To maximize your website’s search engine rankings, an in-depth technical SEO audit is essential for identifying and resolving any potential issues. This blog post will delve into technical SEO audits, looking at how to recognize and tackle potential issues that could hinder your website’s progress from building a robust base for future success.
What is a Technical SEO Audit?
A technical SEO audit analyzes your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) performance. It involves evaluating the site’s structure, content, and links to identify any issues preventing it from ranking well on search engines like Google. A technical SEO audit aims to uncover areas where you can improve the visibility and ranking of your website.
Why Is It Important?
Technical SEO audits are important because they help ensure your website meets current best practices for optimizing websites for search engines. Search engine algorithms change frequently, so keeping up with those changes is essential to stay competitive in the SERPs. A technical SEO audit can also help identify potential problems with your site structure or code that could hurt its rankings. Additionally, regular audits allow you to monitor progress over time and ensure any changes you make positively impact rankings.
When Should You Perform an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is an important part of any digital marketing strategy. It helps you identify areas for improvement and ensure that your website is performing optimally in terms of search engine rankings, user experience, and overall performance.
But when should you perform an SEO audit?
The answer to this question depends on several factors, such as the size of your website, how often it’s updated, and the type of content it contains—generally speaking. However, most websites should undergo a comprehensive SEO audit at least once per year. This will help keep your site up-to-date with current best practices and ensure all elements work together to maximize visibility in search engines.
If you have a large website or one that frequently changes (e.g., a blog), more frequent audits may be necessary – perhaps every few months or so, depending on the amount of content being added and updated regularly. Additionally, if there has been a significant change in traffic or rankings since the last audit was conducted, another review might be warranted sooner rather than later to determine what could be causing those shifts.
When conducting an SEO audit, certain tools can help streamline the process, including:
All these tools can provide valuable information during an SEO audit but are not always necessary. Sometimes, manually checking each page yourself can reveal enough information about where improvements need to be made without using additional resources like the ones mentioned above. In addition to using various tools during an SEO audit, it’s also important for marketers and business owners to get their hands dirty by digging into their websites from time to time, too – taking note of things like broken links, outdated content, etc.
What You Need From a Client Before an SEO Audit
Before you can begin an SEO audit, you need certain things from your client. Without these items, it won’t be easy to accurately assess the website and make meaningful recommendations. Here’s what you should ask for:
Google Analytics is a powerful tool for tracking website performance. It provides data on page views, bounce rate, time spent on the site, etc., which are all important metrics for an SEO audit. Additionally, if the client has third-party analytics tools (e.g., Hotjar), access to those accounts would be beneficial as they provide additional insights into user behavior or technical issues with the website.
If the client runs ads through either of these platforms (or both!), access to their account(s) can help identify areas where improvements could be made to increase conversions and ROI from their campaigns. This information can also provide valuable insight into how users interact with specific pages on the website targeted by ads – allowing us to optimize them further for organic search traffic as well!
Webmaster tools such as Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools offer a wealth of information about how search engines view your site – including error warnings related to crawling indexing issues; backlinks; internal link structure; keyword rankings; sitemaps; etc. Having access to this data allows us to quickly identify any potential problems that could be impacting organic visibility and make adjustments accordingly.
Knowing which social media accounts belong to the client helps ensure we don’t miss out on opportunities for leveraging existing networks or building relationships with influencers who may already have an established presence in their industry or niche market(s). In addition, understanding how each platform is being used (i.e., content strategy) gives us more insight into how we might best approach optimizing each individually for maximum reach and engagement potential!
Understanding who else manages various aspects of the website helps us determine whether any conflicts between vendors could impact performance negatively (e.g., conflicting plugins). Similarly, knowing who internally handles different tasks like design updates or copywriting ensures everyone stays informed throughout our process so no one gets left behind!
What Tips Should You Follow to Conduct a Technical SEO Audit?
