Conducting a technical SEO audit helps you understand behind-the-scenes issues that may be affecting your ranking on search engines. What are these issues? Usually site speed, backlinks and indexing. This may be a bit overwhelming, especially if you are starting out. Here, we will walk you through the steps you should take for your technical SEO audit.
What is a technical SEO audit?
Unlike SEO, a technical audit does not focus on the content. Instead it analyzes technical elements that revolve around how users and search bots navigate through each page.
What does it include?
This kind of audit is usually conducted through Google Search Console, Google Pagespeed Insights, mobile crawlers, among other tools. There are numerous factors to check such as:
- Site speed.
- Usability.
- Indexation.
- Accessibility.
- Redirects.
- Site architecture.
Just keep in mind that before conducting a technical SEO audit, you should set the goals. Do you want to make the pages easier to navigate? Are you looking to optimize the site’s performance? Perfect. Take notes on your goals.
What are the steps for a technical SEO audit?
Scan your website
Use a tool to count the URLs your website has and how many of them are indexable. This tool will help you identify issues as well. You can use Google Search Console or Deepcrawl.
Identify indexing errors
If a website has a page that won’t crawl, it may not be indexed properly. The most common index issues are:
- Indexation errors
- Sitemap errors
- Robots.txt errors
Check the elements on your site
Besides checking the indexed pages, you need to review normal SEO aspects, such as:
- Meta descriptions
- Page titles and title tags
- Canonical tags
- hreflang tags
Identify image problems
Images often constitute some of the heaviest elements in a page. Thus, ensuring there are no image-related problems will help your site’s ranking by improving loading speeds and increasing traffic.
Some image problems are:
- Broken images
- Missing alt text
- Files that are too large
Analyze the links
Another important step is analyzing the links in your page (internal and external links). They help your site become more credible, so make sure there are no broken links.
Do you want to enhance your website? We are here to help you. At Gmedia, we are experts in web development and website optimization. Contact us today and start boosting your site.
