7 Steps Guide to a Comprehensive Technical Site SEO Audit

7 Steps Guide to a Comprehensive Technical Site SEO Audit

With the ever-expanding and evolving competition in the digital marketing landscape, success comes to those who are at the top of their game.

Search Engine Optimisation in 2019 is a powerful weapon that has levelled the playing field, much to the delight of small businesses. Nowadays, startups stand tall with market giants, thanks to the limitless power of SEO.

Search Engine Optimisation in recent years has grown into a reliable means to increase web visibility, drive organic traffic, generate leads & sales.  A recent survey revealed that 61% of markets SEO techniques only for inbound traffic.

In this digital era, having a website is no big deal, but making it SEO optimised, so it ranks well on top-ranked search engines like Google, Bing etc. is the road to success. For that, a technical SEO audit is indispensable when chalking out an SEO action plan.

To make sure your SEO strategy is heading the right direction, you need to conduct a thorough technical SEO audit. The audit will provide you with valuable insights, how your website is ranking-and- what tweaks you need to make for further ranking improvement.

Yes, a technical SEO audit can sound complicated and time-consumption, but here in this post, we’ll be putting forth steps involved to conduct the audit easily & quickly.

But, before we any further, it is imperative to know what a technical SEO audit is? It is a process by which an SEO professional looks into the technical aspect of a site. Or, simple words, determine the SEO health of the website, and what necessary you need to take to improve it.

Step 1: Website Crawl

Start your technical SEO audit with the crawling of the website, and this is like a rule of thumb for SEO experts worldwide. For crawling, there is myriad of credible online tools like SEMrush, DeepCrawl, etc.

These online crawlers help in determining many factors such as broken links, poor quality images, issues with page titles, and bad targeted keywords. The crawler will analyse the content for plagiarism, unlinked links, and too many redirects.

Step 2: Review Sitemap

Once you are done with site crawling, now the second step when doing technical SEO audit is reviewing sitemap. The sitemap is fundamental to your SEO success. It provides search engines complete information about the site's structure and also allows search engine crawlers to discover the recently created or updated web pages.

So, to get your SEO right, you must have a sitemap; further, it is crucial to check it out during a technical SEO audit. Use Seo tools for review sitemap.

Attributes of an Ideal Sitemap:

Your Sitemap Must Be Clear, with No Scope of Errors

Your Sitemap Must Be Concise

Your Sitemap Must Be Up-To-Date

Register Your Sitemap to Google Search Engine Console

Step 3: Analyse The Internal Links

Most of the marketing pros will agree on one thing that having a well-structured, logical hierarchy in your site can significantly impact its SERP rankings. So, it is of paramount importance to check both the internal and external links.

Webpages those are deleted now and then contribute to broken links.

Here, are a few facets you must look into during website internal link audit:

Orphan Webpages

Broken Links

Click Depth

Step 4: Site Speed

Your site speed today has a massive impact on how search engine crawlers and Internet users see your website. While site speed is a critical ranking factor, a recent study also published that probability of bounce raises upto 90% if a site takes just five seconds to load.  So, in a nutshell, checking site speed during a technical SEO audit cannot be underpinned.

Step 5: HTTPS Content

Did you know that 70% of  Google SERP page one results are all HTTPS?

If your site has an HTTPs, then you must see for the prevalent errors when conducting a technical SEO audit. These include: links, canonicals, and redirects, and mixed Content:

Step 6: Check The Site Metrics

 First, you need to check whether Google Analytics is reporting accurate insights. If not, then check for the analytics code embedded at the backend of the website,

 Google Analytics will provide you with valuable information such as bounce rate-, must be as low as possible. A higher bounce rate suggests that Internet users are not finding your site relevant.

To reduce the bounce rate, you’ll have to improve the quality of content on the site, along with other factors like site speed.

Step7: A Backlink Audit

Backlinks are vital to triumph of any SEO strategy; that’s why conducting a comprehensive backlink audit is a no-brainer.  The backlinks tell search engines how valuable the content is on the website.

To have only relevant links coming to your site, you must perform a backlink audit using any online tool. This will give you a fair what sort of backlinks are coming to your site. So, now you’ll have a better understanding of how you should about your link building strategy.

Recrawl The Website’

When you are done with fixing errors or recommendations, you come across during technical SEO audit. Ask Google to recrawl your site.

For recrawling the website, go to the Google Search Console and then head to crawl. After that, tap on fetch as Google. There, you’ll have to enter your website URL that needs to be recrawled, and lastly, tap "Fetch". When Google bot fetched the site,  you need to "Submit To Index" for recrawling request.

Wrap Up

What you think is the real game-changer when doing SEO? Share your views in the comment section.