Every serious SEO practitioner knows that performing a technical SEO audit of their website is a critical step for improving their rankings in the search engines. Unlike content-focused SEO, a technical audit engages in the poking around the framework of the website by figuring out whether the pages are able to be crawled by search engines, indexed, or ranked at all. It isolates limitations that the business may be confronted with in as much as website performance is concerned and provides ways of optimizing user access and optimization speed among search engines.
In this guide, we will tackle a technical SEO audit in detail, step by step. Note down the tools and techniques that you need to identify and fix the most common technical issues affecting your website.
What is a technical SEO audit?
A technical SEO audit refers to the evaluation of the technical aspects of on-page elements of your website that affect its crawling, indexing, and ranking in search engines. Rather than search engine optimization content, this form of audit consists of more of a website’s technical factors and therefore of expanding its search-friendly environment according to new techniques in the field of SEO.
While assigned for a normal technical audit, the auditor will focus on some aspects such as:
- Crawlability: Is your website accessible, and can it be crawled by search engines?
- Indexability: Is it possible for search engines to index web pages?
- Site Speed: In how much time does your website load on desktops and mobile?
- Mobile Usability: Is your website designed and ready for mobile-first indexing?
- Security: Is your website enabled with HTTPS for secure browsing?
- Structured Data: Are you utilizing schema markups on your website for enhanced visibility in search engine results?
Now and then, carrying out a technical SEO audit on your website helps the users of today’s internet plus other search engines such as Google. This also helps in identifying and rectifying problems that would otherwise cause your website to lose rankings.
Tools You Need for a Technical SEO Audit
You’ll need appropriate tools to conduct a technical audit of your website. Here are some essential tools for you before you start:
- Google Search Console: It helps in checking crawl errors, performance, and sitemap submission.
- Semrush: Provides services like site audits, checks backlinks, performance of pages, etc.
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider: This tool is used for crawling your site for identification of missing tags, broken links, and duplicate content.
- GTmetrix: Description analysis helps to identify areas of poor site performance and its improvement possibilities.
- Ahrefs: An SEO tool that covers the whole picture, including the site’s technical problems, backlinks, and organic traffic.
- Google PageSpeed Insights: It evaluates speed and usability for both desktop and mobile users.
Steps of a Structural Audit of a Page
Crawl Your Site
The dues and processes that will enable me to perform the technical audit will commence by crawling the website. Crawling your site helps to understand how the search engines like Google go from one of your pages to another page on your site. This helps you discover critical technical problems, including:
- Missing pages due to the entry of incorrect web addresses (404 pages)
- Redirect chains or loops
- The offering of content that has already been presented through other channels (duplicate content)
- Lack of necessary coded tags
Using Screaming Frog or Semrush:
If you crawl the site, it will be suggested that you obtain the full list of the web pages with resources available for crawling on the target domain.
Check the presence and quality of internal and external links. All broken links are determined, which are bad for UX and SEO.
Proceed to check the meta titles and meta descriptions. The title and description of each page should be distinct and pertinent in terms of keywords used.
Overall, repairing these problems enhances the overall satisfaction and experience of users on your site, the crawl rate, and the ranking back in search.
In order for the search engines to include this content, they must first crawl the site. Any limitations regarding the ease of crawling will make it impossible for pages to be indexed or ranked. Examples of such limitations may include blocked pages and URLs, which are allowed in the robots.txt file.
Site Crawlability and Indexability Checks:
- Google Search Console: Issues affecting the indexing of some pages, including 404 errors and server errors, can be identified in the Coverage report.
- Robots.txt file: Do not block search engine crawlers from accessing essential web pages. Robots.txt files, when mishandled, can lead to the restriction of essential pages from being indexed.
- Sitemaps: XML sitemaps are vital documents that need not only to be in proper order but also uploaded to search engines. It must also be updated regularly to include all other critical pages.
Performing a robust crawlability and indexability exercise will improve the manner in which search engines perceive and interact with your content.
Optimize Site Speed and Performance
It is one of the most important indicators of characteristics, not only for users of the page and getting them correctly. The loading speed of the pages easily determines how specific Google ranking is going to be, hence the rise of core web vitals.
Core Web Vitals Metrics:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): The time taken for a background task to complete is measured through the LCP metric. Aim for a score of less than 2.5 sec.
- First Input Delay (FID): The quickness that the user is able to perform the first interaction is measured by this scale. Aim for a score of below 100 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This measures visual interest and stability in a web page as it goes through the loading changes. Thus, a good score is obtained with a score of less than 0.1.
How to Improve Page Speed:
- Reduce the size of the images having large file sizes: Any time there are images on a page, finding the right position of the image compression tools is that images should not be perceived to be compromised in quality.
- Minimize JavaScript and CSS: Scripts and styles that are nonessential to the loading of the page must be deleted, especially when they inhibit fast loading of the page.
