User Agent and Location Construction in Website Analysis

While analyzing a website, we have compiled 2 methods for you to analyze how the website looks from different locations and how it opens in different user-agents!

Why Is Location Important for Websites?

In website analysis, locations can affect the website’s SEO visibility. This is because websites are often designed for target audiences in a specific region or country. Therefore, if your website’s location does not match the geographic location of your target audience, your website’s SEO visibility may be negatively affected.

For example, if a Turkish company wants to serve customers in Turkey, their website should be in Turkish and listed in popular search engines in Turkey. Additionally, hosting the website on servers located in Turkey can help optimize page load times. Moreover, using a CDN for different locations is also very important in terms of website performance. For more detailed information about CDNs, check out our blog Improve Your Website Performance with CDN!

How to Change Location in Website Analysis?

While analyzing your website’s SEO performance, there is a great method to analyze how and how fast it opens from different locations. Moreover, you can do this directly from your Chrome browser’s developer panel without needing any plugin or tool.

First, after entering the website, right-click and select "Inspect" at the very bottom.

Then, in the opened inspect panel, click on the three-dot icon on the right side and activate > more tools > sensors.

In the Sensors panel, by clicking on the "Location" option, you can either select one of the ready-made locations:

Or you can add a custom location from the "Manage" section:

After selecting a location, simply refreshing the page will be enough to analyze how your website opens from that location. This way, you can analyze your website’s visibility from different locations and carry out SEO optimizations.

Why Is User-Agent Important for SEO?

User-agent is an HTTP header that defines the type and characteristics of browsers accessing a website. For SEO work, the importance of user-agent lies in the fact that search engines use it while crawling and indexing websites. Search engines use different user-agents when crawling, and these user-agents may crawl different versions of websites.

For example, if a website has both a desktop version and a mobile version, search engines can crawl both and consider them when listing in their indexes. Therefore, in SEO practices, it is important for your website to be mobile-friendly and for its mobile version to be optimized.

Another importance of user-agent is that it can affect how a website looks visually and the user experience. Different browsers and devices can display websites differently and have different capabilities. Therefore, testing and optimizing websites under different user-agents is important to improve user experience.

How to Change User-Agent in Website Analysis?

While performing your website’s SEO analysis, there is a very simple method to learn how it is perceived by different search engine and browser bots. Again, you can do this analysis easily using only your Chrome browser, without any plugins or tools.

First, after entering the website, right-click and select "Inspect" at the very bottom.

Then, in the opened inspect panel, click on the three-dot icon on the right side and activate > more tools > network conditions.

In the Network Conditions panel that opens at the bottom, uncheck the "Use browser default" option under the User agent section.

Then, from the menu right below, choose the user-agent you want to analyze with, and refresh the page.

In this way, we can analyze how our website looks and loads in different user-agents. Additionally, we can easily check whether there are any contents hidden from search engine bots but shown to users on the websites/brands we serve, and whether these contents and designs harm SEO visibility.

In conclusion, the importance of user-agent for SEO practices is that it is used by search engines that can crawl different versions of websites and that it can affect user experience. Testing and optimizing websites under different user-agents can help improve the website’s visibility and enhance user experience.