How To Conduct A Comprehensive Technical SEO Audit: 9 Easy Steps

Technical SEO audits are essential for staying competitive in digital marketing. As online competition grows, having a solid SEO strategy becomes crucial. These audits help ensure that websites follow best practices, which is critical for achieving visibility and strong performance in search engine results.

SEO has a big impact on a website’s performance. About 61% of marketers put SEO at the center of their inbound marketing plans, which shows how important it is to draw in organic traffic and reach online business targets. A strong SEO plan is critical to making a site more visible and attracting users.

Even well-designed websites can face ranking issues without proper SEO. Technical SEO audits are crucial for spotting and fixing problems such as broken links or slow load times that could impact performance. Regular audits are necessary to resolve these issues, boosting site functionality and search engine rankings.

Doing a technical SEO audit might seem challenging, but it’s manageable with the right tools. Many tools give detailed reports and helpful tips. Investing in these audits can significantly improve search engine rankings and overall site performance.

Understanding what a technical SEO audit involves is the first step. It includes evaluating a website’s infrastructure to identify factors affecting search engine rankings, such as site speed, mobile compatibility, and indexing issues. This evaluation is crucial for optimizing performance and aligning with search engine guidelines.

What Is A Technical SEO Audit?

Technical SEO audits are essential for staying competitive in digital marketing. As online competition grows, having a solid SEO strategy becomes crucial. These audits help ensure that websites follow best practices, which is key for achieving visibility and strong performance in search engine results.

SEO has a huge impact on a website’s performance. About 61% of marketers put SEO at the center of their inbound marketing plans, which shows how key it is to bring in organic traffic and reach online business targets. Having a strong SEO plan is essential to making a site more visible and attracting users.

Even well-designed websites can face ranking issues without proper SEO. Technical SEO audits are crucial for spotting and fixing problems such as broken links or slow load times that could impact performance. Regular audits are necessary to resolve these issues, boosting site functionality and search engine rankings.

While conducting a technical SEO audit might seem challenging, it’s manageable with the right tools. Many tools offer detailed reports and actionable insights quickly. Investing in these audits can significantly improve search engine rankings and overall site performance.

Understanding what a technical SEO audit involves is the first step. It includes evaluating a website’s infrastructure to identify factors affecting search engine rankings, such as site speed, mobile compatibility, and indexing issues. This evaluation is crucial for optimizing performance and aligning with search engine guidelines.

Also Read: Comprehensive Comparison of Two of the Best SEO Tools in the Market: Semrush vs Google Analytics

What Impacts Your Website’s SEO Performance?

The factors influencing your website’s SEO are divided into three main areas:

• Technical factors: These impact your website’s foundation, including how good your hosting is, how well your site gets indexed, and how fast your pages load. A technically solid website lets search engines crawl and index what you’ve put on it. You need to check to keep things running and prevent technical problems that could make your site harder to find.
• On-page factors: This covers your website’s content, target keywords, and how you use related terms. Writing top-notch relevant content that’s optimized for the right keywords is crucial to draw in organic traffic. Using meta tags, headers, and internal links also enhances user experience and helps search engines understand your site better, which can boost your rankings.
• Off-page factors: Off-page SEO aims to build authority and trust through backlinks and mentions from other websites. When reputable sites link to your content, search engines see this as a sign of value. To boost your site’s authority and search rankings, you can reach out to other sites, write guest posts, and use social media to promote your content.

It’s crucial to regularly audit these areas to stay in step with industry shifts. Also, ensuring your website works well on phones is vital since 60% of people search on mobile devices. Google now ranks mobile-ready sites first in search rankings. This means having a responsive design and quick mobile load times is crucial for your site to be seen.

How To Perform A Technical SEO Audit?

Now that you’re familiar with a technical SEO audit and its key parameters, it’s time to explore the steps you can take to conduct one effectively and ensure your website meets all essential SEO standards.

