Paola Didone's Posts

Log file analysis is one of those tasks you might not do often - due to data availability & time constraints - but that can provide insights you wouldn’t be able to discover otherwise, particularly for large sites. If you’ve never done a log analysis or are unsure what exactly to look for and where to start, I’ve built a guideline to help you:

• Get started with some log file analysis tools
• Understand what log files are useful for
• Digging into the data and think how to better redistribute crawling resources

Log files are essentially a diary of all requests made to your site for a specific time period. The data is very specific and more in depth than you could gather from a crawl, Google Analytics and Google Search Console combined.

I’ve recently worked on a backlink audit that also focused on competitor’s backlink profiles. The results helped my client create a long-term strategy for obtaining backlinks from additional authoritative domains. I put together a list of steps that will be useful if you also are thinking to develop a plan for obtaining more strategic backlinks.

Here are the major steps that you will have to go through:

1. Compare your backlink profile to your competitors
2. Analyse the quality of domains linking to your competitors
3. Discover domains linking only to competitors

Before going over each step, it’s important to have a clear picture of who your competitors are so I advise you to make two lists:

• Direct competitors: directly competing with your business

Handling big sets of data to analyse is quite normal if you work in SEO. On a regular basis, either in Google Sheets or Excel, I use formulas such as vlookup, index, iferror, and the list goes on, to sort quickly through endless data. Not only are they fundamental for my survival as an SEO analyst, I often still have to refer to the Distilled Excel guide to achieve what I want. But sometimes, these functions are just not good enough. They’ll do the work, but the time it takes to set them up makes me question whether I am actually working faster.