How to Perform Technical SEO Audit in 7 Easy Steps | 2024

In implementing SEO, the strategies are essential, but so is the audit. Audit, especially technical SEO audit is a must-to-do when you are optimizing your site to see any issues on it so that you can overcome it immediately. 

To understand how technical SEO works and how to perform an audit on it, read this article until the end!

What Is a Technical SEO Audit?

Technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website to make it easier for search engines to crawl and index, allowing Google to serve users with relevant content at the appropriate moment.

Meanwhile, technical SEO audits allow you to identify and address problems that are influencing your SEO by testing and examining the backend components of your website, such as crawlability, index status, and page speed.

This involves making certain that your website is free of crawlability and indexation problems, which prohibit search engines from listing it on their search engine results pages (SERPs).

Then, when to perform a technical SEO audit? You can do it on your new site and quarterly. Yet, it is also advisable to do it regularly for ongoing maintenance when you see a declining site performance. 

Why Is Technical SEO Audit Important for Business?

Do you know that only 9.37% of online content that succeeds gets top organic traffic from Google, and the rest fails to appear on the first-page search result? Well, this situation doesn't always happen because of poor content quality, but technical issues can also cause it.

Mostly, technical issues happen due to search engine’s failure to crawl and understand your website's content. As a result, they cannot match your content to the search query, and in the worst scenario, your content will not appear as a search result.

That’s why doing a technical SEO audit is very crucial for ensuring that your business websites perform properly, and if there are any issues you can fix them immediately before they go disastrous.

How to Perform Technical SEO Audit?

Performing technical SEO analysis might require more effort, but before doing it, you are recommended to prepare an SEO audit checklist. Below are the aspects you put on your checklist:

• Duplicate content
• Page speed checking
• Mobile-friendliness
• Sitemap reviewing
• Indexable site
• Crawable site

After preparing the checklist, you can begin the technical SEO audit by adhering to these steps:

1. Perform Website Crawling

The first step is to crawl your website. To do so, you can utilize audit tools like Sequence Stat that assist you in thoroughly crawling domains and subdomains to assess the state of your website. 

Crawling can identify issues with your website such as excessive redirects, low word count, broken links, duplicate content, and unlinked pagination pages. 

However, you must ensure that your site is crawlable by checking the robots.txt file. Your website's robots.txt file specifies which pages should and shouldn't be indexed. You can access the publicly accessible robots.txt file by appending /robots.txt to the end of any root domain. In addition, you can check your robots.txt using Robots.txt Checker by cmlabs.

2. Analyze the Audit Report

Next, you will get the report from Sequence Stat and you can analyze what issues found on your site. You can check the issues on links, content, external pages, images, indexability,  and many more and figure out how to handle them on the site audit list of issues and best practices by Sequence Stat.

3. Examine Your Sitemap

Google and other search engine crawlers can navigate your website using the XML sitemap. It basically aids with the crawlers' ability to locate and order the pages on your site. 

It is important to make your sitemap effective by formatting it in a proper XML document, adhering to XML sitemap protocol, not including noindex URLs, including the canonical versions of URLs, and including all new pages after updating or creating them. 

Most significantly, you must verify that your sitemap is appropriately structured, contains only the pages you want Google to index, and contains your most significant pages. 

4. Check Out the Google Search Console Report

Google Search Console gives your company useful analytics data and details about Google's perception of your website. You can view multiple reports for your technical site audit in Google Search Console, such as:

• Core Web Vitals
• Mobile Usability
• Sitemaps
• Security Issues

5. Make Sure the Mobile-Friendliness

Google discloses that they have begun to roll out mobile-first indexing, meaning that they perhaps will use the mobile version of your page rather than the desktop one for ranking and indexing. 

In addition, more users now use mobile devices. This indicates that it is important to ensure the mobile-friendliness. 

You can use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test to see if your page is user-friendly and responsive on mobile devices. When you enter your domain, it will display the mobile version of the page and let you know if it is mobile-friendly.

6. Check on Page Speed

The next technical SEO audit tip is checking on the page speed. It is important because it also determines your ranking. Fast page speed will improve user experience, and that is what Google aims to do.

To do so, you can utilize the Page Speed Test by cmlabs and see the performance, accessibility, SEO, PWA, and best practices.  

7. Run On-Page Technical SEO Checks

Last but not least, you must also monitor the on-page technical SEO aspects, like title tags, headers, and duplicate pages. 

You must make sure that the title tags are relevant to the content on the page and answer what the users need. Moreover, the meta descriptions and meta tags must engage users to visit your site. 

Other than meta tags, you must also clear the hierarchy on the page so that Google can index and analyze your site for search. 

Next, you must pay attention to how you place your keyword on a piece of work or page. Avoid doing keyword stuffing to prevent getting penalized by Google. Instead, strategically place it on the title, alt tags, URL, subheadings, and meta description. 

Lastly, check your schema markup. You can add schema markup to make it easier for search engines to interpret the content of your website. Because it enables search engines to provide users with more relevant results for their queries, it is crucial for technical SEO.

Tips to Do Technical SEO Audit

There are several tips you need to consider when conducting a technical SEO audit to make the whole process more efficient. These include:

1. Customise a Robot.txt File

The first tip for doing a technical SEO audit is to customise robot.txt files. As you know, the robot.txt file plays an important role in controlling crawl access. 

Customising your robot.txt file allows you to prioritise the important pages on your websites and restrict crawling to irrelevant pages. Besides its benefits to minimise your crawling budget, it can also manage your server load and increase your website's loading speed.

2. Create Sitemaps

Both HTML and XML can be useful for your website. HTML sitemaps are useful for simplifying navigation, while XML sitemaps are used to help search engines like Google crawl through your website. 

So, if there is an issue related to crawling and indexing, you should inspect your XML sitemaps first.

Tips: You should add your sitemaps to your Google Search Console to stay updated if any content changes. 

3. Build a Website Framework

You can build a website framework to define all the pages and properly relate them to one another. By doing this, your audience can easily access pages and content which leads to a better user experience.

Some aspects that need to be considered when developing a framework include content, URL structures, an easy-to-navigate menu, breadcrumbs, and internal linking.

4. Simplify Your Website Structure

If the website has a complicated structure and too much irrelevant content, search engine crawlers will need extra time to crawl it. 

So, make sure that you streamline your website structure to make it simpler and easier to understand both for audiences and search engine crawlers.

To simplify your website structure, you can group your content based on similar keywords and relevance and you can highlight the essentials and your recently updated content.

5. Improve Your Website Security by Using HTTPS Protocol

Last but not least, improving your website security cannot be skipped. Google usually prefers websites with the HTTPS protocol instead of HTTP because it has a higher security level. 

HTTPS protocol provides encryption to each user's data and also has an SSL certificate, that’s why search engines trust your website to access their personal data. 

Conclusion

To sum up, a technical SEO audit is necessary to maintain your SEO performance and website health. However, if you work with SEO Services by cmlabs, not only technical SEO audit, we will also optimize SEO best practices for your website. 

Get in contact with our marketing teams right now and let's work together to start achieving real results and expanding your business!