1. Begin By Crawling Your Website

A thorough technical SEO audit begins with a website crawl. To get this first step right, use tools like Semrush, Spyfu, and DeepCrawl. Take Semrush, for example. It has an On-Page SEO Checker that gives you practical tips to fine-tune your SEO plan, boost your backlinks, fix technical problems, and improve your content. These tools can spot issues that might slow down your site.

Crawlers are skilled at finding broken links, low-quality images, and wrong page titles. They also help detect ineffective keywords, duplicate content, excessive redirects, and unlinked pages. Addressing these issues is essential for improving user experience and rankings, as each problem can affect your site’s overall SEO health.

In addition to using crawlers, it’s essential to monitor your crawl budget through Google Search Console. This budget indicates how many pages Google’s crawler can visit and how frequently. Understanding your crawl budget helps you manage how effectively the Googlebot interacts with your site, ensuring critical pages are crawled and indexed more frequently.

To optimize your crawl budget in Google Search Console, you should:

• Remove Duplicate Content: Duplicate pages can waste your crawl budget. Use tools like Semrush to identify these duplicates. Pages often have the same title and meta description tags. Remove as many duplicates as possible; if some need to stay, block them from search engine bots.
• Restrict Indexation: Certain pages, like the Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions, may not need to appear in search engine results. To conserve the crawl budget, disallow these pages from indexing.
• Provide URL Parameters: Due to URL parameters, Google Analytics might crawl the same page multiple times. To address this, add URL parameters in Google Search Console to indicate that it is a single page, not multiple ones.
• Fix Redirects: Each redirect consumes crawl budget. Excessive 301 or 302 redirects can cause bots to stop following them, affecting the reach of your destination page. Minimize redirects during technical SEO audits to optimize the crawl budget.
• Search on Google: Manually searching your website on Google can provide insights into how many pages appear in search results. Use Google Search Console and the “site name” query to see results and identify any issues impacting your website’s ranking.
• Check Your SEO Score: Websites like SEO Site Checkup provide an SEO score highlighting strengths and weaknesses. This score helps guide your technical SEO audit, revealing commonly used keywords, broken links, coding errors, and the status of your sitemap and robots.txt. It also accounts for malware or phishing activity.

2. Review Sitemap

Your website’s sitemap plays a crucial role in your SEO strategy. It informs search engines about your site’s structure and aids in discovering new pages. An optimized sitemap helps search engines efficiently navigate and index your content, improving your site’s visibility in search results.

• Error-Free: Eliminate any errors from your sitemap. Regularly remove broken links, redirects, and URLs that block indexing. This helps ensure that search engines do not ignore your sitemap, leading to better crawling and indexing of your content.
• Concise: Keep your sitemap concise. If it contains more than 50,000 URLs, it may become too large for Google Analytics to crawl effectively. To maintain an efficient sitemap, focus on including only the most important pages, such as high-traffic and frequently updated content.
• Up-to-date: Update your sitemap regularly with new content. Frequent updates help search engines find and index your latest pages promptly. Keeping your sitemap current ensures that all new and valuable content is quickly available to users.
• Registered with Google Search Console: Notify Google about your sitemap by submitting it manually through Google Search Console or by specifying its location in your robots.txt file. This ensures that Google knows your sitemap and can crawl your site more efficiently.

3. Review The Browseable Versions Of Your Website

Ensuring your website has one version people can access is critical to keeping search engines clear. When search engines encounter multiple versions of a site, their understanding of which one to index can muddle. This can result in search results that don’t line up and hurt your rankings. This mix-up often happens when there are separate mobile and desktop versions or when both HTTP and HTTPS versions of your site exist.

To avoid these issues, it is important to address conflicts between different versions of your website. This includes ensuring that your site redirects consistently between mobile and desktop versions, and consolidating HTTP and HTTPS versions to a single, secure protocol. Implementing 301 redirects from non-canonical versions to the preferred ones helps search engines understand which version to index.

