Last Updated on April 21, 2024 by Callum Morris
What is a Technical SEO Audit and How Does it Work?
A technical SEO audit is a process of analysing a website’s code and resources to identify the most effective ways to improve its SEO. A technical SEO audit is an important part of optimising a website’s SEO. A technical SEO audit will help you identify the most effective ways to improve your site’s visibility in search engines like Google. It will also help you understand how your site ranks for specific keywords, which can be used to make changes on the back end of your website.
A technical SEO audit can be a complex and time-consuming process, but it is an essential step in any SEO strategy. By identifying and fixing technical issues on your website, you can improve its visibility in search results, increase traffic, and ultimately drive more revenue. The first step in performing a technical seo audit is assessing the current status of your website and identifying areas that need improvement. This includes analysing how your site ranks for specific keywords, how many pages are indexed by search engines, and if there are any problems with content or links on your site.
What are the Key Components of a Technical SEO Audit?
Technical SEO audits are one of the most important and time-consuming tasks for a website owner. They can be overwhelming, especially if you don’t have experience with the process.
A technical seo audit is a detailed process that helps identify and fix issues with a website’s code, content and design. It usually involves checking for errors in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, accessibility and other coding languages.
Here are the key components of a technical seo audit to help you get it right:
Website Audit Checklist – Does your website have a robots.txt file? Can you access your website from desktop, mobile or tablet? Is the server up and running during regular business hours? Does your website have a sitemap that includes internal links and external links to other pages on the same domain? Do you have a google analytics account with mobile tracking turned on so that you can check if you’re getting any traffic from them on various devices during regular business hours?
Technical Audit Checklist – Are all pages and content on your website optimised for mobile? Does your website load quickly and with no errors when accessed from desktop, mobile or tablet? Is there a backup of the site’s content in case you need to restore it in the event that something happens to your website?
Content Audit Checklist – Are all pages on your website optimised for mobile users? Are there any dead links on your webpage that direct users to broken or inaccessible websites? Are there any outdated links on your webpage that have since been removed by their publishers? Are there any content that is exempt from copyright restrictions?What are the Website Internal Operating Procedures? Ensure that the website has a clear, systematic process for all changes to content across all areas of the website and the website offers a mobile friendly experience with responsive design and optional mobile site layout, as well as optimised search features. Additionally, make sure the website is actively updated and minimise broken links on the homepage.
How to Conduct a Full Technical SEO Audit on Your Website in 5 Steps
A full technical SEO audit is an important process in ensuring that your website is optimised for search engines. It should include a checklist of all the tasks that need to be done on your website to ensure that your website is built with SEO in mind. Here is how to do it:
Step 1: Conduct a Site Audit – The first step in conducting a technical seo audit is to do a site audit. This will help you identify any issues or errors on your website that can be fixed. The site audit should also identify the user experience and usability of your website, as well as its content quality and relevancy for search engines.
Step 2: Perform Keyword Research – After you have completed the site audit, it is time to do keyword research and find out what keywords are relevant to your business and which ones are not.
Step 3: Create Content Ideas – Once you have found out what keywords are relevant to your business, it’s time to create content ideas based on these keywords. This will help you generate more traffic for your website by increasing its relevancy to search engines.
Step 4: Identify Keywords You Should Add to Your Site – Take note of any keywords that are relevant to your business and add them accordingly on your website. Keywords are words that are searched by people online to find the relevant websites they’re looking for. These words change all the time and that’s why it’s important to revisit them on your website from time-to-time.
Step 5: Optimise Your Website for SEO – In order to use SEO in your favor, you should have your website optimised and easy-to-use. This means that you should make a page that’s text-based so that it can be easily read and scannable by the search engines. You also want to make sure all of the important aspects of your website are visible, like links on a page, or an image on a page.
Conducting a technical SEO audit using these steps will help identify the most important factors that need to be fixed on your website for it to become more search engine friendly. After conducting a full technical SEO audit, it is important that you implement the changes suggested by the audit and make sure they are working as expected. This is because there might be some issues with your website that were not detected during the audit process. In the process, you will be able to identify opportunities for improvement that can boost your website’s growth in organic search.
Facts about technical SEO audits:
- Purpose: Technical SEO audits help to identify and fix technical issues that could be affecting a website’s visibility and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Crawling and Indexing: Technical SEO audits examine how search engines crawl and index a website, including issues such as crawlability, robots.txt, sitemaps, and meta tags.
- URL Structure: Technical SEO audits also analyze a website’s URL structure, including the use of canonical URLs, redirects, and clean URLs.
- Site Speed: Technical SEO audits evaluate a website’s load speed and performance, including the use of caching, compression, and minification.
- Mobile Optimization: Technical SEO audits check for mobile optimization, including the use of responsive design, mobile-friendly content, and mobile-specific meta tags.
- Security: Technical SEO audits also assess the security of a website, including the use of SSL certificates and security measures such as firewalls and anti-virus software.
- Importance: Technical SEO audits are important because they help to ensure that a website is technically sound and optimized for both search engines and users, which can result in improved search engine rankings, more traffic, and better conversions.
- Regular Audits: Technical SEO audits should be performed regularly to ensure that a website remains up-to-date with best practices and to monitor its performance in search engines.