact that one of the key elements that indicates whether a site is mobile friendly, is missing. From this site, it gives me a preview window, which I like.

And then we go into an advanced SEO section here. And it shows a number of different technical SEO checks that you would take a look at if you were trying to get into a more advanced level of SEO.

One of the things that it does that a lot of sites don’t do, is it checks whether SPF records are set up. And this is very important if you’re doing a lot of, for example, email marketing. If your SPF isn’t set up correctly, probably more of your mail is gonna wind up in your recipient’s spam folders. It’s not really an SEO thing, per se, but I- it was kinda nice that they did a check on that.

And so, here we get to the bottom, and there again, it’ll give you a review of what your medium priority fixes are, what your high priority fixes are, and that’s these here. And on the social media check, it basically- we didn’t spend much time on that, but it shows whether you’re tied into social media accounts or not. And that can influence SEOs, so it’s gonna tell you you fail if you have no social media presence.

So any case, that’s what it looks like when you do the free check. Now if you have logged into their tool and set up a free account, then you get something else that’s very useful and that is ‘the total back links.’ And before, it didn’t really give you, on the free checker, it didn’t really address back links at all. And I think that would have been a deficiency except for the fact that if you create a free account then you can go into it and check on the back links. Looks like it’s actually telling me I’m not signed up, here. And I had created a free account. Let me sign in here real quick.

Okay, so I signed in with the test account that I put up. Now, one thing that I will tell you, is I did actually a dry-run on this video a couple of days ago. I created a test account, a trial account, here, and it expired after two days, even though the website tells that I should’ve had a 14 day free trial. I don’t know if that’s gonna be your experience or not, but, just be advised, you might wanna make use of it right away.

Now if we go down here, you’ll see- now it’s telling me what the SEO score was with the check. And when you set it up for a free trial account, it’ll ask you for a few keywords, it’ll allow you to select competitors and see where you stand- and right here it shows the competitors, where these companies stand in relationship to our site, when it comes to SEO factors. And so that is nice, that you can do that. Again, you’re not gonna be able to keep doing this unless you sign up for a paid account.

And here we’ll go- now we’ll try again, the ‘back links’ check and you can see what it will do, is it will give me the total number of back links, the referring domains. It’ll give me the domain score on this. Now, I couldn’t find out exactly where this domain score was coming and just by the nature of these I have not been checking with the companies, if someone from the companies can tell us that and put it in the comments, that would be great.

And then down here it’ll show me where the back link URL is, the target that it’s pointed to. So, a lot more stuff when you get into it, or at least some more stuff. Along with a ‘keyword position tracker,’ for the keywords you enter. I think you can enter up to five.

All in all, I would say for a- for free access at this level, it’s a pretty good quality tool. It checks a lot of the stuff you would expect a free SEO checker to do.

Let’s go over now, and take a look at how it ranks on our SEO audit essentials checklist. Now this is a free resource that we give you and it’s for a professional SEO audit, so, you’ll notice here our SEO audit check list has a total of 90 different items to check.

SEO Site CheckUp actually is a tool that you could’ve used to clear 20 of these and when it comes to technical factors, we have 30 items on our list, SEO Site CheckUp would’ve cleared, or helped you to clear, nine. And as we go down here, you can see, and I’m not gonna tell you, every one of these again, in interest of time, but a lot of the items on our checklist could’ve been helped by using this particular tool.

Now this 20 is actually not a bad score, you know, it’s a small minimum, but that just illustrates the fact that there’s a lot more to doing an SEO audit than simply running an SEO checker tool over your site.

Just as a reminder, the SEO Audit CheckList is a free download that we offer, a resource that you can use to go through and have a look at the factors that affect your ranking. SEO Site CheckUp is a good starting point for getting into that audit checklist.

So, in any case, I hope that this review has been of some use to you, and, the SEO Audit CheckList that we offer, is a resource that will be of even more use to you.

And if you want to see other reviews and how-to videos and so forth, that we put out in the interest of helping to train business people to do their own SEO, please subscribe to the channel, with the big red button underneath the video, and also, follow the links in the description for this video, in order to get those free resources.

Ross Barefoot

Ross Barefoot got his start in small business managing an importing company in the bicycle industry.  While there, he tried his hand at programming to find more effective ways to track, market and sell his company’s range of bicycle parts. He loved the web marketing side of things so much he became a professional web developer in 2001, starting a website design business in Western Colorado. He took his first SEO certification course from the Search Engine Academy in 2002, followed it up with another in 2004, and decided to jump full time into SEO training and consulting in 2011, becoming a Master Certified Instructor with the Search Engine Academy, where he continues to serve on the Board of Directors. Today, Ross is CTO, trainer and chief SEO strategist at Horizon Web Marketing (www.horizonwebmarketing.com), a full-service digital marketing agency based in Las Vegas.