Step-By-Step Guide To Technical SEO Audit [What To Include]

You might own a website and from outward it may look fine. But that may not be the case in reality. It is estimated that overall a technical SEO audit service reveals several issues on a website revealing there is a big room for improvement. Working to fix a technical SEO audit checklist may seem intimidating if you do not know SEO basics or what is meant by SEO auditing. In this blog, you will get to know what is a technical SEO audit and how to perform a technical SEO audit.

What is a technical SEO audit?

Just how we saw ways to improve On-Page SEO, there is another side of SEO audit. Technical SEO audit refers to the analysis of an entire website to determine if it is sound from any technical issues and needs improvement. With the help of an SEO team of professionals, you can conduct a technical SEO audit. Each element of the website gets scrutinized for errors and rectified as required. Small to big businesses as well non-business organizations tend to do this and often. The recent fad is to conduct a technical SEO audit checklist every six months.

When to conduct one?

You need to check a guide to technical SEO audit in the following scenarios to consider one.

If you have built a new website
If you revamped the entire website
If the website underwent any content change
If the website already faces severe technical issues
If you have experienced a sudden drop in organic traffic
If you have noticed a shortage of indexed pages on the website

Why care about technical SEO audits?

In simple terms, the lack of technical soundness deteriorates your website’s overall performance and how well you have garnered other things.

It is advisable to receive technical issues at the earliest to avoid a hefty amount of money
Your website may not get deserved SERP ranks
Your website may not get higher engagement
If unresolved, the technical issue causes low user experience

A technical SEO audit checklist

A technical SEO audit checklist comprises the following:

Mobile first
Page speed
Mobile first
URL structure and canonical tags
Redirects and HTTP status code
Meta Robots and robots.txt
Meta Tags
XML sitemap
Schema markup
Crawling errors
Heading tag optimization
Thin pages
Backlink optimisation

Technical SEO audit tools

Many of these technical SEO audit tools provide technical SEO audit report templates and you can choose and get easy reporting:

Google search console
Semrush
Ahrefs
SE Ranking
Moz
SEO Browser

How to perform a technical SEO audit

SEO experts use various ways and steps on how to do a technical SEO audit, the thing to remember is the benefits of the whole procedure to your business. It is not a mountainous task if you follow the right steps and implement them in the right way as instructed. Before conducting a technical SEO audit, you should determine your end goal and see how the procedure leads to it.

Crawl the website

Using the best SEO auditing tool you can conduct a website crawling. Such a tool can detect if your website meets the crawling standards. It gives you an in-depth analysis of issues faced by your website such as high-priority issues, moderate issues and others. This is very important as crawlability catastrophes severe or minor can decrease your SERP ranking as well as Google’s indexing capability.

Number crawlability issues

After a careful crawling of your website reveals major issues such as indexation issues, robot text issues as well as sitemap issues. Major problems you can find while crawling a website would be as follows:

Pages blocked in Robots.txt – The Robot.txt file might be missing in your XL sitemap or may not be working properly. If this is a problem for you, it is high time to place a link to your sitempa.xml in your robot.txt. So that search engines can better understand what content they need to be crawled.

No follow links – How to do a technical SEO audit without paying attention to the backlink profile? It is impossible. Nofollow link is one of the important metrics for backlink profiles. Your website may have countless web pages for different purposes. So it is essential to include a nofollow link on the website to identify spammy links as well as paid links.

Bad Site Architecture – Your website may have built-in bad site architecture such as having hidden content, images without alt tags, too many heading tags and high click depth. Resolving these issues right away is necessary.

Ensure technical on-page elements

It is crucial to ensure that on-page technical elements work smoothly on your website. It includes how well you have identified keywords, written meta tags as well as schema markup.

Title tags – Writing a unique and concise title for each of your pages that contain your most important and relevant keywords is a best practice.

Meta tags – Keywords need to be incorporated in meta tags while focusing on user-targeted.

Structured data – To improve website visibility include structured data on all important pages.

Keywords – Identifying the performance of keywords and including ranking keywords from competitor analysis is much needed.

Internal links – Internal links are necessary for your website to get easy access to content and boost SERP results. If you fail to incorporate internal links, the search engines cannot crawl your web pages hence no good SERP results.

Loading speed of website – Your website speed for the mobile screen also needs to be optimised just like the desktop. Removing unused CSS and eliminating render-blocking resources can be the best recommendations.

Internal broken links – If your website has a lot of broken links, you can remove the links leading to the 404 error page or replace the link with another web page.

Duplicate content – Rewrite all duplicate product descriptions, listing pages and other content. Remove and modify the duplicate content where necessary. Creating individual pages can be a great help.

By implementing every change a search engine optimization agency in Dubai recommends proves to be fruitful in SEO audit. They will simply start down taking each category of attributes and work on them. Therefore, your website works best in terms of SEO and user experience. After all, that is what you expect from a detailed technical SEO audit checklist.