How to Conduct a Technical SEO Audit in 6 Easy Ways

Owning a website to be discoverable online is crucial, but there is one more important thing you should know: maintaining its position on the search engine result pages (SERPs). 

Regarding this, SEO is the key. Not only optimise the content for search engines, you also need to ensure that your site’s health is good by doing a regular technical SEO audit. 

Then, how to perform a technical SEO audit and what to prepare to do it? This article will guide you to explore website technical audit and its best practices. 

What Is a Technical SEO Audit?

A technical SEO audit is an activity to examine a website's technical elements so that your site's pages are easier to crawl, indexed, and ranked by search engines like Google.

By doing a technical SEO analysis, you can figure out and repair things that can slow down your site, hinder search engines from learning your content, alter how visitors use your website across various devices, make it difficult for search engines to find your pages, and so on. 

Some elements that are audited include site architecture, URL structure, security, redirects, sitemap, robots.txt file, site code, site errors, page speed, user experience, indexation, schema markup, and image delivery. 

Over time, increased organic search visibility and traffic may result from locating and resolving such technical problems, which also help search engines better comprehend and rank your content.

Why Is Technical SEO Audit Important?

SEO practices in general are important for your site and content to appear in the most prominent place in search engines, yet SEO tech audit is equally important to keep your site easily crawled by search engines. 

It is important to note that search engines' main goal is to provide users with the best and most relevant responses to their queries. They accomplish this by using search engine crawlers to examine and comprehend website material, which is subsequently presented on search engine results pages.

However, when a technical issue happens in the middle of the crawling process, it will ruin the process of learning by search engine bot. Moreover, if the issues are experienced by users, such as slow page loading, broken images, broken links, and many more, they will leave your site immediately, increasing the bounce rate.

Similar to how a user would not tolerate broken links or a slow-loading website, search engine crawlers give preference to websites that provide information effectively and promptly. 

How to Conduct a Technical SEO Audit

To perform the audit, it is a must to know the technical SEO audit best practices, from making sure that your site is crawlable to ensuring that your site is responsive to mobile devices. Below are technical SEO checklists you should take note of:

1. Choose a Site Audit Tool

The first thing to do before doing an SEO audit is to determine the tools to use. In this case, you can use Google Search Console or Site Audit Tool by Sequence Stat. 

Some Site Audit Tools will inform you about the domain information, the number of good and bad-conditioned pages, sitemap checking, link checking, robots.txt files checking, and many more.

In general, there are some issues you can handle yourself and those that need developer or system administrator hands. Moreover, if your site is newly built, you must conduct a technical SEO audit immediately. 

After that, evaluate your website at least once every three months, once a month, or whenever you see a drop in rankings.

2. Ensure the Site's Crawlabilty 

No matter how much content you produce regularly, if the site is difficult to crawl, search engines cannot index and learn the page. As a result, your content and page are hard to be ranked. Moreover, Google searches its index when a user enters a query to provide relevant results. 

To ensure your site is crawlable, you can check on the robots.txt file because any web-crawling software that lands on your website will start by looking through this file. You can find this file in the site’s root folder https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Then, this file also works to allow and disallow user agents. 

In addition, robots.txt helps you to keep search engine bots out of your private files, prevent bots from consuming too many server resources, and give the address of your sitemap.

Robots.txt contains a code that can stop search engines from indexing your entire website. But, you must verify that the robots.txt file does not prohibit any folder or page from showing up in search results.

3. Check the Indexability

Not only crawlability, but your site must be able to be indexed by search engine bots. To check it, you can use the crawl tool on the internet or Google Search Console. From the analysis, you can see whether there are redirect errors and pages that are and are not indexed. 

4. Evaluate Your XML Sitemap

For Google and other search engine crawlers, your XML sitemap serves as a map of your website. All it does is make your website pages easier for these crawlers to find and rank. 

During each technical SEO audit, make sure your XML sitemap contains all the pages you wish to rank and ensure that no pages you don't want to appear in the SERPs are included in the sitemap.

After that, you can see how the sitemap works and the issues lying, such as format errors, incorrect pages, too large files, orphaned pages, or finding HTTP URLs in sitemap.xml. 

5. Check on Mobile-Friendliness

You may own a website now and have completed the SEO tactic on it to make it perform well. Yet, have you ensured its mobile-friendliness? 

A mobile-friendly website is necessary in the recent Google algorithm since it already announced the roll-out of mobile-first indexing. 

Moreover, there will be 56.93 million smartphone users in the UK by 2024 and the number will keep increasing until 2029. This means that more people will access your site from their mobile phones. 

Therefore, you must ensure its mobile-friendliness by evaluating how responsive it is for mobile devices and how it performs on the devices. On top of that, if you have not build a website for mobile, you should immediately plan it since your competitors might already have it and gained traffic from mobile devices. 

6. Improve the Page Speed

The last technical SEO audit checklist, but not the least, is improving the page speed. You must note that page speed now become one of the ranking factors Google considering. 

There are many tools you can use to test the page speed, like Page Speed Test by cmlabs or Google PageSpeed Insight. 

In addition, you must note that page speed is not only about how rapidly your page loads for users, but also how efficient it is to be loaded by search engine bots for the sake of crawling. 

Some activities you can do to improve the page speed is implementing minify and accumulating JavaScript and CSS files. 

Conclusion

Those are some SEO tech audit best practices you can adhere to. In conclusion, performing site audit regularly is essential to make sure that your site performs well for both users and search engine bots. As a result, your site can be accessed by users easily and indexed by search engines thoroughly. 

Since there are a lot of elements you should audit, you might need another hand to ensure that your site is healthy. In this case, you can rely on SEO Services by cmlabs. Aside from assuring that your site works well, our SEO experts will also make sure that you can win the digital market in your niche. Secure a meeting now and tell us your SEO needs for free!