- Enable browser caching: Elements, which may include images or stylesheets that have been visited by the user and are stored in the user's browser, so that upon retrieving them faster than the first visit.
- Use CDN: It can enhance performance for players that make significant use of 1 or more servers geographically dispersed, or alternatively, use the phrase that a CDN lowers the latency by then serving applications content to the user through a server that is more proximate to him.
You can check the speed of your site and optimize it through Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix.
Ensure Mobile-Friendliness
Google has a delight in mobile-first indexing. This means that the mobile version of your website is the main one used in indexing and ranking the site. Thus, it goes without saying that mobile optimization should be a core strategy in achieving SEO for your website.
Steps to Enhance Mobile Usability:
- Responsive Layout: The structure of the content on your website should change automatically depending on the device used. No matter what device is used, be it a mobile phone, a tablet, or a desktop PC, the website must ensure ease of use.
- Mobile Usage Optimization: Apply strategies like lazy image loading for images and use time-out scripts for faster browsing on mobile.
- Clickability of items: Avoid unintentional mouse clicks by ensuring there are adequate taps for any presented buttons or links.
Utilize the Mobile-Friendly Test application from Google to gauge the mobile version of your website, and make sure to unravel any mobile usability problems in Google Search Console.
Protect Your Site With HTTPS Security
Security is one of the standards used to determine ranking, hence a safe site regarding the elevation of users trust. For data protection and SEO performance, every website these days needs to be secured, which means the use of HTTPS (secured by SSL certificate).
Website Security Measures:
- Purchase an SSL Certificate: Make sure the URL of the website starts with HTTPS and not only HTTP. This means that users’ connections to the server are protected, whose contents cannot be viewed by third parties.
- Check for Mixed Content: Once you transition to HTTPS, check that every single internal element, such as images and even scripts, is also served using HTTPS. Mixed content (that is, when an HTTP element is in a page that supports HTTPS) is always known to cause security warnings on browsers.
Eliminate all the mixed content, keeping the users’ confidence intact and avoiding low search engine rates as one of the consequences among other concerns.
Get Rid of Duplicative Content and Standardize It with Canonical Tags
Duplicated content works out as confusing websites and also diminishes the strength of the authority of the pages tagged with such. A problem like this one must be resolved and make sure that search engines will have a clear understanding of which version of the content matters most.
Enhancing Duplicate Content:
- Check for duplicate pages: Perform duplicate and content checks using Screaming Frog or Semrush to detect pages with duplicate content and also page meta tags.
- Canonicalization: Use rel=”canonical” tags on similar and duplicate pages so as to help search engines determine which of the pages should be indexed.
- 301 Redirects: Use 301 redirects such that duplicated or outdated pages should be redirected to an appropriate newer version.
With the correct handling of duplicate content comes a coherent hierarchy of websites that ensures that reputable pages of the site are ranked higher by the search engines.
Implement Structured Data
Using structured data (schema-coded markup) would help a search engine comprehend the contents on your site better. It has the potential to enhance how your pages are displayed on the results, more so exaggerating it with some rich snippets, including star ratings, pricing, and event details.
Steps to Implement Structured Data:
- Choose the correct schema type: Regardless of whether you have a blog, eCommerce store, or a local store, you ought to apply the schema markup that relates to your content (example: product schema, FAQ schema, event schema).
- Validate your schema: Apply Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool or Rich Results Test to ensure that there are no mistakes in the markup that you have created.
- Monitor rich results: After adding the schema markup, you can check the results of your effort in the search engine under the Search Appearance section in Google Search Console.
When structured data is used appropriately, it can lead to a better ranking on search engines and more clients.
Monitor Site Health Regularly
A technical SEO audit is not a one-off affair. You should always take note of the state of your site technologically and, even better, how the state of your site changes over time.
Best Practices for Ongoing Monitoring:
- Google Search Console: Search Console continues to be effective by monitoring index status, pure status of crawl errors, and security issues.
- Set Up Alerts: Whenever new technical deficiencies such as broken links or missing pages appear on the web, use tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush and set the alerts for them.
- Regular Speed Audits: As you add content and features, rerun the speed tests on the webpage so that the website remains up to the desired state.
Worrying and keeping track of a website's technical state ensures it is user- and search-engine-friendly.
Conclusion
For the best performance of your website in the search engine, you need a praiseworthy technical SEO audit. You can also improve your rankings by investigating crawlability issues, reducing the time of site loading, improving mobile usability, and making your website secure by using HTTPS. Other poor issues like duplicates, poor site structure, poor on-page optimization, and weak implementation of structured data will be addressed effectively, allowing the site to be successful over time.
Audits should be conducted frequently in order to sustain the site’s health. Without strong technical foundations, your content and optimization efforts will not yield useful results.
More advanced recommended guides for your SEO strategy: What is Technical SEO and Why Does It Matter? The Difference Between Technical SEO, On-page SEO, and Off-page SEO Advanced Technical SEO Techniques for Improving Site Performance
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