A technical SEO audit is, in fact, an in-depth assessment of your site’s technical aspects to validate its compliance with the best practices of SEO. It will help identify the site’s technical glitches that could be responsible for flaws in its search engine rankings and how to improve them. In this guide, we’ll take you through the step-by-step process of performing a technical SEO audit.
Crawl Your Website
Crawling is the first step in a technical SEO audit, which means you use SEO tools such as Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, or SEMrush to crawl your website. Crawling will help you understand how Google sees and views your site.
Important things to check as one crawls:
- Broken links (404 errors)
- Redirect chains (multiple redirects)
- Duplicate content
- Blocked pages from robots.txt
Make sure that every page is crawled and indexed well by the search engines. You want to correct or eliminate any broken links and make the redirects flow smoothly.
Check for indexing issues
Now that your website has been crawled, make sure all your important pages can be indexed by search engines. Google Search Console will contain the “Coverage” report. See how many of your pages are indexed, and whether you have any errors.
Prime actions:
- Look for those pages that are excluded or not indexed.
- Resolve any noindex tags if they were improperly used.
- Make sure your robots.txt and XML sitemap are in order.
Optimize Your XML Sitemap
Your XML sitemap makes it easy for search engines to explore and index your site. It should be:
- Recent with your most important pages.
- Clean, without errors or broken links.
- Included in robots.txt to direct search engine bots.
You can submit the XML sitemap to Google Search Console to ensure Google can discover all your website’s URLs.
Check Site Speed and Performance
Site speed is an important ranking factor. A slow website can really hurt the user experience and the performance of SEO. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or Lighthouse to test your site’s page speed.
- Desktop and mobile load times.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – key metrics for Core Web Vitals.
- Compress images, leverage browser caching.
An efficient, fast website enhances both your SEO and user experience.
Verify Mobile-Friendliness
With Google using mobile-first indexing, if you’re not mobile-friendly, you’re pretty much out of the running for SEO success. Google Search Console provides a report specifically on Mobile Usability- it’s very useful.
What to check:
- Responsive design for various devices.
- That your fonts are not too small and your buttons big enough to tap.
- Use Google’s Mobile Friendly Test tool to test your site.
If your site is not mobile-friendly, it may also be losing rankings.
Optimize Internal Linking Structure
Internal linking is how search engines build an understanding of your site’s architecture and the relative value of your pages. A proper internal linking strategy will help your SEO by equally balancing the link equity on your site.
Best Practices Include
- Link to your most important pages regularly.
- Avoid too many or orphan pages-they are pages without links.
- Descriptive anchor text which is relevant to the information contained on the page being linked
Internal site linking also assists in accessing your site for users, and this might increase the time a user spends on your site and lower the bounce rates.
Analyze URL Structure
A clean URL structure, friendly for SEO, helps that both the users and search engines know what a given page is about.
Look out for:
Short, descriptive URLs containing relevant keywords
Hyphens used consistently in place of underscores
Removing unnecessary parameters or IDs.
For instance, a nice URL will look like this: www.example.com/blog/technical-seo-audit instead of www.example.com/?p=1234.
HTTPS Implementation
Your secure site is very important for SEO and trust of users. Google is utilizing HTTPS as a ranking signal, so make sure that your site is secure.
Key tasks:
- Check that your website runs on HTTPS.
- Ensure that all HTTP pages are redirected to HTTPS.
- Fix any mixed content errors – HTTP content on an HTTPS page.
You can test your implementation of your SSL certificate using tools such as SSL Labs.
Structured Data and Schema Markup
Structured data helps search engines understand your content better. Schema.org markup enriches the way your webpage appears in search results with its rich snippet (such as star ratings, product information).
Missing schema for key pages such as articles, products, events.
Errors on the Google Search Console Rich Results report.
Correct use of JSON-LD or Microdata on your structured data.
This could make a huge difference in how your pages are presented in Google’s results by improving it.
Remove Duplicate Content
Duplicate content can harm your SEO as it confuses the search engines about which page to rank. Use tools such as Copyscape or Screaming Frog to track down duplicate content on your site.
Fix duplicate content by:
- Conserving pages through 301 redirects.
- Canonical tags: To indicate the preferred version of a page.
- Handling paginated content as well as www vs. non-www versions of your site.
Duplicate content resolution averts dilution of ranking power across multiple pages
Monitor for Crawl Errors
Follow crawl errors from Google Search Console and other SEO tools. If your site is not properly accessible, crawl errors can prevent search engines from crawling your site and thus negatively impact your SEO efforts
Some common ones include:
- Server error (5xx).
- Not found errors, that is, 404 errors.
- Blocked resources.
Resolve them all as soon as possible so that the experience of crawling remains smooth for the search engine.
Conclusion
Abhijeet Panja
It is that which keeps the website well-optimised, user-friendly, and search-engine-friendly. This step-by-step guide will help you identify and correct the most critical issues probably hindering your site from ranking high in search results. Regular auditing means your site will always be in top shape to meet the algorithms of the search engines and the expectations of the users-thus better rankings, traffic, and user experience.
