How to Perform a Quick Technical SEO Audit
Reading Time: 6 minutes Regular technical SEO audits are crucial to ensuring your client’s site works correctly and ranks well. But what does a technical SEO audit look like? How long should it take? Can you do it on the fly? Or Should you go with a WordPress SEO Agency? And how do you know if the site is performing at its best?
Don’t worry; we have got you covered.
Here, we’ll provide answers to these questions and more. Here, we will first discuss the basics of a technical SEO audit. We’ll also show you how to perform a quick technical SEO audit so that you can begin your evaluation process as soon as possible.
So let’s get started.
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What Is a Technical SEO Audit?
A technical SEO audit includes an in-depth analysis of the technical aspects of websites. It’s an essential step in the process of determining how well the site is performing, and what can be improved. A technical audit aims to ensure you’re using the best possible tools and techniques to optimize the site for search engines.
Why is a Technical SEO Audit So Important?
A technical SEO audit is crucial because it helps you determine the health and potential of your client’s website. A website is an online business that needs to be optimized for leading search engines to gain visitors, and improve search rankings. A technical SEO audit will show you where the website currently stands, and where it’s heading.
The main benefit of a technical SEO audit is that it can save you time and money by helping you identify areas needing improvement. For example, if the site is not mobile-friendly, potential customers may not be able to access it, no matter how hard they try. Google also considers mobile-friendliness a ranking factor. This means that if your site isn’t mobile-friendly, then Google might not show it in their search results or index it properly.
After knowing the importance of technical SEO, let’s understand how to execute it on your website.
How to Conduct a Technical SEO Audit?
Here is the streamlined process that WordPress white label SEO agencies for conducting a technical SEO Audit of your website.
#1. Crawl The Website
You’ll need to crawl the website to perform a technical SEO audit. A crawler is an automated tool that can automatically access, and traverse websites. The crawler can be configured to crawl any URL on your site, whether it’s a subdomain or an entire domain. For example, if your site had an “About Us” page, the crawler could crawl it, and its subdirectories (e.g., About Us/Contact).
Also, make sure to check the robots.txt file. This file will tell Google where you have defined a no index or disallow directive for specific pages on your site. A robots.txt file is a text file that contains instructions for web crawlers such as Googlebot, Bingbot, and Yahoo bot. You can use it to tell search engines what pages on your site they should not crawl or index.
Googlebot follows all links on your site, and indexes everything that it finds, but you can use this file to help Google know which pages on your site are off-limits for crawling and indexing by adding them to the robots.txt file.
#2. Indexation
As soon as you know search engines have crawled the site, it is vital to understand if the site’s important pages have been indexed. Make sure to fix indexation issues that prevent it from appearing on search results pages, which can lead to a high bounce rate for that website.
For example, if your site has broken links or incorrect page titles, the crawlers will detect this, and you’ll see a spike in your bounce rate. You can also check whether your backlinks are still pointing to the same page they pointed to when they were created (e.g., if they’re linking to other pages) or to new pages that don’t exist yet (this could mean you have an internal link problem).
#3. Sitemap Review
A site map comprises a list of all the pages and files on your website. It contains the URL of each page, the title, and any keywords used in the address (URL). It helps the search engine find the pages on your site, resulting in indexing and ranking.
When you create a sitemap, you tell Google what pages are on your site, and where they are located. Google uses this information to determine which pages are most relevant to the search query you have inserted.
This will help you determine if there are any broken links or cross-links on your site. If so, fix them immediately. You can also use sitemaps to estimate how many pages you have because each page has its own entry in the sitemap file.
Once you have reviewed your sitemap file, it’s time to look at the content of each page within that file. You should also include any redirects and canonical tags in your sitemap so that Google knows how to handle them properly when crawling your site.
#4. Checking Technical On-Page Elements
On-page optimization is also one of the essential parts of technical SEO. You should check your website’s markup, images, and other static content to ensure it meets Google’s guidelines. Many on-page elements can affect your rankings in Google. These elements include:
Meta descriptions: The description of your page is what people see when they do a search for your site. It’s also how Google determines the page’s relevance to the query. A good meta description is one that directly relates to the content of your page, and includes keywords that you want to rank for on Google.
Keyword Density: Keyword density is particularly how often a keyword appears within a given content. If too many low-quality, unrelated keywords are used in a piece of content, it will hurt its ranking performance in Google.
Inbound links: Links from high-quality websites help you to drive traffic to your website, which boosts rankings on search engines like Google. To check if any external links have been added recently (or removed), use webmaster tools such as MozBar or Open Site Explorer (both available as paid addons). You can also use tools like Ahrefs to check link authority and anchor text distribution metrics for specific pages on your site.
#5. Duplicate Content Review
An SEO audit should include a duplicate content review. If you have duplicate content on your site, then you are most likely losing out on a lot of traffic and SEO benefits.
You will need to thoroughly check each page to see if there are any duplicate articles or content. You can use Google Search Console’s Site Search tool to find duplicate content for each article and ensure it is removed from the site. It would help if you also looked for pages where the same content has been copied and pasted across multiple pages.
#6. Check Page Speed
When you perform a technical SEO audit, it’s vital to check page speed at last. This is an important thing you can do to improve your site’s performance, and it significantly impact on how well your website performs in Google. To check your page speed, use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
Page speed matters because it affects how Google crawls and parses web pages, which affects how well your site appears in search results. Even if you’re not ranking well for a particular keyword or phrase, if Google can’t crawl your page quickly enough, then you won’t rank well for that query.
It’s also important because it helps reduce server load, and improve user experience. Sites that are slow to load often leave users frustrated or feeling like they’re waiting too long for something to happen — whether that’s waiting for a page to load or an element of their content to load.
Summary
There is no silver bullet for Technical SEO. It’s all about delivering the website to search robots in a way that they understand, and that you can work with. Strategy-driven SEO comes first. Just always remember that SEO content audit is an essential part of the process. It is a systematic, and comprehensive evaluation of the current website content to check whether it is optimized for search engines.
Most agencies perform their own Technical SEO audits independently without consulting white label SEO agencies. However, this approach may not be optimal because it is often accompanied by mistakes and inexperience.
Technical SEO audit is something that should be performed by a professional WordPress SEO agency. So, it’s crucial that you hire a professional SEO agency to perform these tasks, as it will help you achieve better results in the long run.
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Co-Authored With
Ronik Patel is the CEO and founder of UnlimitedWP, a White Label WordPress Development Agency located in Boston, USA. It offers Unlimited WordPress tasks for digital and web agencies at a fixed monthly cost.
