With competition in search engine results pages ever growing today, you really can no longer afford to ignore technical SEO. Ensuring your website is crawlable, fast, and secure is crucial for the best performance and rankings.
Knowing these issues helps one carry out deeper analysis and one that covers all possible angles of such a strategy. For the uninitiated, an audit could be quite overwhelming.
Below, you will be walked through the process of a step-by-step technical SEO audit. You'll understand not just what common problems exist but also why they are important and when they should fall in your overall SEO strategy.
A technical SEO audit is all about the thorough examination of the technical elements of your website to ensure that search engines, such as Google, will have no issues crawling, indexing, and even ranking your pages.
The technical SEO audit will ensure that your website is closely optimized with Google, Bing, or Yahoo. Performing a technical SEO audit involves an analysis of every element on the website to determine and eliminate all the elements that may be in the way of optimization.
Something as minute often makes all the difference in your ranking at the search engine. It is also where technical SEO sets in to ensure search engine crawlers and users can effortlessly crawl into your website.
The broken links or pages not found will hurt the indexing process of Google and make your rankings suffer. Resolve the technical SEO issues to bring in much-needed improvements in the technical features of your website for better organic traffic.
There are more than 90% websites on Google that get almost no organic traffic. And you don’t want yours to become one of them. That’s where technical SEO audit becomes handy.
Here are some common reasons to do technical SEO audit of your website:
A technical SEO audit lets you identify and fix various issues that could go against your ranking in any of the search engines. If Google can't crawl and index your content, then your website is going to suffer from organic traffic problems.
You can locate these issues in advance through regular audits and fix them before they do too much harm.
These are some of the technical SEO issues that you should solve, which might be one of the most crucial ranking factors, developing more traffic to your website and producing more leads.
UX is, in fact, so crucial to the search engine rankings of your website. Website SEO audits help identify problems in UX-a factor driving away visitors from a website. These include, but are not limited to, errors, broken links, and slow loading times of pages.
With a smooth user experience, this will allow your visitors to stay on your site longer and also come back soon in the near future. Google favors a great UX, too, since websites with great user experiences are more trustful.
A sudden ranking drop is not always linked with serious issues. Google often rolls out core updates that may result in ranking changes within search. Regular audits and ranking checks will allow you to realize the outcomes of these updates quicker and change your strategy according to them.
It's quite usual to see rankings fluctuate during core updates. Nevertheless, look at all new fresh releases and monitor performance on your website. If your ranking is still below par, then probably there is a need for identifying technical issues.
While doing technical SEO audit, you will figure out several factors that can help you understand the current situation of your website. To understand these factors, you should first know core elements of technical SEO. These include:
1. Mobile Optimization: Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly, assuring a very good user experience and enhancing search engine rankings.The process involves in technical SEO audit are completely based on these elements. Just make sure you save this checklist before jumping directly to the audit.
1- Check your site’s crawlability and indexability
Indexability here refers to the capability of the search engine to understand the page's content and add that to its index-a prerequisite to eligibility for appearance in the search results for relevant keywords.
Crawling and indexability issues should be the first point of beginning in technical SEO audits, since without them, no search engine or users will find your website.
While a page can be crawled, it does not necessarily mean it would be indexed. There, indexability is an entirely different factor.
Start by analyzing the robots.txt file. It is a kind of guideline for web crawlers that regulates which parts of your website should or shouldn't be crawled. You can allow or disallow various user agents to let either all, or some parts of your site be accessible.
2- Review your sitemap
A well-structured and fully developed XML sitemap is very important in search engine optimization. This gives the road map to search engine crawlers, leading them to the vital pages of your website.
Here are the key elements of proper XML sitemap:
Another thing to remember is updating the sitemap quite regularly as you go on creating or updating new pages. Such guidelines being followed and submission to Google Search Console automatically increase search visibility and rankings.
3- Fix Internal Linking Issues
Internal linking helps to connect the pages from within your domain to one another and is a very important means of doing SEO. They will lead to a well-structured website and give some distribution to link equity so that search engines can really effectively identify what matters most.
As you go about improving the structure of your website for user and search engine visibility, it's important that you determine the health and status of your internal links.
Common Issues in Internal Linking:
Understanding internal linking mistakes during audit will go a long way in improving your website, both from a general SEO viewpoint and from a usability perspective.
4- Audit page speed
In this digital era, page speed has become a crucial ranking factor in search engines. Success is pegged to the speed, responsiveness, and friendliness of any website.
Run your website through various tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights for mobile and desktop devices. The tool gives comprehensive insights on the website performance by showing scores and suggestions on areas of improvement.
Page speed is an important factor in general, and more so when considering the e-commerce websites. A slow pace might seriously affect your bottom line. That one tiny improvement would make for a positive impact on the bottom line.
5- Audit Your Site Architecture
Site architecture refers to the hierarchical structure of your web pages and the way in which they link to one another. A well-planned site architecture will provide a multitude of benefits for users and search engines alike.
Here are the key aspects of site architecture:
This would, in return, create strategic exposure of users and search engine crawlers alike to the relevant content by optimizing these elements of site architecture, while ensuring that maximum visibility of targeted keywords and proper distribution of SEO value across the website take place.
6- Ensure your website is mobile-friendly
With Google now into mobile-first indexing, the search engine considers the mobile version of your website the basis for ranking and indexing.
This current trend shift reflects the increasing use of the internet through mobile devices since 52% of the total internet traffic in the world is powered by mobile devices. The only way to be truly confident that your website is 'mobile-friendly' is to conduct a painstaking manual review.
Navigate through your site with your phone and search for errors or other problems on key conversion paths. Ensure contact forms, phone numbers, and key service pages are functioning as expected. If you're on your desktop, right-click on the page and select.
7- Duplicate content review
Duplicate content is a very common problem in the world of SEO, and it can badly hurt your website. Though it is well known that there is no penalty for duplicate content imposed by Google, a number of other problems may ensue that are a result of the presence of duplicate content.
Such issues include but are not limited to:
Most Frequent Causes of Duplicate Content:
By fixing these issues, you can further improve your website's SEO and ensure that the right version of your content shows up when people search for it.
RanksPro is an all-in-one SEO tool with a powerhouse of features, including keyword research, competitor analysis, in-depth technical SEO audits, and more. Perhaps the most prized feature of this tool is the site audit capability that gives in-depth detail to critical issues affecting the performance of your website.
Here are the simple steps to utilize RanksPro for technical SEO audit:
Here are some key benefits of using RanksPro:
By utilizing RanksPro for your technical SEO audits, you can gain valuable insights into your website's performance and take the necessary steps to optimize it for search engines and improve your online visibility.