Conducting a technical SEO audit can help identify and resolve any discrepancies, ensuring that only one version of your site is indexed. Additionally, using HTTPS is vital for site security. Google prioritizes secure sites by marking HTTP sites as “Not Secure,” which can deter visitors and impact user trust.

4. Check Internal Links

A clear and logical hierarchy on your website is crucial for improving search rankings. Regularly reviewing internal and external links is essential to ensure they function correctly and maintain an optimal structure. A well-organized link structure not only aids search engines in crawling your site but also enhances user experience by making navigation more intuitive and efficient.

Web pages may be deleted or moved, leading to broken links. These broken links can negatively impact your SEO by wasting your crawl budget and creating a frustrating user experience. Regular audits of your website’s links can help identify and fix these issues promptly, ensuring all pages remain accessible and valuable to search engines and visitors.

Internal Linking Factors to Review:

• Click Depth: Click depth indicates how many clicks a page is from the homepage. Keeping this number as low as possible, ideally below three, is crucial for user experience and search engine crawling. Tools like WebSite Auditor allow you to check click depth by navigating to Site Structure, then Pages, where you’ll find the click depth in one of the columns.
• Broken Links: Broken links can misuse your crawl budget and confuse visitors. To identify broken links, go to the All Resources dashboard in WebSite Auditor, then click on Internal Resources. Sort the list by HTTP Status Code to locate any broken links. Regularly fixing these issues ensures that all links remain functional and contribute positively to your website’s SEO.
• Orphan Pages: Orphan pages aren’t linked to any other page on your website, making them difficult for search engines to find. These pages can undermine your SEO efforts by leaving valuable content undiscovered. To identify orphan pages, navigate to Site Structure in WebSite Auditor and then to Pages. Linking these pages back into your site structure ensures that all content is accessible and beneficial to your overall SEO strategy.

5. Test Site Speed

The speed of your website plays a crucial role in ranking in search results. If a site loads, people often click away before they see your content, missing the chance to engage with what you provide. This hurts the user experience and can lower your site’s ranking. A fast website keeps visitors interested and signals to search engines that your site is efficient and user-friendly.

Regularly checking your website’s speed should be a part of your technical SEO efforts. These checks can help you identify issues like large images, unoptimized code, or slow server responses that could slow your site down. Fixing these issues can boost your site’s performance, which leads to better user engagement and higher rankings in search engines.

Your website’s loading speed has a direct impact on visitor retention. When a site takes 5 seconds to load, the likelihood of someone bouncing increases by 90%. This highlights the importance of improving your site’s performance. What’s more, Google Analytics now considers site speed in its search result rankings, which means a slow website might end up with lower results.

Improving your site’s load time is essential, and tools like Google PageSpeed Insights can help. This tool measures how quickly your site loads and compares its speed to others in your industry. It offers valuable tips, like optimizing images or enabling browser caching, to help you boost your site’s speed and overall performance.

6. Check HTTPS Content

Approximately 70% of the results on Google’s first page are HTTPS-enabled, highlighting its importance for SEO and security. If your website already uses HTTPS, addressing common HTTPS issues during your technical SEO audit is crucial to maintaining optimal performance and security.

• Links, Canonicals, and Redirects: Verify that all internal and external links and canonical and redirect tags point to HTTPS pages. Although HTTP to HTTPS redirects help secure your site, relying too heavily on them can create extra redirects, hindering crawling efficiency. Each redirect consumes part of your crawl budget, potentially impacting your site’s overall SEO performance. Regularly audit these links and redirects to ensure they are correctly configured.
• Mixed Content: Mixed content issues occur when a secure HTTPS page loads elements over HTTP, like images or scripts, compromising the page’s security. This can prevent browsers from fully displaying the page or its contents. To address this, use tools like WebSite Auditor’s Site Audit feature to find “HTTPS Pages With Mixed Content Issues.” Check the Internal Resources section to locate and update any non-HTTPS resources. Resolving these issues ensures that all elements on your secure pages are fully protected, enhancing user experience and SEO.

