How to analyze a website before starting SEO?

There are lots of SEO Tools which can analyze your website like Google does. Perhaps, one of the best ways is to ask Google itself to see the way Google analyze your website. And for that, you should be using Google’s Webmaster Tools which is the concise novice friendly resources that explain the fundamentals of Google search.

And most importantly, it is free of cost!! :)

Thank you for inviting me.

First one needs to conduct a  Pre SEO Audit:

• Know the objective  of the site and its target audience
• Keyword Analysis for its target market
• SERP ranking of the site for its primary keywords
• Competitor Analysis
• analyze the need and scope of SEO for a website.
• Customer Journey and UX Analysis for the site

You can also do a crawl of the site using screaming frog or any other tools. This would give an SEO consultant fairly good or rather deep insight into the scope of SEO, without  admin access for the site.

Well,  good SEO consultants do this home work before visiting a prospect client and hence in most cases know much more about the prospect client's site than the site owner itself. 

The clients are normally shocked to know that an outsider knows so much about the sites weakness and has come with ready solutions.

First, it depends if you are talking about a newly designed website or website that has been functional though without SEO? Therefore your question is very vague. SEO is in three stages, on-page, off-page and technical

As such it will be good to start with technical to determine if there is anything that will make you to call a designer to sort out before you can start to implement on-page and later on move to offpage.

However, you will be asking questions such as; is the content good for the purpose for which it is intended?

Is it user-friendly and responsive? Can users navigate to a given page with one or max 2 clicks?

Is the website crawlable by the search engine?

Are there any broken pages

Have the pages been indexed? (Google will index pages within 3 days, even if means indexing just one for a start)

Initially you can start with Google Webmasters Tools/Console & Google Analytics. Analyze your technical aspect of website then analyze backlinks. After analysis you can plan the SEO campaign !

Take a look at on-page elements on your web site. Examples of on-page optimization include actual HTML code, meta tags, keyword placement and keyword density. What you want to make sure is that your site structure is compliant with search engines algorithms and best practices (Google of course but if your target audience uses Bing or Yahoo don't hesitate to check compliance with those SE as well). 

Then focus on your back links or off page elements to ensure your receive links from relevant web sites.

Structure of the site is key to look at from the start then focus on content relevancy; you need also to look at the user experience which is determined by the industry you are in and the target audience you are addressing and how your site serves their needs: content, information, e-commerce etc. This will determine how relevant your site is to that particular audience you are targeting and will impact search engine results and your site ranking.

There are many useful SEO onsite checking tool on the internet.

For example Woorank, Seositecheckup, Semrush SEO or Moz that you can use to look into your website's SEO onsite and offsite issues.

Do not trust in only one SEO tool always try 2-3 and compare results. None of them 100% accurate ! 

Better analysis of a website actually starts from having a better domain name and user friendly design for the website to the efficient use of tools for keyword research and comparing link matrices .These are also part of optimization only.