These are some tips you should follow to Conduct a Technical SEO Audit as the following:
#1. Crawling
The first step in conducting a technical SEO audit is to crawl your website. Tools like Semrush, Spyfu, or DeepCrawl can help you with this task. They will identify errors such as broken links, poor images, page title issues, and bad keywords. Additionally, they can detect duplicate content, excess redirects, and unlinked pages. It’s also important to take a look at the Google Search Console to see your crawl budget – that is, the number of pages that Google Analytics crawls on your website and how often it does so.
How can you maximize your crawl budget for the Google Search Console?
You need to do the following:
#2. Review Sitemap
The sitemap of your website is an integral part of any SEO strategy. It provides search engines with information about the structure and content of your site and helps them discover new pages. Therefore, you must review your sitemap during a technical SEO audit. To ensure that your sitemap is effective, ensure it’s clean and error-free. Redirects and URLs which could block indexing should be removed or updated to avoid being ignored by search engines. If there are multiple versions of a page on different URLs, then canonical tags should be used to indicate which version should be indexed. This will also help to prevent duplicate content issues from arising in future audits.
In addition, you need to check for broken links within the sitemap itself – if these exist, they can cause crawlers to miss out on important parts of your website when indexing it for search results pages (SERPs). Use tools such as Integrity (for Mac users) or Xenu Sleuth (for PC users) to do this effectively. Also, consider using Screaming Frog – this tool allows you to crawl through all internal links on a given URL to quickly identify any broken ones that may have been missed in manual checks. Finally, ensure all relevant pages are included in the sitemap; those without an entry won’t get crawled by bots! Use Moz or BuzzSumo to check what content has been indexed already so you know what needs adding before submitting the revised map for approval from Google Search Console etc.
#3. Check the Browseable Versions of Your Website:
Optimizing Website Versions for Better Search Engine Rankings To ensure that your website is presented consistently to search engine crawlers, having only one browseable version of your site is important. Multiple versions, such as separate mobile and desktop sites or HTTP vs. HTTPS duplicates, can confuse search engine crawlers and negatively impact your rankings. During a technical SEO audit, it’s crucial to identify and address any issues with website versions to ensure only one version is browseable. Additionally, it’s recommended to use HTTPS to improve security and search engine rankings. HTTP websites may be flagged as “Not Secure” in Google Search.
#4. Check Internal Links
A logical hierarchy and properly functioning internal and external links can significantly improve search engine rankings. Broken links can result from deleted or moved pages and should be regularly checked and fixed. Here are a few things you can check about your internal linking during the technical SEO audit:
#5. Check HTTPS Content
About 70% of page 1 results on Google Search are HTTPS. If your website already uses HTTPS, it’s important to check for common HTTPS issues during your technical SEO audit. What are the common HTTPS issues most websites have? Here are a few factors you should check your HTTPS site for:
#6. Re-Crawl Your Website
After identifying and fixing the issues found in the technical SEO audit, it’s important to ask Google to re-crawl the website. This ensures that the changes made are taken into account immediately. To do this, go to Google Search Console, navigate to Crawl, and select Fetch as Google. Enter the URL that needs to be re-crawled and click Fetch. Once the page is fetched, click on Submit to Index to request Google to re-crawl it. You can submit the exact URL or the URL along with all linked pages. If you choose the latter, Google will use the URL as a starting point for content indexation and follow all internal links to crawl your website. Completing this final step ensures your website’s changes are reflected in search engine rankings and visibility.
Frequently Asked Questions
Conclusion
By performing a thorough technical SEO audit, you can pinpoint and rectify any issues that may impede your website from reaching its fullest potential. This includes improving site performance, enhancing content quality, utilizing social media platforms effectively, and monitoring rankings and traffic to ensure the success of your online presence. With an extensive knowledge of search engine algorithms and the capacity to tailor strategies for maximum optimization, local marketing can be effectively achieved.
Let OptiLocal help you maximize your local SEO potential with an in-depth technical SEO audit. Unlock the full power of search engine optimization and get found by more customers today!
