Just like on-page SEO and off-page SEO, there is another area of SEO, i.e., Technical SEO, that may affect the site’s rankings. It doesn’t include activities such as content optimization and link building. Instead, it covers all the technical aspects of a website.
For beginners, working on the technical aspects may look a little tricky. However, there are a few basics that one has to keep in mind in order to excel at it. Continue reading to learn more about SEO technical audit and how to optimize the site without any SEO agency.
What Is a Technical SEO Audit Service?
The technical SEO focuses on website audit and server optimizations. It may include technical aspects, such as site structure, navigation, XML sitemaps, indexing, crawling, redirects, and duplicate content. We can say that it deals with the non-content elements of the website.
These types of SEO audits plays a very crucial role and can have a direct impact on the search rankings. An individual can have well-written and researched articles on the site. However, if there are technical issues with site backends’, your site will never rank on the organic search. Therefore, it is very important to pay special attention to these technical elements of the website.
There are many digital marketing agencies that offer search engine optimization services and website SEO audit services to improve the performance of a site. These agencies have experienced SEO professionals that identify technical issues, perform regular SEO audits and optimize the pages on your site. SEO audit service helps in making the site more efficient for indexing and crawling. This way, search engines will deliver the right content to the users.
You need to buy these services, and the cost of an SEO audit can be quite expensive at times. This will not be viable for people working alone. So what do you do? If you don’t want to spend much money on these services, but still want to audit your website, you can DIY the steps. Read on to learn more!
How to Conduct a Technical SEO Audit?
Now, that you know, the importance of technical SEO, you must know how to perform an SEO audit.
There are three parts of SEO audit reports based on the different aspects of SEO:
1. Technical audit – crawling errors, hosting issues, sitemap errors, hosting, etc.
2. Links audit- backlinks analysis
3. On-page audit – content, keywords, competitor analysis, metadata, image optimization, etc.
Let’s understand how to conduct a comprehensive SEO audit. Here are the steps that one should follow.
1. Begin By Crawling the Site
Crawling is the basis of SEO success, and every SEO audit process must begin with crawling the website. You can use various SEO audit tools like DeepCrawl, SEMrush, Spyfu, and Ubersuggest.
We have been using Ahrefs as our audit tool for years, as it is user-friendly and gives accurate information regarding the website.
First, to run an audit with Site Audit, you must ensure your website is connected to your Ahrefs account as a project. The easiest way to do this is via Google Search Console, although you can verify your ownership by adding a DNS record or HTML file.
To use Ahrefs for crawling your website:
Step 1: Open Ahrefs’ Site Audit. This feature will be available for free in Ahrefs’ Webmaster Tool.
Step 2: Add “New Project”
Step 3: When you add a new project, you’ll have to verify your ownership of the website.
Step 4: Once verified, it’s good to check the crawl settings and set parameters according to your needs.
When you crawl the site, you will get information about broken links, duplicate content, excess redirects, image issues, the site’s performance, and unlinked pages. Therefore, you will understand the various errors affecting the site’s performance.
This will give you a brief idea of the factors you must work on. The SEO tools will scan your website to check how many URLs there are, how many are indexable, how many are not, and how many have issues.
From this, the audit tool creates an in-depth report on everything it finds to help you identify and fix any issues hindering your site’s performance.
Of course, more advanced issues may need further investigation that involves other tools, such as Google Search Console. However, our audit tool does a great job of highlighting key issues, especially for beginner SEOs.
2. Check If there are Different Browsable Versions of the Website
If the website has multiple versions, it will negatively impact the SERP rankings.
If you were using the HTTP version before and have switched to HTTPS, this type of error may come. Therefore, checking the number of browsable versions of the visible website is crucial.
This type of error can also occur when there are different mobile and desktop versions. The search engines will get confused about which version must be shown or which version is correct.
It can negatively impact your rankings. Ensure that there is only one version of the website, and make sure that your websites use the HTTPS version.
3. Check the Crawlability and Indexation Issues of your Website
If search engines are unable to search some pages on your site, it might mess up how your website gets listed – or maybe not listed at all. And if your site isn’t on the list, people won’t find it.
