4 Things to Look into in a Technical SEO Audit
- 27 May, 2022
- Jason Ferry
- Website SEO
When improving site performance, a technical website SEO audit is an essential starting point. Web admins can get bogged down in optimising individual website SEO pages, but if the website as a whole is not technically sound, those efforts will be for nought.
In this blog, we will cover what to look for in a technical audit in website SEO for online businesses.
According to Techradar, more than 547,200 new websites appear online on the internet every single day. It is necessary for Google to crawl and keep all of these websites in its database, which takes up space on Google’s physical servers.
Because there is such a large volume of content available nowadays, Google may prioritise websites that are well-designed, load quickly, and offer information that is both useful and relevant to their users.
As a result of raising the bar, it is now less likely that Google will reward a website with good results if it is slow or contains a lot of jargon in the code.
Those that are sincere in their desire to surpass their business competitors will have a significant opportunity to do so if they work to improve the coding, speed, and overall user experience of their website. These are some of the most important ranking signals, and they will continue to be so even as the amount of content on the internet continues to grow at an exponential rate.
Auditing the technical SEO of a website can be a challenging undertaking due to the many moving pieces involved. It is possible that folks who are not developers will have difficulty comprehending several of these components.
In order to successfully supervise the technical website SEO audit improvements, one should ideally have a solid understanding of how to carry out the task. There is a possibility that some of these will call for the employment of programmers, designers, writers, or editors.
It will come as a relief to learn that a number of tools are at the SEOs’ disposal to conduct the audits on their behalf and provide them with all of the detailed data they require to improve the technical performance of a website.
Structure
- Crawlability: How frequently does Google crawl the website?
- Security: Is there a secure connection (HTTPS) available on the website?
- On-page SEO elements: Does the keyword present on every page in the title tags, the meta description, the filenames, and the paths? Is it made up of the same on-page characteristics as websites that rank in the top ten for your target keywords, and if so, what are those features?
- Internal links: Is there a link that goes from this page to any of the other pages that are available on this website? Other factors that are extremely important include the structure of the website, in addition to its breadcrumbs, anchor text, and link sculpting.
- Headings: Does the H1 use the primary KW? Are there H2s that include supporting keywords?
- Compliance issues: Is the coding on the website valid HTML? What is the score for accessibility?
- Images: How long does it take for the images to load? Are you using optimised versions of the title, keywords, and srcset attributes? Does the website support modern image formats such as webP and SVG?
- Schema and semantic Web: Are the schema tags in place and appropriately configured? WebPage, BreadcrumbList, Organisation, Product, Review, Author/Article, Person, Event, Video/Image, Recipe, FAQ, and How-To are some schema tags that can be utilised.
- Canonicals: Are there any canonical tags currently in use, and if so, have they been configured appropriately?
- SiteMap: Is there a site map that includes only valid pages, and has all redirects and 404 pages been eliminated?
These are only a few factors to consider that most tools will report on.
User Experience
Google has started emphasising ranking variables centred on user experience. Google is upping the bar for user experience as the web as a whole gets more organised. Increasing their advertising revenue by focusing on user experience.
You should conduct a user experience audit on your website, asking the following questions:
- Is it quick?
- How quickly does the page become interactive?
- Is it simple to use on mobile devices?
- Is the site’s hierarchy clear and intuitive?
This can be measured in a variety of ways, including:
- Site loading time
- Web Essentials Mobile-Friendliness
- Navigation structure
- Design of intrusive advertisements or interstitials
Make sure that the developer you are working with is knowledgeable about the most recent developments in the technical aspects of SEO and is able to execute the required changes to boost your SEO performance score.
Technical SEO audit tools
Some of the most popular SEO audit tools include:
- Semrush Site Audit
- Screaming Frog
- SiteBulb
- Website Auditor
- ContentKing App
- GTMetrix
- Pingdom
- Google Lighthouse
- Google Page Speed Insights
Putting Technical SEO Fixes in Place
After collecting all of the CSV outputs, search engine optimisation specialists can then construct a list of all of the problems and go through them one by one to get rid of any duplicate reports that were generated by the different programs.
The next thing that has to be done is to figure out whose department each potential fix belongs to and what priority level it has been assigned. It’s possible that some of them may require the attention of your developer, while others will require the attention of your content team. This is something that you should keep in mind. In the latter group, for instance, there are jobs such as rewriting duplicate titles or polishing descriptions on pages that have a low click-through rate. Both of these examples are instances of tasks that fall into this category.
Get Comprehensive Technical Audits for Your Website
A technical SEO audit is a comprehensive analysis of your website’s technical aspects that could be affecting its organic search performance. This can include anything from site speed and structure to indexation and crawlability issues.
Hiring experts like position1seo.co.uk to do a technical SEO audit of your site can help you identify any potential problems that could be holding back your site from achieving its full potential in the search engines.
Aside from that, we also offer other SEO services, such as on-page optimisation, link building, and much more.
Position1SEO is the leading provider of technical SEO audits in the UK. We have a team of experienced and certified SEO experts who can help you identify any potential problems with your website’s technical aspects. Visit our homepage to learn more about our services, or send us an email at jason@position1seo.com for a free consultation.