With the speeds and changes happening in the world of digital marketing, ensuring that your website is optimized for search engines is extremely important.
A Technical SEO Audit is a crucial examination of the technical side of your website. It gives you an idea of issues that could counter your website’s presence in the search results.
Stay with us in this blog post, where we take you through the 12 essential steps to carry out a thorough Technical SEO Audit to make your site ready to shine.
Why Do a Technical SEO Audit?
Google uses very complex algorithms to rank a website. If your site has technical issues, it may not appear in search results. But, with the help of regular SEO audits, you can stay ahead of your competitors.
Here are the key 12 steps by which you can easily perform a technical SEO audit:
Step 1: Crawling the Website
The first action of a Technical SEO Audit is the crawling of your website. With Screaming Frog or Sitebulb tools, you can collect information on the pages within your site, internal links, and how it all fits together.
What you ultimately get through the crawl is an overview of the overall health of the site, including broken links, duplicate content, and redirect chains.
Step 2: Index Status
Finally, verify if the pages of your website are indexed. You can do this within Google using the “site:” operator. This search will show you the pages indexed by Google. If important pages seem missing, it can hint at problems in your robots.txt file or meta tags.
Step 3: Check Your Robots.txt File
The robots.txt file instructs search engines as to which pages they must crawl and which to avoid. Google Search Console is a tool you can use to detect crawl errors and disallowed pages.
Step 4: Review XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap helps search engines understand your site’s structure. Ensure that the sitemap is updated and contains all the important pages to be indexed. Validate the sitemap file for any errors and submit it to the Google Search Console for perfect indexing.
Step 5: Analyze Page Speed
Scan your site’s loading time with tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix. When you see a slow page load time, you’ll know what part contributes to slowing it down, like large images or too much JavaScript, and you can improve.
Step 6: Mobile Friendliness
Mobile-first indexing will become the new norm, so your site should be mobile-friendly. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test is also a good tool for checking your site’s performance on mobile devices. Address issues, such as ensuring readable text and properly spaced touch elements.
Step 7: Review HTTPS Status
Security does matter when it comes to SEO rankings. Ensure your site uses HTTPS over HTTP. If your website is not secured, then consider switching to HTTPS in order to safeguard users’ information and amplify your ranking capabilities.
Step 8: Eliminate Broken Links
Broken links can impact user experience and your SEO performance. Using your crawl tool from Step 1, look for errors such as 404 or broken links. Replace these with other relevant pages by updating and redirecting them.
Step 9: Review The Internal Linking Structure
Another excellent application of an internal linking structure is that it contributes to distributing page authority and even enhances user navigation. Analyze your internal links to ensure they follow a logical or meaningful order. Some of the critical pages can be referenced from several areas, thereby increasing their opportunities to rank well.
Step 10: URL Structure Optimization
URLs should be short and descriptive. Avoid using numbers in names or text that are not relevant to the content of your site. Ensure you include a word within the URL wherever possible, and also attempt consistency in all your URLs.
Step 11: Handling Duplicate Content
Duplicate content can confuse search engines and reduce page authority. Use the SEO audit services tools like Copyscape or Siteliner to find duplicate content on your site.
Step 12: Analyzing with Analytics and Performance
Continuously monitor the changes in your website performance after the end of the audit by using analytics. Some of the tools used by Google Analytics and Google Search Console. You will get information on traffic for the site, as well as bounce rates and conversion metrics, among others.
Conclusion
A Technical SEO audit is of prime importance in any SEO strategy. If you follow these 12 steps, your website will be ready for proper search engine optimization, with enhanced visibility and improved user experience. Hiring professional SEO audit services can ensure issues are properly identified and resolved. Kickstart by choosing the top SEO audit company like Growth Vive Solutions, which is known for its exceptional success rate.