Thus, you should ensure that search engines can smoothly check out your site and gather info. This way, they can put your site in the right spot on the SERP, and you can score a good ranking for those super-important keywords.
Crawlability issues may contain,
Sitemap problems: Sitemaps play a crucial role in crawling the website. You must check that your website doesn’t have any errors in it. Otherwise, it would affect the crawling and drastically affect the search rankings. You must remove blocked URLs and redirect them from the sitemap. If they are not removed, the search engine will not crawl it. You can see these issues by going to Site Audit > All Issues > Other
Robot txt. File: Robots.txt is like a note on your website that tells Google which pages they’re allowed to check out and which ones to steer clear of. You can usually find it hanging out in the main folder of your site: https://domain.com/robots.txt. They guide crawling bots away from private folders, prevent bots from putting too much load on your server, and tell them where your sitemap is located. Just one wrong robot.txt can make search engines skip over your entire site.
“User-agent: *
Disallow: / ”
So, you want to double-check that your robots.txt file isn’t blocking any folders or pages you want to appear in search results.
Indexation problem: Getting your pages indexed is crucial if you want to show up on Google. Only the pages indexed smoothly will appear in SERP. If your pages aren’t making it to the index, there could be many issues causing this hiccup.
4. Evaluate the Different Technical On-page SEO Elements
Although some on-page SEO issues are ignored, if you and a competitor are side by side on the search engine results page, even the most minor problems could decide who snags that top spot.
Here are some of the things you might want to look at:
Canonical Tags
Google is not a fan of duplicate content. This is when canonical tags come into play. This is one of the most high-priority issues you should work on. These tags decide which version of your content takes the lead when you have multiple pages with similar content. If you miss checking canonical tags, it can mess with your crawl budget. To check if there are any duplicate pages,
Step 1: Go to Site Audit
Step 2: Under Reports, click on Duplicate
Step 3: Finally, see the Issues
Title Tags or Page titles
Title tags are very important in a web page. Their main goal is to tell the users and, most importantly, Google what the page is about. And did you know? If a title tag does not please Google, it is free to modify it—the reason for this is that the title tags are too long.
If you find this issue during the audit process, try to reduce the title tags to 60 characters. You can even see this in the Site Audit Issues tab under Content.
Hreflang Tags
The hreflang tags are like a reference for Google, showing them the target region and language of a page. It’s like a guide to help display the correct version of a page, considering where the user is and what language they prefer.
It’s part of international SEO, especially useful when you have different versions of the same page in various languages or targeting different parts of the world.
To find issues related to this:
Step 1: Go to Site Audit
Step 2: Check Issues under Localization
5. Test the Speed of Your Site
After Google said that speed affects a site’s ranking, SEO professionals have taken this point very seriously, and so should you. The site speed could affect the overall performance and the ranking of the site. You must conduct a site speed test.
You must address this issue if your site has a slow load time.
Various factors could affect the speed performance of the site. Here are some of the issues that you must analyze:
• High-definition and large-size images
• Embedded videos
• Plugins and widgets that the site is using
• Repetitive script
• The theme of the site
• Host
To check the speed of your site using Ahrefs,
Step 1: Select Site Audit
Step 2: Click on Reports
Step 3: Check Performance
Step 4: Finally, go to the Overview
Here, you’ll see how your site is performing speed-wise.
(Source : Google Images)
You can use Google Page Speed Insights to test the site’s speed performance. The probability of bounce rate increases with an increase in the load time. Suppose the load time is more than 5%; the bounce rate probability increases and may go up to 90%.
It is crucial to resolve site errors, especially when dealing with your site’s technical elements. These sites have their own credibility and brand names attached to them.
If there are certain issues and faults with the speed or anything else, it could affect your overall image.
When preparing your report, you must check these factors and look out to resolve them.
6. Check Internal Links
After you have tested the speed, you must analyze your site’s internal links. You must check orphan pages, broken links, and click depth.
(Source: Google Images)
Orphan pages are those web pages that are not linked with any other page of your website. To check the orphan pages, you can use the Website Auditor tool. It will help you find all the orphan pages, and you can address the issue with ease.
