Are you struggling to get your website to appear higher in search engine rankings?
The solution might lie in a technical SEO audit.
By conducting a thorough analysis of your website’s technical infrastructure and making necessary improvements, you can boost your site’s search visibility and ultimately drive more traffic to your pages.
A proper technical SEO audit can be a daunting task, but the rewards are well worth the effort. It requires a deep understanding of various web technologies, such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, as well as knowledge of how search engines crawl and index websites.
However, don’t let the complexity of technical SEO intimidate you.
With the right approach and audit tool, anyone can conduct a successful audit and make significant improvements to their website’s search performance.
In this article, I’ll cover the essential steps you need to take to perform a technical SEO audit and provide you with the insights you need to make your website more search-engine friendly.
Let’s Get Started to Audit Your Site
An in-depth technical SEO audit is an essential aspect of maintaining a healthy and optimized website.
Toward the end, I will provide a comprehensive checklist to help you get started by making sure that you have a proper way to check your progress.
Step 1: Analyze Your Website’s Performance
The first step in conducting a technical SEO audit is to analyze your website’s performance.
There are several tools available that can help you analyze your website’s performance, including Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and SEMrush.
Some key metrics to look out for include:
- Organic Traffic – Analyze the website’s organic traffic to determine whether there are any significant drops or increases.
- Bounce Rate – Look for pages with high bounce rates to determine what’s causing users to leave the website quickly.
- Page Load Speed – Slow page loading times can negatively impact your website’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Mobile-Friendliness – Ensure that your website is optimized for mobile devices as more users are browsing on their phones.
Learn how to use these Google’s free tools for your SEO advantages
Step 2: Conduct a Crawl of Your Website
The next step is to crawl your website to identify any technical issues that may be affecting its performance.
Crawling is the process of indexing and analyzing a website’s pages and content. It is a tool like a search engine bot that will find and crawl all the pages and posts that are available on your website.
There are several crawling tools available, such as Screaming Frog and DeepCrawl.
JustRank has it’s own crawler and technical SEO audit service that can help.
Some key elements to look out for during the crawl include:
- Broken Links – Broken links can negatively impact your website’s user experience and ranking in search engine result pages.
- Duplicate Content – Duplicate content can confuse search engines, leading to lower rankings.
- HTTP Status Codes – Identify any 404 errors, 301 redirects, and other HTTP status codes that could be affecting your website’s performance.
- XML Sitemap – Check that your website has an XML sitemap that’s properly formatted and submitted to Google Search Console.
Do you know ahrefs provides 5000 crawl credit for free if you create an account with them?
Step 3: Analyze Your Website’s On-Page Optimization
On-page optimization refers to the process of optimizing individual pages on your website to improve their ranking in search result pages.
Analyzing your website’s on-page SEO involves looking at elements such as:
- Title Tags – Ensure that each page has a unique and descriptive title tag that includes the primary keyword. From my experience, this is one of the most important ranking factors.
- Meta Descriptions – Include relevant and engaging meta descriptions for each page.
- Header Tags – Use header tags (H1, H2, H3) to organize your content and help search engines understand the structure of your page.
- Image Optimization – Optimize images by compressing them and including alt text with relevant keywords. This usually affects your site speed significantly.
Learn more about on-page SEO here
Step 4: Check Your Website’s Technical Setup
Your website’s technical setup includes elements such as the domain, hosting, and server configuration.
Some elements to check during the audit include:
- HTTPS – Ensure that your website is using HTTPS to encrypt data and protect user privacy.
- Robots.txt – Check that your website’s robots.txt file is properly configured to direct search engines to the correct pages.
- Canonicalization – Implement canonicalization to ensure that search engines understand which version of a page to index.
- Redirects – Ensure that all redirects are properly configured and that there are no redirect chains.
Understand how search engine ‘sees’ your website
Step 5: Review Your Website’s Security
Website security is a critical component of technical SEO, and it’s essential to ensure that your website is secure from hacking attempts and other security threats. Some elements to review during the audit include:
- SSL Certificates – Ensure that your website has an SSL certificate installed and that it’s up-to-date.
- Password Policies – Ensure that your website’s password policies are strong and that they’re regularly updated.
- Firewall – Implement a firewall to protect your website from malicious attacks.
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Download Our Checklist for FREE
To help you conduct a comprehensive technical SEO audit, here’s a checklist that covers the key elements we’ve discussed.
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Conclusion
By analyzing your website’s performance, conducting a crawl, reviewing your website’s technical setup, and ensuring that your website is secure, you can identify any technical issues that may be affecting your website’s ranking and visibility.
Use the audit checklist provided in this article to conduct a comprehensive technical SEO audit, and ensure that your website is performing at its best.
One of my SEO strategies would get the site audited once or twice in 6 months’ time.
While this will not affect your search ranking, it does help to keep the site clean and healthy from the technical aspects.
