Find Out How To Conduct a Technical SEO Audit With These Simple Steps

Thanks to the ever-growing competition in the digital marketing space, you need to remain at the top of your game. SEO is a major contributor to any website’s success and is one factor that cannot be ignored.

SEO is very critical for the success of any online business. In fact, about 61% of marketers say that SEO is their primary focus for inbound marketing. You may have built your website well but if the SEO is not up to the mark, your website will not be able to compete.

To make sure that your SEO is at its best, you need to conduct a technical SEO audit. This will give you an idea of how your website ranks and what you need to do to improve your rankings. It may sound difficult and time-consuming, but it doesn’t have to be.

You can easily conduct a technical SEO audit in a short amount of time. And that short amount of time can have a big impact. Before diving deeper into the topic, let’s first take a look at what exactly a technical SEO audit is.What is a Technical SEO Audit?

You need to ensure that your content and website rank high in the search engine result pages (SERPs) on Google. The days of keyword stuffing and backlinking from micro-sites are gone. You need to up your game and get your SEO strategy in line with the latest developments.

A technical SEO audit is a process during which you check the technical aspects of your website’s SEO. It basically checks the health of a website and finds out what fixes might be needed to improve it.

Search engine bots crawl the web to find pages and websites. The bots then check your pages for the different ranking factors before ranking your website in the search results.

SEO is changing constantly and your competitors are keeping up with the changes too. For this reason, it is important for you to remain up-to-date to remain relevant. If you don’t assess your website’s health, you may end up losing traffic to your competitors.

As the search algorithms and technology change frequently, it is a good practice to perform mini-audits monthly. You must also ensure that you do conduct a full-fledged technical SEO audit every 4-5 months.

Factors Affecting Your SEO

The main factors that affect your website’s SEO can be broadly classified into three different categories.

• Technical: This includes technical aspects such as hosting, indexing, page loading speed.
• On-page: This includes factors such as site content, target keywords, and their related terms.
• Off-Page: This section includes the backlinks and outside references to your website from other websites.

You need to conduct audits of each of these factors at regular intervals. This will ensure that you’re always up-to-date with the changing conditions in the industry.

One of the most important factors to be kept in mind is the mobile-readiness of your website. As about 60% of all searches happen on mobile, Google has started giving more importance to mobile-friendly websites.

Now that we know what technical SEO audit is and what parameters are included in it, let’s take a look at how you can conduct one.

1. Start With A Crawl

Every technical SEO audit must start with the crawling of your website. For this, you can use tools such as SEMrush, Spyfu or DeepCrawl.

The crawlers help you find errors such as broken links, poor images, page title issues, and bad keywords. They can also help you identify duplicate content, excess redirects, and unlinked pages.

You can also take a look at the Google Search Console to see your crawl budget. Your crawl budget is essentially the number of pages that Google is crawling on your website and how frequently it is doing that.

Looking at your crawl budget will give you an idea of how the Google bot is crawling your website.

To make the most of your crawl budget, you need to do the following:

• Remove Duplicate Content: Duplicate pages can easily waste your crawl budget. You can use tools such as Screaming Frog to find duplicate pages. These pages usually have the same title and meta description tags as well. Remove as many duplicate pages as possible. However, if you need to keep them, block them from the search engine bots.
• Restrict Indexation: There will be pages such as Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions that may not need to be listed in search results. You can disallow these pages from being indexed and save on the crawl budget.
• Provide URL Parameters: Google may end up crawling the same page twice, with URL parameters and without them as if they are two pages.You can add URL parameters to the Google Search Console. This can instruct Google that it is crawling the same page and not two of them.
• Fix Redirects: Every single redirect that the Google bot follows is a waste of crawl budget. Additionally, if there are loads of 301 or 302 redirects, the bots may stop following them and may not reach the destination page. You need to reduce the number of redirects during technical SEO audit to optimize your crawl budget.

Continue reading this article on Shane Barker's blog.