If your latest SEO audit revealed that you’re not technically sound, don’t panic! In this blog post, we’ll give you the top five technical SEO auditing tips to take your site from zero to hero in no time.
When it comes to technical SEO audits, there’s no such thing as too much information – but the five points we mention in this blog will help get you started on the right foot.
Before we dive in however, you need to make sure that the following things are already executed:
- register a domain name with an extension like .com or .net
- set up hosting for your website
- install WordPress and set up security plugins
The rest is easy peasy lemon squeezy! We’ll walk you through what needs to be done in a technical SEO audit so you can do it yourself and not waste money on hiring somebody to do it.
But before we get started, it’s important to ask “Why should I even conduct a technical SEO audit to begin with?
Why Conducting a Technical SEO Audit is Necessary?
A technical SEO audit is a method by which you review the technical aspects of the SEO of your website. It essentially monitors the health of a website and finds out how to improve it.
Search engines use bots to find pages and websites through the web. The bots check your pages for the various rankings according to an algorithm before the classification of your web pages.
Since search engines often change the search algorithms and technology for bot crawling, mini audits are a good monthly practice. Whereas you should conduct a full blown technical SEO audit every 4-5 months.
Technical audits also ensure that your website is serving the right content to search engine bots. Technical SEO audits also review all aspects of a website, including links, code, and design thereby helping you find out how successful your site is in helping visitors find what they need from your site.
At the end of the day, all of the benefits of a technical SEO audit help your website rank better on search engine result pages (SERPs). But it’s never easy conducting an audit if you don’t know what to look for. And that’s why it’s important to discuss the factors that affect SEO performance.
What Affects the SEO Performance of a Website?
We’ll give a short overview of the factors that impact your website’s SEO the most. It’s these same factors that a technical SEO audit examines. It’s also important to mention here that although there are many factors, we’ll only be mentioning the most important ones here.
Website Security & Accessibility
Accessibility in terms of SEO means having a URL that the search engine crawl bots can easily read and index. Whereas security means enabling SSL security for the website that shows users their connection with the website is encrypted and safe from hacking. If your website is SSL secured, a small lock icon should appear next to the URL.
Page Speed
The quicker your website loads, the higher it will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). Page speed is dependent on the size of images you put on it and the speed of the server on which it is hosted.
Mobile Friendliness
As far as Google and other search engines are concerned, having a mobile-optimized website is essential for better ranking. That’s because over 90% of the global internet population uses a smartphone to go online.
Optimized Content
The content on the website needs to be optimized for search engines with the use of focus keywords and Latent Semantic Indexing (LSIs). As such, the more useful the content is with appropriate use of relevant keywords the more likely it is to rank higher.
Top Tips for Technical SEO Audit
Now that we know why conducting a technical SEO analysis is necessary and what factors impact SEO the most, here’s some of the top tips for a successful technical SEO audit.
1. Crawl Your Website
Each SEO technical audit must begin with your website crawling. Tools like SEMrush, Spyfu, or DeepCrawl are available for this purpose.
SEMrush SEO Checker also provides you with feasible suggestions to improve your website’s SEO strategies, backlinks, technical SEOs, and content quality.
The buggies help you find buggy links, poor pictures, issues with page heading, and bad keywords. They can also help you find duplicate content, excess redirects, and unlinked pages.
You can also check your crawl budget on the Google Search Console. The number of pages that Google crawls on your website is primarily your budget, and Google recommends that you should not go beyond 2,000 to 5,000 pages.
Technically speaking, a crawl budget is the number of URLs or page depth that Googlebot can crawl without affecting your website rankings. If you decide to go beyond the recommended limit, you affect your chances of ranking higher.
