What is a Technical SEO Audit?
The technical SEO audit method is utilized to check the technical factors of the SEO of a website. It is used to check the fitness of the website and point the minor and major concerns that are affecting the SEO. Everyone wants their website to rank at the top but how do we actually know that it is even eligible for it or not? A technical SEO audit basically is a master process which helps you in calculating and evaluating the technical aspects of your website. This is the reason why you should know how to perform a technical SEO audit. If you are thinking like an owner I should not worry about it because I have hired a marketing specialist. Then you are wrong you should always know how your website is performing or is it even performing. That is why you should know how to perform a technical SEO audit.
The search engine bots are always crawling on websites and web pages to check the ranking factors of the website. Due to this, you must check how to perform a technical SEO audit of the website after a span of time. Another reason to do this is that everyone else is doing and improving themselves. There are experts who are working for your competitors also and they won’t leave a chance to get to the top. For this reason, you need to keep your website up to date and well organized.
How to perform a technical SEO audit.
Crawl your website:
Technical SEO must be started with crawling your website with different tools such as SEMrush, Deep Crawl, and Spyfu. These tools help you to understand the flaws in your website and provide actionable suggestions to improve SEO ranking factors. Factors like broken links, duplicate content can easily hurt the SEO of your website and these tools provide a remedy to it.
You can visit the console of Google Search and find out the number of pages being crawled by Google and how often Google is doing that.
Sitemap review-
A sitemap is a file in which you provide all the information about the web pages, images, videos, or any other type of content. Sitemap helps Google to understand the link between the web pages and the importance of the content. This is why you must do a sitemap review while performing a Technical SEO audit.
Your sitemap should be clean I.e. there should not be any kind of errors or blocked URL redirects otherwise search engines might end up ignoring your sitemap.
Your content and webpages must be updated in the sitemap, it helps Google to detect the new content faster.
Check site loading speed-
Page load time is an important direct ranking factor of SEO and Google has also affirmed that. In the aspect of performing a successful technical SEO audit, the speed of the website must be included. The loading time of the page also influences the ranking indirectly from the factors like bounce back ratio and waiting time. If your website has a loading time of more than 2 seconds then it can be considered a slow website which can impact the SEO. You have to make your website as fast as it can be without negotiating the user experience. To increase the speed of the webpage these are the actions that you can perform:-
- Increasing the server speed.
- Optimizing the source code.
- Removing unnecessary content.
Check internal links
Internal links are those links that are inside a website. For example, a webpage is redirecting to another webpage of the same website. They do also contribute to the ranking of a website and can affect the SEO score directly or indirectly.
Make sure not to include any broken links because they confuse the visitors and can result in a high bounce back rate. You can find those links by using Website auditor, click on internal resources and sort out HTTP status to check the broken links.
Orphan pages are similar to broken links, these are the pages that are not linked to any other webpage and because of it receives very low traffic, as the search engines are not able to find it.
Do a Backlink check:
Backlinks are the most crucial factor in deciding the SEO score of the website, backlinks help you to drive the traffic on your website by posting links on other platforms. They show that your content is much valuable and is acknowledged by others. Search engine bots always try to find the mentions of your website on other platforms, that is why should know how your website is doing in terms of backlinks. You can perform backlinks audits by using online tools such as Ahrefs.com. it helps you identify the type of backlinks your website requires. Also, you can keep an eye on your competitors and find out how the backlinks are performing for them.
Use Google Analytics:
Google Analytics is a tool that helps the statistical metrics of your website for SEO and marketing purposes. It contains almost every insight into the audience and performance of your website. You help you to identify if the web pages are accepting the crawling requests from search engines or not. You can find it out by typing “ Site: your website domain name” and searching it on the search bar. If the number of pages appeared on the result page are not equal to the number of actual of webpages then it is an indication that the web pages are not accepting crawling request properly.
Google Analytics also uncovers the number of views your website has received, the bounce-back rate, session duration, and many other factors.
Recrawl your website:
After the actions are performed in the technical SEO audit, you can request search engines to re-crawl your website, sitemap, and other factors.
To request this, you need to go to the Google search console click on the crawl, and then click on Fetch as Google Button. You are required to enter the URL of the web page and click on Fetch. Once done, you have to click on submit so that Google can re-crawl it.
Also Read: Top On-Page SEO Google Ranking Factors You Should Know In 2022