If any of your indexed pages are orphaned, they won’t make it to PageRank or be found by search engine crawlers.
You can use Ahrefs to check them by going to:
Site Audit > Links > Issues Tab > Orphan Page
Internal links are of exceptionally high importance. They give an excellent experience to the users as well as the search engines but also help external link-building strategies.
When the topics are appropriately siloed, having proper internal links makes it easier for your users to understand what is on your website. Apart from this, it makes keywords relevant, ensures that the page’s content is properly crawled, and allows the users to look for relevant results.
7. Check External Link
External links are links on your page that take the users to another domain. If your site gets linked by someone else’s website, it means it is someone’s external link.
External links are usually used as sources in your content to show where you got the information from.
Additionally, linking externally to authoritative websites makes you look reliable and shows Google that you’ve added trustworthy information.
While doing a website audit to find external link issues:
Step 1: Go to Ahref’s Site Audit
Step 2: Click on All Issues
Step 3: Select Links
You can see issues like your page has been linked to broken pages and no outgoing links found on your page, both of which can harm your site’s credibility and give a bad user experience.
8. Check for the Common HTTPS issues
You must ensure that all the page redirects refer to HTTPS pages. The mixed content error could occur when the other resources on the site load with an insecure or HTTP connection over a secured HTTPS version site.
If such errors exist, then those pages will not load properly. The browser will prevent these from loading. It would affect the security and crawl ability of the site.
9. Check if Your Website is Mobile-friendly
Google stated that more than 50% of the online traffic comes from mobile devices. Also, Google usually indexes those sites that have mobile versions rather than those that only have a desktop version. This is known as mobile-first indexing. Therefore, it is important that you check your website for mobile friendliness.
You can use Ahrefs’ mobile crawler by changing the “Project Settings” and modifying “Crawler Settings.”
After changing the settings, you’ll have to crawl your site again and look for issues that have been added, showing only for the mobile version.
10. Check the Analytics
You must check whether the analytics code is installed correctly or not. If there are some errors in it, you will have to fix them as soon as possible.
(Source: Google Images)
Google Analytics will report correct data only when the code is placed correctly, that is, above the header of each page.
After this, go to Google and type “site: domain name of your website.” It would reflect the number of pages that are visible or are getting crawled.
Compare the data from these search results. The number of pages shown here must be similar to your metric data.
If the number differs, it is likely that some of your pages are not properly crawled. You will have to check the errors that are arising on those pages.
11. Perform Backlink Audit
Backlinks play a crucial part and affect the search engine rankings. Search engines consider backlinks as an important factor for determining your rankings. If a site has more backlinks, search engines will consider your site useful and relevant.
(Source: https://neilpatel.com/backlinks/)
You can check the backlinks using tools such as Ahrefs and Ubersuggest. These tools will provide you with information about the backlinks.
You can conduct a competitor analysis using these tools and see the keywords competitors are ranking for. You can compare your site with your competitors and create your own strategy.
Summing Up
Many website owners fail to execute a thorough SEO audit properly. When you fail to execute it effectively, it can risk your reputation in the industry. Since you might’ve your own brand dominance and power attached, if you fail to maintain it digitally, you will lose out on your customers.
By applying technical SEO strategies effectively, you can maintain their image and credibility. Many brands perform well in terms of content and building backlinks. However, a minor technical failure could adversely affect the performance and search rankings.
Therefore, you must pay special attention to your site’s technical aspects. Conduct thorough research and audit before building your strategy for your site’s better visibility and performance.
FAQ
What do SEO audit services include?
Professional SEO services are mainly provided by SEO agencies where SEO specialists check your site to find issues that are not letting your site shine in the SERP. These services usually include noting the possible issues found, suggestions on how to fix them, and finally, implementing the solutions after a thorough consultation.
Why is it important to audit the technical elements of your website?
SEO is an ongoing process. So, when you properly audit your website’s technical elements, you can identify and fix the issues that are preventing your site from performing well. Doing this improves your SEO performance, site’s content, and user experience.
What will the final audit report include?
The final SEO audit report will contain a detailed evaluation of the site’s metrics and a complete list of actions to fix all technical, content, off-page, and on-page issues.
