Right now, you must have heard all about keyword rankings and how they are important for you to rank on the first page of google.
But SEO is much more than that. If the technical aspects of your webpage are not optimal, then no matter how good your keyword integration is, it will affect your chance to rank higher in search engines.
That is why we have to perform a technical SEO audit.
What happens when you can rank higher on Google SERPs?
Recent research from Bright Edge shows that around 53% of website traffic is generated by organic search and 61% of all online experiences start with search engines.
From that data, less than 1 % of searchers went on and clicked on the second page.
It shows how important SEO is and how you need to consider all the elements of SEO and not only the keywords.
Understanding and implementing every aspect of SEO is difficult, but it’s not impossible.
In this guide, we will dive deeper into technical SEO audit and how you can use it to improve your overall website experience.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the element involved in the process of optimizing the website for search engines. It’s a complex and ever-changing field, but the basics are pretty simple: make sure your site is accessible for the search engines to crawl and index.
Why Technical SEO is Important?
When you have produced excellent, helpful content that people were waiting for, you are ready to showcase the masterpiece to the world.
Moments later, the readers open your web page, and it takes a longer time to load your website, and they feel nothing but annoyed.
For every delay in the loading time, the bounce rate increases, and you lose precious traffic and you will be placed in the 90% of websites that receives no organic traffic from google.
What is a Technical SEO Audit?
As we have discussed, you need to ensure your website ranks higher in Google SERPs.
Technical SEO audit allows you to analyze the technical aspect related to how search engines can access, crawl and index your content.
Your audit will help you identify areas of your website where you can make changes for the better and keep users satisfied.
Elements of Technical SEO
When performing a technical SEO Audit, there are many elements to consider which includes:
- Mobile SEO
- Page load speed
- Link health
- Duplicate content
- Schemas
- Crawl errors
- Image issues
- Site security
- URL structure
- 404 pages
- 301 redirects
- 302 redirects
- Canonical tags
- XML sitemaps
- Site architecture
Technical SEO Audit Tools
Here are a few recommended tools to assist you in your technical SEO audit:
- Screaming Frog – fantastic tool to crawl your website.
- Ubersuggest – a free tool to start a crawl of your website.
- Google Analytics & Google Search Console – to monitor and identify technical SEO concerns such as crawl failures, performance, and so on
Steps to conduct a Technical SEO Audit
1.Start a crawl of your website
Ensuring the contents of your website are crawled and indexed is a critical part of your technical SEO Audit.
There are many great tools to aid you in this process, such as SEMRush, Screaming Frog, and Spyfu.
These tools assist you in producing valuable insights in identifying flaws such as broken links, poor pictures, page title issues, and ineffective keywords for you to take action.
In addition, they can assist you in uncovering duplicate content, excessive redirects, and unlinked pages.
2.Simple Google Search
You can manually perform a Google Search of your website to see how well it ranks.
The best way to do this is to use Google’s search operators.
Search operators are special characters that can be added to a Google search to help you find what you’re looking for.
For example, the “site:” operator can be used to find all pages on a website that are indexed
by Google, which is what we should follow now.
Simply search “site: root domain.”
It looks exactly like this:
This will show you which of your pages appear in the site result and offer you a sense of what might be going wrong with your website and how that might influence your search engine rankings.
3.Ensure that just one version of your website is accessible
If you have multiple versions of your website, it will definitely hinder the crawling of your website as the crawler will be confused as to which version of your website is the correct one.
It can result from a conflict between a mobile and desktop version or a duplicate “https” version and a non- “https” version.
When you conduct your technical SEO audit, you need to ensure that just one version of your website is browsable.
It is highly recommended that your website uses HTTPS.
4.Carry out on-page Technical SEO Checks
There are a few ways you can carry out on-page Technical SEO Checks, which include:
- Check the site title and meta description
- Check the site URL
- Check your website page’s load speed
- Check content quality: is it relevant to your target audience? Is it user-friendly?
- Check for duplicate contents, and if there are any, remove it
While on-page SEO audits are crucial, they are not the only focus of technical SEO audits. There are additional SEO audits to think about.
5.Govern your Internal & External Links
Both internal and external linking are important for user experience and traffic to your site.
When you have logical hierarchies within your sites, it can improve your SEO rankings because the visitors can easily navigate your website, and it proves the usefulness of your site.
You need to identify broken links on your website, and tools such as Integrity and Xenu Sleuth will significantly benefit you.
After that, the tool will start checking each link on your site and report its findings.
6.See how fast your site is
Google penalized slow websites with a significant drop in search rankings because they want people to surf websites as fast as possible.
Faster sites can lead to a better user experience and lower bounce rates hence a higher conversion rate.
You can do a few things to improve your site speed, including optimizing your image and reducing redirects.
You only need to utilize Pingdom and Ubersuggest to see your site’s performances with actionable insights.
7.Examine Off-Site SEO and Conduct a Backlink Audit
A backlink audit is a process of assessing the quality of the backlinks that are pointing to your website.
When you have a good number of backlinks, Google will categorize your site as relevant, useful, and in the higher rank.
Follow these very simple steps using ubersuggest to perform a backlink audit:
– Step 1: Enter the URL and click the “Search” button.
– Step 2: Click “Backlinks” in the sidebar on the left.
– Step 3: Examine the report.
Engaging on social media is a proven way to get high-quality backlinks.
Publish your content on the top social media platform where your target audience is most engaging.
This way, you can build trust and authority over time and positively affect your website traffic.
An SEO Audit is a great way to find the errors in your website that prevent you from ranking well in search engines.
It can also help you identify where you are losing business as a result of poor performance on search engine results pages (SERPs)
Technical SEO audits are a crucial part of your website’s success. If you want to make sure that your site is performing as well as possible and staying ahead of the competition, then it’s important to have regular technical SEO audits done.
This post has outlined some of the most common steps involved in performing an audit. We hope this guide was helpful.
If you need assistance performing an SEO Audit from an expert, feel free to contact us here.
We will be more than happy to conduct a technical SEO audit on your website.