10 Tips for a Successful Technical SEO Audit

Based on the previous SEO blog post about the Top 4 Client Expectations from an SEO Agency, it was mentioned that Technical SEO is one of the most in-demand SEO Services. If you are looking to build your online presence and get the most out of your website both mobile and desktop, then you should be doing a Technical SEO Audit. This will help ensure that all of the different aspects of your site are up-to-date and optimised for search engines.

We have listed 10 tips when doing a Technical SEO Audit that can help improve both your ranking in Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) as well as increase traffic to your site.

1. Crawl your website

This is the most important part when you are doing a Technical SEO Audit. By starting a crawl of your website, you will see all the issues in the website such as:

• Internal Links
• Titles tag
• H1s
• Meta descriptions
• Broken links
• Content Issue
• Images
• Status Code
• XML sitemaps

Many tools provide services to crawl your website:

What exactly does the Crawling program do?

While doing a technical SEO audit for a website, you can find many problems from titles to broken links. There are various tools that can fix those issues efficiently and help you with your technical SEO audit. These tools will “crawl” your site, which means it will extract all the URL parameters and several pages, robots.txt file, sitemap XML and structure data. It will then analyse the data it has gathered to be able to give you a good base of information to create your strategy. It also has an audit checklist to follow in finding out what needs fixing on your website in terms of the URL structure for a better user experience and a google bot to understand your site easily.

2. Build Internal Links To Your Website

Internal linking lets people click from one page to the next on the website. It is suggested to put internal links inside the content of each main target page either homepage, product or service page. Using this technique can help search engines understand what is important in website content and make it more relevant and optimised for better search visibility in SERPs.

It is important to use the right links on your website. This will help your user experience and also help you rank better in the search engine.

Some website owners ignore the importance of using internal links. You can put them in your navigation bar or on individual pages to help users find the information they are looking for quickly without having to click through all of your sites. Internal links are also important if you want search engine bots to understand what is important about your site structured data and result in better search engine rankings for keywords that matter most to potential customers.

3. Your Web page Must Be Mobile-Friendly

A mobile-friendly website works the same way on computers and mobile versions. This means that nothing changes or is unusable on a computer or mobile device. Features like navigation drop-downs are limited, as they can be difficult to use on mobile.

Google is experimenting with a new way of page indexing that’s called the mobile-first index. Recently, people shifted to using their phones to find what they want, not a computer. To give people the best experience, you need a mobile-friendly website. Mobile optimization is about adapting your website to the screen size of a phone and making sure the page loads instantly and that it is functional.

You can check if your website is mobile-friendly by using any of the following free tools:

• Google’s mobile-friendly test
• GT Metrix
• HubSpot’s website grader
• Bing’s mobile-friendliness test tool

You should not ignore the Mobile SEO as Google has announced at the I/O conference that they will give more weight to those websites that are mobile-first indexing.

4. Review Your Sitemap XML

A sitemap is a file that has information about your website. This includes the structure and helps search engines to crawl find new pages on your site, so it is important to have a good sitemap for your website so you can be successful with your SEO strategy. It is recommended to put XML sitemap in robots.txt file as well.

You have to make sure that your sitemap is:

• Clean: Your sitemap must not have any errors or issues, those errors or issues should be removed from your sitemap. If not, the search engines may ignore your sitemap.
• Concise: Your site map must be concise and include all the important pages in it. If it has more than 50,000 URLs Google will not crawl it.
• Up-to-date: All your changes or updates should be added to your sitemap.
• Registered in Google Search Console: Your sitemap must be registered in Google Search Console and also have to update it when you make changes or updates.

5. Test Site Speed

When it comes to SEO site audits, a website’s load time is crucial. Users will be irritated if they have to wait too long for the site to load. The faster it is, the better.

It is important to check the speed of your website and make it faster. To do this, you can use some of the webmaster tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights or Google Search Console. This will show how fast your website loads and how well it performs against other websites and will decrease the bounce rate in long run.

6. HTTPS status codes

HTTPS is a way to make your site more secure. Websites without HTTPS show errors with codes 4xx or 5xx instead of content. In 2014, Google announced that HTTPS would become a ranking signal and it can help you get a ranking boost to your website. In 2018, Google started marking all HTTP sites as “not secure”.

7. Broken Links

Broken links are bad for user experience and SEO technical audit. You can check the broken links of your website by crawling your website with Screamingfrog or SEM rush. Those who do not have tools can use your Google search console account to find it by going to the:

Search Console > click Coverage > Excluded.

You might see 404 errors, they are found all over the Internet. Some are called hard 404 errors and some are called soft 404 errors.

Click on the search console coverage issue to see a full list of pages returning 404 errors.

404 Error Page occurs when content on your site was removed or relocated without proper redirects to the correct page. If your page isn’t loading, try to make it load again. You can do this by refreshing the page or by removing things from it and adding new things instead. Another way to solve this problem is to create redirect chains to specific broken links to a proper landing page.

8. Check for Duplicate Pages and Thin Content 

It was once possible for low-value websites to rank in the top results for competitive keyword queries in the search engine. This helped companies make a lot of money.

Google released its first algorithm update last February 2011 and penalized people who put up bad content on their web pages. This includes people who wrote about the same thing over and over again, or who used poor quality writing that did not help a person with what they wanted to find.

Duplicate content and thin content can affect how high your website ranks in search engines. If you have duplicate or thin content, the search engines will not rank your website as well. Google wants to show users the best pages so make sure to have only quality and unique content.

Here are tips, on how to create good content: E – A – T

Expertise

Expertise is when someone has a high level of knowledge or skill in a particular field. Like doctors, they know more about medicine than you do. But sometimes in Google’s guidelines, there are less formal ways of showing expertise like in reviews or forums – these are not as likely in YMYL (Your Money Your Life).

Authoritativeness

Authoritativeness is when your website is seen as a trustworthy and important website in a certain area. You can do this by getting backlinks from other websites that are also trustworthy. For example, if you have an online fashion store, and magazines talk about your store in their articles, then search engines will see your site as trusted.

Trustworthiness

Trustworthiness is how much users can trust your website. You can show people that you are trustworthy by having a secure domain name and by getting positive reviews from customers. It is worth mentioning that when you get too many negative reviews, search engines will think your site is of poor quality and this will affect how it ranks in SERP.

9. Monitor the Ranking Progress

It is important for SEO success to check the target keywords are ranking and heading in the right direction. Part of the technical SEO audit is to make sure that all the keywords are on the right page with proper title tags as well as headers. If you are doing well with these SEO audit tips, your rankings will go up and traffic will come.

You can check it by using Ahrefs :

Site Explorer > Enter domain > Review

Organic search > Organic keywords

Or you can do it in the old school way of searching manually on google keyword by keyword, which is going to cost you a lot of time.

10. Backlink Profile Analysis

When someone links to your website, that is considered a backlink. A high number of backlinks means a high ranking in search engine results. When you get a link from someone else’s website, it shows that people think your site is valuable and useful.

Google is one of the biggest Search Engines that people use when they want to find things online. If you want your website to be high up in Google, you need to create backlinks from other websites that are trustworthy. These websites will give a lot of weight to their backlinks.

You should get backlinks from websites that are trustworthy and authoritative and must be mobile optimised with a responsive design. In meantime, it is also recommended to have your google analytics and google search console installed to get a basic understanding of your website when doing a technical SEO audit.

Move Ahead Media has an in-house SEO team that can perform an SEO Technical Audit for any website in any business sector! Get in touch with our SEO experts today and grab your FREE SEO AUDIT HERE!