Search engines are the primary way people discover new information these days. If you want people to discover your business, you need to have a website that is visible on search engines. To do this, there are three key ingredients you need to worry about – the content you produce, having a user-friendly website, and technical Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics. In this guide, we’ll go over how to conduct a technical SEO audit along with how you can get started.
What is a Technical SEO Audit
A technical SEO audit is a process of going through your technical SEO strategy and looking for flaws. Search engines like Google use an advanced algorithm to determine where each page will appear in search results. By fine-tuning some of the smaller aspects of your website, you can better meet the requirements that these search engines are looking for.
In a complete technical SEO audit, you’ll go through all sorts of items that could be limiting your search rankings. By regularly monitoring for these items, and addressing them when they appear, you can ensure that your website can reach the maximum number of people.
SEO Audit Checklist
There are many steps involved in running a complete technical SEO audit. Below is some information on the types of steps that are essential in any audit.
Set Up Tracking
The first thing you’ll want to do in any audit is set up tracking. You need to have a system in place that lets you know how many visitors you are getting to your site each day, what pages they are visiting, and where they are coming from. You should have this tracking set up and running for at least a few days before you start making changes in your audit. That way, after you make changes, you can look at the data to see if you’re getting the results you wanted.
Visible Content
The next thing you’ll want to do is make sure your content is visible to search engines and humans alike. To do this, you simply need to visit each page of your website. You should make sure that each page loads correctly, that it looks the same in different browsers, and that there are no missing elements.
After that, you should use Google’s free Search Console tool. Inside this tool, you can check to see if there are any issues with the way Google reads your pages. If the Google Search Console tool doesn’t return any issues, then you are good to go.
Mobile Friendly
About half of all web traffic comes from smartphones. This means if your website isn’t optimized for smaller screens, you’re likely missing out on visitors. Not only that, but Google considers whether your site is mobile-friendly when determining its rankings. The best thing you can do is open your site on a mobile device and see that it works correctly. If the buttons are hard to use, or the text hard to read, you may need to make some adjustments.
Suspicious Backlinks
A big part of your technical SEO audit will be the detection of suspicious backlinks. Search engines like Google place a large emphasis on the sites that link to your own, moving you up the results when more high-quality sites link to you. However, it isn’t just about the number of links that point to your site. If you have too many low-quality sites linking to you, it can actually harm your ranking.
To fix this, you need to search for suspicious backlinks. There are several backlink checker tools that you can use to help you accomplish this. You’ll want to regularly scan through all the sites that link to your own, looking for ones that come from suspicious sites. If you find any, you should disavow those links to prevent them from injuring your search ranking.
Check Your Page Speed
Another factor that search engines like Google look at is how fast your pages load. Users don’t want to wait a long time for a website to load and are more likely to leave and visit another page if it takes too long. Google considers this and will therefore lower the rankings of slower pages.
As a part of your audit, you should use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to measure the load time of various pages on your website. If the results come back that your site is too slow, you’ll want to take steps to fix this.
Correct Sitemaps
Finally, you should check on your sitemaps. Sitemaps are maps of your website that show how each of your pages is connected to one another. Google uses sitemaps to help determine which pages of your website are the most important. To submit your sitemap to Google, you can once again use their Search Console tool. In here you will find a place to submit your sitemap, information on the most recent sitemap, and whether there are any issues with your sitemap. It’s a good idea to regularly submit a new sitemap anytime there are significant changes to your site.
Conduct Regular Audits
It’s important to remember that a technical SEO audit is not something you should do only once. You’ll want to know right away if there are problems with your website or if there is anything that is dropping you down in search results. The only way to do this is by conducting an SEO audit on a regular schedule. We recommend making a comprehensive checklist of the things you want to check, then scheduling time once a month to go through it all. If you don’t have the time or ability to do this, you should consider hiring an agency to conduct the SEO audit for you.
Hopefully, this guide was able to provide you with some helpful information on what a technical SEO audit consists of and why you need it. If you can conduct one regularly, and take the necessary actions to fix any issues you come across, you should see the results in your web traffic over time.
