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Search engine optimisation can be just as successful as technical SEO because both focus on content and user-friendliness. To ensure that your website ranks well in Google SERPs, you must make sure that your technical SEO audit strategy is both effective and comprehensive. Creating a checklist for your audit can be extremely beneficial.
Our technical SEO audit guide can help you ensure that your technical SEO is up to date.
What is a Technical SEO Audit?
A technical SEO audit is a regular task that every SEO specialist is familiar with and performs on a website to check various technical items to ensure they meet the ranking factors required to rank well in Google. This means that technical aspects of your website can have a direct impact on your ranking in search engines like Google and Bing.
To conduct your first technical SEO audit, you can use a simple Excel checklist.
This technical SEO audit checklist will walk you through the process step by step. You can keep track of any issues you discover in an Excel or Word document. Keeping track of the issues you discover will allow you to address them as they arise. As a result, it aids in ensuring that your website is best optimised for search engines.
You can follow our audit checklist guide by clicking here:
- Start by Crawling Your Website
- Review Sitemap
- Examine Your Website's Browsable Versions
- Make certain that your website is mobile-friendly.
- Check Internal Links
- Test Site Speed
- Check HTTPS Content
- Compare Site Metrics Using Google Analytics
- Do a Backlink Audit
- Re-Crawl Your Website
What Factors Affect Your Website’s SEO Performance?
There are several factors that can have an impact on the SEO of your website. They can be divided into three categories:
On-page factors: This includes keywords, site content, and terms associated with them.
Off-page factors: Backlinks and other references to your website from other websites are included.
Technical factors: This includes things like page speed, indexing, and hosting.
Technical SEO audits should be performed on a regular basis as a best practice. This will help ensure that your website is in sync with the industry's changing ranking factors.
How to Conduct a Technical SEO Audit?
Now that you know what a technical SEO audit is, let's look at how to perform one:
Crawl Your Website
Crawling your site is the first step in any technical SEO strategy. Tools such as Screaming Frog, SEMrush, and Deep Crawl can be used. You can use free tools available on the internet.
Using SEMrush's On-page SEO Checker, you can get recommendations to improve the quality of your website's content, backlinks, technicality, and overall SEO strategy.
These crawling tools can assist you in locating errors such as incorrect page titles, poor images, broken links, and incorrect keywords. It can also assist you in identifying redirects, duplicate content, and unlinked pages.
Review Your Sitemap
A sitemap is required for every website. It is extremely important. It can provide search engines with information about your website's structure. It can also aid in the discovery of new pages on your website.
Your site must have a sitemap in order to successfully implement your SEO strategy. That being said, it must be verified during the technical SEO audit.
Examine Your Website's Browsable Versions
Every website owner must ensure that only one version of his website is accessible.
Is there a different version of your website?
If you have multiple versions of your website, it will cause "confusion" and send mixed signals to search engines.
If the search engine becomes confused about which version of your website to display to your audience, your search engine rankings will suffer.
Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly.
Google announced the rollout of mobile-first indexing in 2019. Google has been working on it for several years.
Google's Mobile-Friendly Test is a free tool that anyone can use to determine whether your website's pages are mobile responsive and easy to use. When you enter your website domain, it will tell you how your page will look on mobile and whether or not it is mobile-friendly.
You can also check your website manually. You can visit your site using your own phone. Examine your website, including other pages, for errors.
Check Internal Links
Here are a few things you can look into regarding your internal linking:
Click Depth: It displays the number of clicks a specific page has received from the homepage. Keep the number of clicks as low as possible as a best practice.
Broken Links: These kinds of links can squander your crawl budget. It may perplex your visitors and leave a negative impression of your website.
Orphan Pages: These are the pages that are not linked to any other page on your website. These pages can be difficult for search engines to find.
Test Your Site Speed
When it comes to SEO, the page speed of your site is crucial. According to studies, people dislike waiting. Visitors are more likely to bounce and leave your website if it takes too long to load.
The longer it takes for your site to load, the more damage it can cause. Every technical SEO audit is incomplete unless your website's page speed is tested.
Check HTTPS Content
When conducting a technical SEO audit, look for common HTTPS issues.
Every SEO Specialist should examine your HTTPS site for:
Links, Canonicals, and Redirects: Your site's internal links, including canonicals and redirects, must all point to an HTTPS page.
Your website may contain HTTP to HTTPS redirects. However, in SEO, sending your visitors to a redirect is not a good practice.
Redirect links can waste your crawl budget every time a Google bot encounters one.
Mixed Content: The most common mixed content issue occurs when a secure page loads unsecured content such as a video or image. This reduces the page's security and may prevent a browser from fully loading the unsecured content or the entire page.
Compare Site Metrics Using Google Analytics
During a technical SEO audit, make sure the Analytics code is correctly installed. Check to see if Google Analytics is reporting correct data.
Each page must have the Google Analytics tracking code installed above the header.
You can cross-reference your data in Analytics by comparing it to the results of a Google search for "site:domain." The number of pages should be the same. If it does not match, the tracking code must be corrected.
Do a Backlink Audit
Backlinks inform search engines about how valuable your content is to visitors. Backlinks are critical to the success of your website.
Aside from backlinks, Google bots look for brand mentions of your website. As a best practice, you should be aware of what is going on and off your website.
Re-Crawl Your Website
After you've resolved all of the issues discovered during your technical audit, you can re-submit your website to Google for re-indexing.
This is the last step in any technical SEO audit. This step ensures that all of your changes will take effect immediately.
Key Takeaways
These are the fundamentals of technical SEO. It may appear to be a daunting task, but once you've completed your first audit, it will be clear what improvements you can make to your website.
These steps are a great place to start to ensure that your website is optimised for search engines.
Improve your Site Rankings and get your Site Audited with us! Contact us now!