The Key To a Technical SEO Audit

Competition is higher than ever when it comes to digital marketing, and it’s imperative that you prioritise the SEO of your website and your digital marketing strategies. The success of your business has never been so dependant on SEO, and as a result it is a subject that you ignore at your own risk. With more companies than ever making greater attempts to improve their SEO, you need to ensure that your website is not only well-built from a design perspective, but from an SEO foundation that will improve your competitiveness in the digital space. That’s why a technical SEO audit is vital for ensuring that you are achieving what you need to achieve when it comes to improving SERPs, sales, and increasing brand loyalty. The more that you understand how to conduct a technical SEO site audit, the easier it will be to make website improvements.

Understand a Technical SEO Audit

It’s a key necessity of any website that it is designed to perform well on SERPs. In the dark ages of the internet, this could be achieved with underhanded methods like keyword stuffing and micro-site backlinking, but those days are long gone. A technical SEO audit is a process where you evaluate the specific technical elements of your web pages, and identify those areas that need improvements. Search engines crawl through massive numbers of web pages in order to provide the right answers to every specific query, and then rank those websites accordingly. Relevance is the foundation of any SEO strategy, and a healthy website will be fully optimized at a technical level in order to have greater showings on Google and other search engine results pages.

Website SEO Factors that Matter

There are three primary ways that your SEO can be categorised when looking at how to conduct a technical SEO site audit. Each will have a different impact on your SERPs. They are:

• Technical SEO: This will be those aspects of your website such as loading speed, the platform that you have used as a host, and your indexing.
• On-Page SEO: This refers primarily to your content, but is dramatically affected by your use of keywords and any of the related industry terms that you use.
• Off-Page SEO: Backlinks are very effective for improved SEO and should be prioritised, but any website that refers back to yours will improve your SERP performance.

An audit is where you analyse the effectiveness of your SEO strategy, and should be conducted as regularly as is practical. SEO parameters change on a regular basis, so keeping up to date and making changes to your website is often essential if you want to maintain your existing effectiveness.

SEO Crawl

There are some useful tools available online in order to conduct the first stage of your technical SEO audit. These tools are important because they can help you to identify the factors that are negatively affecting your existing SEO. These factors can include:

• Broken links
• Images that are of poor quality
• Issues that you may be having with your page titles
• Ineffective use of keywords
• Identifying duplicate content
• Highlighting redundant site redirects
• Recognising pages that are unlinked

One of the tools that is available to use when evaluating how to conduct a technical SEO site audit is Google Search Console. This gives you a ‘crawl budget’, which is essentially just a highlighting tool that tells you how many of your web pages are being searched through by search engines, and how often they do so. This is very important for having a greater understanding of how Google views your website. If you want to improve the value of your crawl budget, then your duplicate content, indexing, page redirects, and URP parameters all need to be fixed.

It’s worth noting that you can evaluate your website by using Google to search for yourself. Type in ‘site:domain name’ and you will have a very clear picture of which of your pages are performing well and which are invisible to search engines.

Sitemap Review

One of the key aspects of your technical SEO audit will be ensuring that your sitemap is up to date. Your sitemap gives valuable data to search engines about your pages and the structure of your website. When focusing on how to conduct a technical SEO site audit, you should always ensure that your sitemap is error-free: The goal for your sitemap should be making certain that it is smooth and easily understandable. If you have index-blocking URLs or redirects, then these should be tidied up so that search engines do not ignore your existing sitemap. Overall, your sitemap needs to be:

• Clean
• Concise
• Always up to date
• Registered with Google Search Console

Internal Links

Having a more logical link hierarchy that more easily guides users around the pages that they need is a very useful method for improving SEO. While backlinks are effective, never underestimate the use of those internal links. Just as you must check for broken backlinks, so too should your technical audit evaluate your internal links. If you remove pages from your website, then those internal links can lead to nowhere, and that will affect your SERP performance. When it comes to internal links, focus on:

• Click depth: This is the number of clicks that it takes to reach a specific page from your homepage base. You want this number to be as low as possible, with most SEO specialists aiming for three mouse clicks in total. You can do this manually, or by using one of the online tools that will assess this for you.
• Broken Links: Ideally, you never want these on your web pages as they negatively affect your crawl budget, confuse your site visitors, and reduce your overall SEO.

Additional Factors

When it comes to technical SEO, you also need to sure that the following elements are clean and clear for both users and the search engine bots that will be crawling through your pages. Make use of the available resources in order to ensure that these are perfected:

• Site Speed: More important than ever, you can test your site speed by using Google PageSpeed Insights, which will also highlight the best actions to take if your site is loading too slowly.
• HTTPS Content: You can use WebSite Auditor to evaluate your current HTTPS content, and it too will highlight any issues with your links, redirects, and any problems with mixed HTTPS content.

Once you have conducted your technical SEO audit and taken the necessary steps to fix any issues, you should immediately run another crawl analysis. This will show you how effective your audit has been, and will highlight those areas that still need working on. Regular technical SEO audits are a critical component of website management, and the more frequently that you conduct them, the quicker you can identify and react to the issues that are negatively affecting your overall SEO performance.