Technical SEO involves optimizing your website to improve its search engine rankings by making it easier for search engines to crawl. This includes actions such as improving site speed, optimizing robot.txt files, and fixing redirection errors. The ultimate goal of technical SEO is to ensure your website can be seen, crawled, and ranked by search engines. By adhering to webmaster guidelines such as providing accurate and user-friendly content, websites can improve their ranking. Additionally, ensuring that your website is accessible to search engine crawlers and users is crucial to avoid page indexing issues. Technical SEO helps you improve these technical characteristics of your website to enhance organic traffic.
Technical SEO is important because it ensures that your website functions well and improves your search engine ranking. Imagine having amazing content that people are eager to read, but when they click the link, it takes forever for your page to load. This frustrates readers, increases your bounce rate, and ultimately leads to lost traffic. Technical SEO plays a crucial role in optimizing your website’s performance and attracting more customers. Ignoring technical SEO sends the message to search engines like Google that you don’t care about their guidelines, which can negatively impact your rankings. Therefore, including technical SEO in your strategy is essential for reaching your online marketing goals
An SEO audit is an evaluation of your website’s performance on search engines to identify technical issues that could affect its ranking. Regular technical, on-page and off-page SEO audits can help create actionable plans to improve website performance and customer experiences. Through these audits, you can identify opportunities to optimize your site’s performance and fix errors to enhance its ranking gradually. By prioritizing problem areas, you can create an action plan to address and improve your website’s performance.
During a technical SEO audit, three factors should be evaluated:
- Back-end factors including hosting and indexing
- Front-end factors such as metadata, content, and keywords
- Link quality and outside references should also be assessed to ensure a comprehensive review of the website.
Let’s face it, SEO is not a simple topic. It can be daunting to try to identify and fix technical SEO issues on your website, especially if you have no experience with it at all. However, there are many different factors that contribute to a site’s ranking in the search engines—and while on-page SEO is very important (and something we will cover here), there are also other parts of your site that need attention as well. That’s why we’ve put together this list of nine easy-to-follow steps for performing an audit of your website’s technical SEO performance. These will help you assess whether there are any problems on your site that could impact its visibility in Google searches—and what steps you should take next!
Crawl Your Website
The first step in any technical SEO audit is to crawl your website and make sure it’s not broken. To do this, you can use a tool like Screaming Frog to crawl your site and see what issues arise.
The next thing you’ll want to do is check the Crawled Pages report in Google Search Console (the former Webmaster Tools). This will show you how many pages were crawled by Googlebot last month, as well as some general information about those pages such as their titles and URLs. You may notice some pages that aren’t showing up here–that’s because they were never indexed or were removed from search results due to a manual action taken by an algorithm update or other reason. If there are lots of these kinds of things happening with one particular page type (e.g., product pages), then that might be an issue worth investigating further (although it might just mean that those types aren’t being used very much).
Perform a Manual Google Search
The first thing you’ll want to do is perform a manual Google search for your website. In order to do this, simply type in the URL of your site followed by “site:”.
For example: https://www.examplewebsite.com/ – This will bring up all pages indexed by Google that contain both https://www and examplewebsite com/, which means we’re looking at all pages on our domain (including subdomains).
- Note: If you have multiple domains set up through Google Search Console’s Search Traffic > Webmaster Tools > Settings > Sites tab, there is no way around having to manually check each one individually.*
Once you’ve done that, look through the results page and see if anything sticks out as being obviously low quality or spammy content (e.g., articles with titles like “Top 10 Ways To Lose Weight Fast Without Exercise”). If so–great! You just found something worth investigating further!
Make Sure Only One Version of Your Site Is Browseable
The first step in your audit is to make sure that only one version of your site is browseable. This means that if someone searches for a keyword, they will land on the correct page and not an error page like “404 Not Found” or “500 Internal Server Error.”
You can check this by searching for keywords in Google and seeing what results come up. If there are two or more different versions of the same URL that show up, then it’s possible that some visitors may see one version while others see another.
Conduct On-Page Technical SEO Checks
- Check your site’s page titles.
- Check your site’s meta descriptions.
- Check your site’s meta keywords.
- Check your site’s alt tags (the text that appears when you hover over an image).
- Check the number of internal links on each page and make sure they’re relevant to the topic of that page; also, check their anchor text to ensure it’s descriptive and not just repeating words from other parts of the same document or from other documents altogether (e.g., “click here” or “more info”).
Manage Your Internal and External Links
A technical SEO audit will help you identify the internal and external links on your website. You should use this information to decide if you need to remove any of them, or change how they’re used.
Internal Links- Internal links are links from one page of your site to another page on your site. They can be used to organize content for users, but they also have an impact on search engine rankings because Google uses them as a signal for determining relevance. The more internal links there are between pages, the stronger this signal will be–so make sure you’re using them wisely!
External Links- External links are links that lead users away from your site (or at least off-site). They’re usually shown as blue text with underlines when someone hovers over them: Example Link. External link building is an important part of SEO because it helps increase brand awareness and drive traffic back into sites through keyword ranking boosts.
Check Your Site Speed
To check your site speed, you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. It will give you an overall score and a breakdown of how it thinks you can improve your score.
Here are some tips for speeding up your site:
- Optimize images with an image compression plugin (like ShortPixel) or by using tools like TinyPNG and JPEGmini
- Reduce server response time by optimizing code on the frontend and backend (check out this guide for more info)
Leverage Your Analytics and Compare Site Metrics
Analytics is a powerful tool to help you understand your website’s performance. You can use analytics to track the number of users who visit your site and how long they stay, as well as which pages they’re viewing, where they come from (location), and more. Analytics will also tell you what devices people are using to access your website–this information can be useful when deciding if there are any compatibility issues with older browsers or mobile devices.
Analytics is especially useful when it comes time for an SEO audit because it gives insight into how the site has been performing over time so that you can compare metrics across different periods (for example: last month vs this month). If there are any surprising changes in traffic patterns over those periods (i.e., an increase in search traffic) then this might indicate that something changed during those two months (like a new link acquisition strategy) which may have affected rankings positively!
Look for Any Security Issues
You should also check for any security issues. To do this, you’ll need to use a tool like Screaming Frog or DeepCrawl (both free). Just enter your website’s URL into the tool and let it crawl through all of your pages. You can then look at each page individually in order to see if there are any security issues that need to be addressed. If there are, take action immediately!
Evaluate Your Off-Site SEO and Conduct a Backlink Audit
Having strong backlinks is crucial for achieving success in SEO. When you have a strong backlink profile, it sends a signal to search engines like Google that your page is highly relevant and valuable to users. However, it’s important to note that off-site SEO is not just about hyperlinks. Search engine crawlers also take into account brand mentions on other websites. That’s why it’s essential to pay attention to both on-site and off-site aspects of your website.
Backlink audits are beneficial because they allow you to:
- Evaluate your current link profile and understand how it’s impacting your website.
- Identify areas where you can focus on acquiring more high-value backlinks.
- Analyze your competitors’ backlink numbers and strive to outperform them.