Also Read: 25 of the Best SEO Audit Tools to Improve Your Search Rankings

7. Compare Your Site Metrics Using Google Analytics

To ensure that Google Analytics provides accurate live data, verify that the tracking code is correctly installed. This is vital to your technical SEO audit to confirm that data collection is functioning correctly. The tracking code must be placed just before the closing </head> tag on each page of your website. Proper installation is essential for collecting accurate metrics and performance insights.

After confirming that Google Analytics is working correctly, compare its data with the results from a site search. The number of indexed pages should align with the count reported by Google Analytics. Any discrepancies may indicate issues with page crawling, potentially due to technical problems or incorrect settings.

Google Analytics tracks important metrics, like bounce rate. This shows how many visitors leave your website after looking at one page. When a lot of visitors do this, it means there’s an issue with your content or how well your pages work. To fix this, make your content more relevant to what users want and speed up how fast your pages load. This will improve things for people using your site.

When doing a technical SEO audit, try using tools like MozBar to look at the SEO elements of your web pages. MozBar gives you helpful info by showing links like follow, no-follow, outside, and inside links and telling you the Page Authority score. This score goes from 1 to 100 and shows how likely a page is to rank well in search results. It helps you spot areas to make better and speeds up your audit process.

8. Perform A Backlink Audit

Backlinks are crucial for your website’s success and play a significant role in technical SEO audits. They help search engines assess the value and relevance of your content, improving your site’s authority and ranking. Quality backlinks indicate that other reputable sites endorse your content, enhancing your credibility and visibility in search results.

Search engine crawlers look beyond just detecting hyperlinks for off-site SEO. Google’s algorithms evaluate brand mentions on your site and across the web. This means search engines assess your overall online presence and brand reputation. Tracking both on-site and off-site activities is essential for a comprehensive SEO strategy.

Tools like Ahrefs are essential for an effective backlink audit. They provide detailed insights into your backlink profile, highlighting the types of links your site receives and identifying opportunities for acquiring high-value links. Ahrefs also allows you to analyze your competitor’s backlink profiles, revealing their strengths and weaknesses.

Semrush is also helpful in evaluating the keywords your competitors rank for and the backlinks supporting those keywords. This analysis helps you understand the competitive landscape and adjust your SEO strategy to improve your keyword rankings and backlink profile.

Social media platforms are essential in your SEO strategy. Engaging with these platforms can generate additional backlinks and increase brand visibility. Social media interactions drive traffic to your site and contribute to brand mentions, which can enhance your SEO efforts more straightforwardly than traditional link-building methods.

9. Re-Crawl Your Website

After addressing the issues highlighted in your technical SEO audit, it’s crucial to prompt Google to re-crawl your website to ensure that recent changes are promptly recognized. This step is essential as it allows Google to index the updated content and reflect improvements in search results. The re-crawling process can also help identify any remaining issues or areas needing further optimization.

To initiate this process, access Google Search Console, a valuable tool that helps manage your website’s presence in Google search results. Navigate to the “Crawl” section and select “Fetch as Google.” Enter the specific URL you want re-crawled and click “Fetch.” This action allows Google’s bot to retrieve and analyze the page with the latest updates.

Once Google has fetched the page, you’ll see an option to “Submit to Index.” By clicking this, you request Google to re-crawl the page and update its index. You can submit just the specific URL or the URL along with all linked pages. Opting to submit all linked pages allows Google to follow internal links and comprehensively crawl your entire site, ensuring that all updates are considered.

Conclusion

A thorough technical SEO plays a significant role in making your website work better and show up more in search results. When you follow these nine steps, you can spot and fix problems holding your site back. 

Regular audits are essential for keeping your website in top shape and staying ahead of the competition. A solid audit sets the stage for long-term SEO success and a better user experience. Make these steps a routine part of your SEO strategy to keep your website performing at its best.

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