If you’re well into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how it works, then you’re well aware that technical SEO is the foundation for your search efforts. Conducting a technical SEO audit can provide invaluable information about your site that helps you diagnose and fix any technical issues that may be preventing the pages on your site from ranking as highly as they should.
An in-depth technical SEO audit is the most thorough way to identify issues hurting your site’s search visibility and rankings. This article reviews the process of performing an audit, so you can ensure you’re not missing any critical things.
This article will guide you through how to perform an in-depth technical SEO audit using practical tools. The goal here is to find any technical issues that are negatively impacting your rankings or preventing search engines from crawling your site efficiently.
What Is A Technical SEO Audit?
A Technical SEO Audit is a process of inspecting the back-end code and HTML structure of a website. It’s also known as On-Page SEO Audit. It’s the process of analyzing your website’s technical aspects to determine its optimization potential.
It involves a detailed analysis of internal elements such as HTML head tags, image alt tags, canonical tags, and title tags. A Technical SEO Audit is necessary for any website because it helps you to fix critical issues that may be hindering your website from getting higher rankings in search engines.
The report contains details about the most common issues on your page and how you can fix them to improve your website’s visibility in search engines.
A Technical SEO Audit is a way to get a better understanding of the technical aspects of your website. This includes things like the load time, how fast your site responds to user input, and how well it performs in terms of search engines’ algorithms.
It’s important to note that this isn’t just a one-time thing; it’s an ongoing process that should be done as often as possible. This is because many factors can affect how search engines see your site, so it’s always good to keep an eye on those factors and ensure they all work in your favor.
Recommended: How to use SEMrush to perform a SEO Audit
Types Of Technical SEO Audit
Technical SEO audits are an essential part of understanding your website and how it can be optimized to rank well in search engines. There are many different types of audits that you can conduct on your site, and each will have a different focus and set of outcomes. Here are some of the audits you can conduct:
- Content Audit
A content audit involves analyzing the content on your website. It helps you determine if your website is well-structured, relevant, and up-to-date. It’s essential to have a content audit because it can help improve search engine optimization efforts.
You need to ensure that the content on your site is accessible for users to read, understand and navigate through easily. Some tools can help you find all pages on your website to know exactly how many pages are indexed by search engines
- Backlink Audit
A backlink audit is a process of analyzing your website’s backlinks and identifying the quality of each link. It helps you understand which links are helping your site.
A backlink audit may seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. Here are some things to keep in mind:
- Consider doing an audit once per quarter or at least every six months. This will allow you enough time to implement changes before they become significant issues.
- Start with top-level pages (i.e., homepage) because these tend to get more links than other pages on your site and thus offer more opportunities for analysis and improvement.
A backlink audit is one of the most effective audits you should conduct for your SEO business.
- Compliance Audit
A compliance audit is a technical SEO audit that checks to ensure your website is aligned with the most recent web standards. It’s essential to do this type of audit as often as possible because any updates to these guidelines or policies may affect how search engines crawl your site or index it in their search results.
By performing a compliance audit on your website, you can ensure that your site meets current web standards and best practices. Your content must be written in a way that makes sense to both humans and search engines.
Ways To Perform An In-Depth Technical SEO Audit
Conducting an in-depth technical SEO audit is more beneficial than not. Below are ways to do it to identify issues that are hurting your site and ranking potential:
Perform An Audit Of Your Site’s Crawlability.
You can perform an audit of your site’s crawlability. The concept of crawlability refers to the ability of search engines to access and index all of the pages on your website. Crawlability issues are among the most common reasons for poor search engine rankings, so addressing them is critical.
Search engine robots (spiders) use web standards (like HTML) to understand how webpages should be structured and what they contain. If these standards aren’t respected, then bots won’t be able to navigate through your site effectively. This can result in significant issues with crawlability because bots won’t be able to discover new content or update existing content when changes occur on a page.
Review Your Site’s Technical Infrastructure
Before you do anything else, it’s essential to check the technical infrastructure of your website. If it’s not running on a modern platform, the audit might be a waste of time.
Check that your site is running on a modern platform. You should also check if your platform is up-to-date. Check that your server is fast enough and has resources to deliver content quickly to users’ browsers without causing delays in page loading time or freezing issues. This way, search engines can crawl through all pages without any trouble.
When search engines can crawl your website without trouble, it’ll also reduce bounce rates which directly affect SEO performance over time. This is because a low bounce rate indicates high visitor engagement with content available on your site rather than other external sources like social media channels, etc.
Analyze Your Site’s Internal Linking Structure
Doing an internal link audit is a great way to quickly understand the structure of your website and catch problems that might be preventing people from finding the content they’re looking for. When performing an internal link audit, you should look at the number of links to each page on your site, whether or not those pages are linked to by other pages, and the words used in links.
An internal link audit is necessary for a technical SEO audit. This is because it helps you identify the pages on your website that aren’t linking to each other, which means they aren’t correctly connected.
By auditing the links, you’ll be able to identify and remove any broken links preventing users from getting where they want to go. Consequently, this improves the user experience of your website and makes it more valuable to search engines.
Perform A Content Audit For SEO Optimization Opportunities
When you want to perform a content audit, look for duplicate content. It’s easy to have duplicate content on your site, especially if you have a blog or a forum that users can post to. Additionally, check for pages with no title tag, meta description, or meta keywords. These are some essential pieces of information on each page because they tell search engines what your page is about, so they know how to rank it in search results.
When you perform a content audit, you’re looking at how your site’s pages are organized and categorized and where they fit into the bigger picture of your site. You can use this information to decide if there are any holes in your existing structure or if there are any pages that need to be reorganized or added.
Review Site’s URL Structure
If you’re doing a technical SEO audit, you need to review the URL structure on your site. The URL structure of your website is vital for both users and search engines. It helps users find information on your site more efficiently, and it helps search engines crawl and index that information so that it can be found in search results.
In doing a technical audit, you need to review the site’s URL structure for a few reasons. First, it can help you determine if there are any duplicate URLs on your site. This could be from having multiple pages with the same content or multiple pages that have been created for one reason or another. In either case, having duplicate URLs can hurt your site’s rankings in search engines, so it’s vital to get rid of them if possible.
Conclusion
Technical SEO audits are an exciting and challenging part of SEO. It’s rewarding to find the root cause of a problem or get a site’s rankings up because you changed something on the back end. Many other things can be included in a technical SEO audit that could make your website rank.