Understanding the importance of technical SEO is the first step toward improving your website’s ranking and performance.
A technical SEO audit is a comprehensive evaluation of your website from a technical perspective, identifying issues and finding solutions to improve its search engine optimization.
It assesses how effectively search engines can crawl and index your site, and even small technical issues can impact your site’s ranking and negatively affect user experience.
In this blog, we’ll explore what a technical SEO audit is, why it’s essential for your website, and how it works.
If you don’t have time to do it yourself, you can always count on agencies that have experience like Fortis Media.
What Is A Technical SEO Audit?
A technical SEO audit is a deep analysis of your website’s technical aspects, which includes everything from website structure, code quality, website speed, mobile-friendliness, and much more.
All these factors are critical in determining whether search engines can crawl your site effectively and understand its content, ultimately impacting your website’s ranking.
A comprehensive technical SEO audit identifies the issues and recommendations that need to be resolved to improve the site’s performance.
Why Is A Technical SEO Audit Important?
A technical SEO audit is essential for a variety of reasons. It’s the first step in understanding the website’s technical strengths and weaknesses and identifying the issues that may negatively impact your ranking.
It’s also a good way to identify ways to improve the user experience, such as reducing page loading times and making the site more mobile-friendly.
By finding and addressing these issues, you’ll increase the chances of your website ranking higher in search engine results pages, resulting in more organic traffic and, ultimately, better conversions and revenue.
Key Areas Covered By A Technical SEO Audit
When conducting a technical SEO audit, there are many different areas that will be examined. Some of the key areas include:
- Website architecture (URL structure, navigation, etc.)
- Page load times
- Broken links
- Mobile optimization
- Duplicate content
- Website security
- Backlinks and outbound links
Each of these areas will be reviewed in depth and any issues identified will be highlighted.
Once the audit is complete, a detailed report will be provided outlining the issues found, and recommendations for how to rectify them.
How Does A Technical SEO Audit Work?
A technical SEO audit is conducted by an experienced SEO professional with deep technical SEO knowledge.
The process involves a comprehensive analysis of your website, focused on identifying critical technical issues and optimizing its structure for better search engine crawling and indexing.
The auditor will use various tools to evaluate the site’s performance and identify any potential technical flaws that need fixing.
They will also provide recommendations and solutions to address the issues and improve the website’s optimization.
Components Of A Technical SEO Audit
1. Crawlability and Indexability: This includes technical SEO issues that prevent search engines from crawling and indexing your website pages.
2. Mobile-Friendliness: Your website needs to be mobile-friendly. In other words, your website should look great, function correctly, and load quickly on mobile devices (.e.g. smartphones).
3. Site Architecture: A site should be structured, enhancing experience and search engines’ visibility to increase website crawl and indexation.
4. Page Speed Analysis: All website pages must load quickly, with load times not exceeding a few seconds.
5. On-page SEO: Full optimization involves giving the right signals to search engines to understand who you are, the products and services you offer, and associated topics.
The Basics Of Conducting A Technical SEO Audit
1. Start With A Site Speed Check
Let’s face it; nobody likes to wait for a website to load. Slow site speed can hurt your SEO rankings and frustrate your visitors.
That’s why it’s crucial to start your technical SEO audit by checking your site’s speed.
There are various tools available to check your website’s speed, including Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and Pingdom.
These tools can provide valuable insights into what’s causing lag on your site and provide recommendations for improvements.
So make sure to prioritize checking your site speed early on in your technical SEO audit.
2. Optimize For Mobile
With more and more people accessing the internet on their mobile devices, it’s essential to have a mobile-friendly website.
Not only is it better for user experience, but Google considers mobile responsiveness as a ranking factor.
To check if your site is optimized for mobile, you can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool.
This tool will analyze your site and provide recommendations for mobile optimization.
Some common mobile optimization best practices include creating responsive designs, compressing images, and using larger fonts.
3. Conduct A Crawlability Analysis
It’s essential to ensure that Google can crawl and index your website to improve your SEO rankings.
Conducting a crawlability analysis can help identify any issues that might prevent Google from accessing your site or indexing your pages correctly.
One of the best tools for this is Google Search Console, which provides insights into how Google crawls and indexes your site.
You can also use third-party tools such as Screaming Frog or DeepCrawl to identify issues with broken links, duplicate content, and missing meta tags.
Your website’s structure and navigation can impact your SEO rankings.
An organized site structure can help search engines understand the content of your website, while clear and concise navigation can improve user experience.
Conducting a site structure and navigation analysis can help identify any issues with your website’s layout or organization.
Consider things like implementing breadcrumb navigation, optimizing internal linking, and using keywords in your URL structure.
5. Check Your Technical SEO Health Score
Finally, using a Technical SEO Health Score Audit Tool can help you gauge your website’s technical SEO performance.
Some common tools include SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz. These tools will assess various elements of your website, including meta tags, HTML structure, and page speed.
They will then provide an overall technical SEO health score and specific recommendations for improvement.
Conclusion
A technical SEO audit is a critical component of any website optimization strategy.
By identifying technical issues and fixing them, it can help improve your website’s ranking, increase organic traffic, and ultimately lead to better conversions and revenue.
Whether you’re starting from scratch or looking for ways to improve your existing website, a technical SEO audit is an essential step in your optimization plan.
So, get started today and take your online presence to the next level!