During your website crawl, try implementing the following changes:
a. Eliminate Duplicate Content
A sure-fire way of wasting crawl budget is to allow Google Search Console to crawl duplicate pages. Use tools like Screaming Frog to find duplicate pages that have the same title and meta descriptions. You can easily remove duplicate pages from WordPress or at least block them from being crawled by Google crawl bots.
b. Detail URL Parameters
Google can end up crawling the same page twice, with and without URL parameters as if they were two pages. That’s why you’re given the ability to detail URL parameters in Google Search Console to tell Google not to crawl the same page twice. Unique URL parameters for two similar (but not identical) URLs helps protect the crawl budget.
c. Ensure Correct Redirects
Try to reduce the number of 301 or 302 redirects on your website because Google bots simply do not redirect these links to a destination page. This ruins user experience and also wastes crawl budget.
2. Review Sitemap
The sitemap is simply a map of your site, which tells the search engine about the structure of your website. The review of your sitemap is an essential part of the technical SEO audit since a clear and concise sitemap is likely to get indexed much quicker as compared to a complex one.
When we say “clear and concise”, we mean a sitemap that is easy to understand and has less than 50,000 URLs (Google doesn’t crawl a sitemap with more than 50,000 URLs). Once you’re satisfied with the review of your sitemap, index the sitemap on Google Search Console.
3. Test Core Web Vitals
Core web vitals are a mandatory step of any technical SEO audit since their introduction in mid-2021. Core web vitals assess the speed, interactivity and stability of a website to decide how well it provides user experience. As a result, core web vitals now play a key role in deciding the ranking of your website.
Essentially, there are three core web vitals; (1) Largest Contentful Paint which measures the loading time of the website (2) First Input Delay which measures the interactivity of the website and (3) Cumulative Layout Shift which measures the visual stability of the website.
There’s a whole host of things to consider to improve core web vitals, and we’ve already discussed them in detail. But here are some main highlights that might help you get started:
- Make sure you activate “lazy loading” to optimize images that appear on the website and reduce their load times.
- Reduce page size by compressing images to reduce load times.
- Use a caching plugin like WP Rocket which reduces the time it takes to open a new link.
- Reserve space for ads before designing the layout to reduce layout shift when the page loads.
Want more tips? We’re here to help.
4. Check Internal Links
Pages on the website should flow logically, which means there shouldn’t be an unrelated internal link. Otherwise this affects search engine ranking negatively.
Here are a few things to look for when performing a technical SEO audit on your internal linking.
a. Click depth
Click depth indicates how many clicks separate a specific page from the homepage. You must keep this number as low as possible. It should ideally be less than 3. To find out, use Website Auditor and navigate to Site Structure, then Pages. The click depth will be displayed in one of the columns.
b. Broken links
Broken links can waste your crawl budget. They can even cause visitors to become confused, which is bad for your website. In WebSite Auditor, go to the All Resources dashboard and then click on Internal Resources. To find broken links, sort the list by HTTP Status Code.
5. Audit Browseable Version of Website
You must ensure that only one “version” of your website is accessible.
Do you have multiple versions of your website?
If you do, you will end up sending conflicting signals to the search engine. The crawlers will be perplexed as to which version is correct.
If the search engine is perplexed by the different versions of your website, it will not display it to users.
This type of error can occur as a result of mobile and desktop versions competing or duplicate HTTP vs. HTTPS versions. The technical SEO audit should ensure that only one of your website’s versions is accessible so that the website has a maximum chance of ranking higher.
Bonus Tip: Re-crawl the Website When Everything is Done
Once you’ve completed the steps outlined above, it’s time to re-crawl the website. This is just a quality assurance check for all the changes you’ve made to make sure they are working and everything is being displayed as intended.
A re-crawl will also index the updated version of your website, taking into effect all the changes you’ve made during the technical SEO audit. This will improve the chance of your website appearing higher in search engine result pages (SERPs).
Too Busy to Do a Technical SEO Audit? Let Us Handle It
Accurate Digital Solutions provides in-depth SEO services to companies from all kinds of industries. It doesn’t matter what your website is about, we’re confident we’ll be able to get it ranking in no time. Besides, you’ve got a business to run. You don’t have time to go around conducting full-scale technical SEO audits!
Let Accurate Digital Solutions take this responsibility off your hands. Our experts have a proven track record of performing up to the mark and we’re highly experienced in SEO services. Contact us today to get started with your website’s technical SEO audit!