What 9 Points Are Required In A Technical SEO Audit?
What is Technical SEO?
What does technical SEO entail? Technical SEO entails changes to your site that make it easier for Google to crawl and index it, allowing it to deliver the right content to users at the right time. Your technical SEO health is affected by site architecture, URL structure, the way your site is designed and coded, redirects, your sitemap, your Robots.txt file, image delivery, site errors, and many other factors.
In this article, we will go over the first nine things to look for when conducting a technical SEO audit.
Steps Should You Follow to Conduct a Technical SEO Audit:
Let’s look at how to conduct a technical SEO audit now that you know what it is and what parameters it includes.
- Start by Crawling Your Website
The crawling of your website should be the first step in any technical SEO audit. You can do this with tools like SEMrush, Spyfu, or DeepCrawl.
The On-Page SEO Checker from SEMrush also gives you actionable advice on how to improve your site’s SEO strategy, backlinks, technical SEO, and content quality.
Broken links, poor photographs, page title problems, and bad keywords are all detected by crawlers. They will also help you find duplicate content, redirects, and pages that are not connected.
You can also look at your crawl budget in the Google Search Console. The number of pages that Google crawls on your website and how often it does so make up your crawl budget.
- Review Sitemap
Your website’s sitemap is extremely important. It will inform search engines about the structure of your website and assist them in discovering new pages.
A sitemap is necessary for executing an effective SEO strategy. As a result, you can check it during your technical SEO audit to make sure your site’s architecture is logical and easy to follow.
- Check the Browseable Versions of Your Website
Make sure there is only one “version” of your website that can be viewed.
Do you have multiple versions of your website?
If you do you will be sending the search engine mixed signals. Search engines will be confused as to which version is correct.
If the search engine is unsure about your website’s versions, it will not know how to display them to users and could report errors. This can have a significant impact on your search engine rankings.
These errors can occur as a result of duplicate HTTP vs. HTTPS versions or as a result of mobile and desktop versions fighting it out. Only one version of your website should be browseable, according to technical SEO audit practice.
Obviously, making sure your website uses HTTPS is a great idea. Even Google is ensuring that users are aware of which sites are secure and which are not. Websites that use HTTP now have a “Not Secure” label next to them which is bad for your rankings.
- Check Internal Links
Your search rankings will benefit greatly from a logical hierarchy on your website. As a result, it is important to double-check both internal and external links.
Web pages may also have been removed or relocated, resulting in a broken link that hurts your site’s health.
- Test Site Speed
When it comes to SEO, the speed of your web is a critical factor. People dislike waiting for websites to load, and the longer it takes, the more likely visitors are to abandon the site.
As a result, no technical SEO audit is complete without a speed test of your website.
- Check HTTPS Content
On Google’s first page, about 70% of the results are all HTTPS. If your website already uses HTTPS, your technical SEO audit should include a look for common HTTPS problems.
- Use Analytics to Compare Site Metrics
Check to see if your analytics service is providing accurate real-time data. If it is working properly, the code has been correctly installed.
During the technical SEO audit, this should be reviewed. The Google Analytics tracker code must be placed above the header of each web page.
Once the service is up and running, you can compare the data to the search results for “site:domain name.”
In both cases, the number of pages should be equal. If the numbers do not match, that means that some pages are not properly accepting crawl requests.
You can also use Google Analytics to validate your bounce rate. You want to keep this rate as low as possible.
- Do a Backlink Audit
Backlinks are critical to your website’s achievement, so it is no surprise that they are included in the technical SEO audit. They demonstrate to search engines how important your website’s content is to users.
Crawlers, on the other hand, do not just look for hyperlinks in off-site SEO.
Google’s bot also looks for brand mentions on your website. As a result, it is critical to be aware of what is going on and off your website.
- Re-Crawl Your Website
You should ask Google to re-crawl the website if the problems found in the technical SEO audit have been resolved.
This final step of the technical SEO audit ensures that the changes you have made are implemented right away.