The technical SEO audit is a technical analysis of your website to find out if it meets the technical requirements for search engines. It looks at aspects such as speed, HTML coding, content quality, and other technical factors that affect how well your site ranks in the SERPs. In this blog post, we’ll show you what an in-depth technical SEO audit entails and how to do one yourself!
- What is a Technical SEO Audit?
- What Factors Affect Your Website’s SEO Performance?
- Technical factors
- On-page factors
- Off-Page factors
- What Steps Should You Follow to Conduct a Technical SEO Audit?
- Start by Crawling Your Website
- Check Internal Links
What is a Technical SEO Audit?
The days of keyword stuffing and backlinking from micro-sites are gone. You need to up your game and get your SEO strategy in line with the latest developments. How can a technical SEO audit help your website rank better? A technical deep dive is an essential step towards improving one’s online visibility on Google. It helps enhance basic site functionality by fixing errors that might hinder its performance, such as broken links or even page speed issues, such as mismatched titles tags resulting in low clicking through rates (CTR).
What Factors Affect Your Website’s SEO Performance?
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A technical audit will help you identify these problems. Let’s take a look at what makes up an in-depth technical SEO audit. This is just one example of how to do it on Moz.com. They use Google Analytics as their source for data collection and other tools like Screaming Frog for deeper analysis into individual pages/URLs on-site structure, meta tags, link building opportunities, etc. Using this information can provide insight into which aspects need improvement and technical recommendations for doing so.
A technical deep dive is an essential step towards improving one’s online visibility on Google through fixing errors like broken links or page speed issues, among other things like mismatched titles tags resulting in low clicking-through rates (CTR). Google’s search algorithm is a mystery to many, but there are three main factors that affect your website’s SEO. These include:
Technical Factors
Several technical factors affect a website’s search engine optimization. The most common of which is hosting, indexing, and page loading speed.
- Hosting refers to the server that houses your website. The faster your site loads, the better user experience it provides, thus optimizing SEO rankings opportunities.
- Indexing is Google’s process of ranking websites based on quality and authority by crawling through each page of a website or blog post using an index that its crawler creates as it goes along. Indexation can also affect technical factors like speed because if pages are not correctly indexed, they will take longer to load – which brings us to our next factor.
- Page loading speed (also known as ‘time-to-first byte’) has become increasingly important since August 2017 when Google first announced its intention to include this metric in search results via mobile devices only.
On-Page Factors
These on-page factors affect a website’s SEO. Examples of these include site content, target keywords, and their related terms.
- Target keywords are the most important technical factor to consider when optimizing a website for search engines. It is imperative that your target keyword be included in at least one H-tag and meta description tag per page on your site, as well as within the content of each individual page.
- Site content refers to how you present and organize information on your site’s pages. This can affect SEO if it’s not done properly because it might be difficult or time-consuming for Google bots crawling through sites on their indexing missions — which we just discussed!
Off-Page Factors
Several external factors affect a site’s search engine optimization (SEO). One of these is off-page SEO. This includes links and references to your websites, which affects the reputation of major search engines like Google. Your website’s links and references can affect its SEO performance; however, they are generally considered technical factors. It’s because links from other sites help Google bots crawl through each page of your site faster by providing more information about their content: like anchor text (the words used in a link) and title tags (which we discussed earlier). Citations might seem similar to links; however, these refer specifically to customer reviews or testimonials you receive either online or offline that mention your brand name or company logo. These provide both technical and social proof for search engines who want to know what others are saying about you!
The final off-page technical factor is back, which refers to external websites linking back to your website. However, the technical factors are not limited to SEO. They also include social media and the security/privacy settings of each page on the site that affects its search engine optimization (SEO).
Social proof is another external factor affecting a website’s SEO performance. It provides information about how others perceive you or what they think of your brand name or company logo, affecting rankings in organic searches performed by Google bots crawling through sites. It might seem like something small, but these factors can provide insight into technical problems with websites associated with poor user experience, such as slow loading times! This includes both technical factors related to content on pages within your site itself as well as third-party technical issues beyond your control affecting this technical factor.
What Steps Should You Follow to Conduct a Technical SEO Audit?
Let’s look at how you can conduct a technical SEO audit is and the different parameters included in it. First things first, choose your SEO Audit tools wisely! There are many technical SEO audit tools available on the web, such as SEMrush, Google Search Console, and Moz. Each of these has its own unique features that can help you find technical issues with your website. Additionally, each provides a different scope for technical audits, so it’s important to choose one depending on what type of technical problems or issues need to be addressed on your site.
There are many tools available that offer free trials, including SEMrush and Google Search Console. Google search console includes several technical factors like crawl errors and index status: which measures whether pages have been indexed by bots crawling through websites looking for content to add into its indexing system (the more relevant keywords found here; the better). On the other hand, SEMrush analyzes how well various aspects such as title tags and meta descriptions appear within SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), which can affect technical SEO performance as well.
In order to conduct a technical SEO audit on your own, you’ll need some expertise and technical knowledge that’s both easy enough for beginners but detailed enough for those who have more experience in the field of technical SEO! Once you’ve decided what parameters to analyze during technical audits, it will be easier for Google bots to crawl through websites looking at content on each page. While there are many aspects influencing search engines’ decision-making process about rankings, let’s look at three main factors affecting technical SEO:
- Crawlability (how fast pages load within sites). Crawlability is a significant technical factor because Google bots crawl through websites to index their content in search engine results pages (SERPs). This means if your website isn’t optimized within technical SEO factors, it will be difficult for Google bots crawling through sites to find information on each page and therefore not indexed or added into its SERP system!
- Indexation of site content by Google bots. Indexation refers to whether each webpage has been properly crawled and then indexed into SERPs (Search Engine Resultratings, etc .) or not. It’s important to note that technical SEO is more complex than simply optimizing the content on each page!
- Social proof provides external data sources about how well a website might perform when users visit them based on various factors like customer reviews, ratings, etc. This can affect rankings in organic searches conducted by Google bots crawling through sites.
Let’s look at what technical issues could arise from a technical SEO audit! If you see pages with heavy redirects causing slow load times, this is both a technical and user experience issue. You’ll have to check other factors such as social proof or backlinks pointing back to determine if it affects technical performance on your website. On the other hand, meta descriptions that are too long might cause duplicate content because Google will only index one of them within SERPs. Thus, these two parameters need to be adjusted depending on how they affect technical SEO for each page of your site being audited. Other technical issues include:
- Incorrect canonicalization errors (which sets preferred versions of various URLs) which can lead to duplication.
- Non-indexed links creating broken internal linking within your site.
- 404 pages for various technical reasons.
As you can see, technical audits provide insight into how users experience a website across different devices and help web admins identify technical problems related to user experience and technical SEO performance! Thus, it’s crucial to conduct an in-depth technical audit of each page on your website, including those hosted by third-party platforms such as Magento or Shopify. If you want more traffic from organic searches performed using Google bots crawling through websites looking at content available online. If this sounds like something too complicated, don’t worry about performing these technical audits yourself!
Start by Crawling Your Website
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Choosing the right technical SEO audit tool is key to your technical SEO success. This means choosing one that will provide you with accurate information in order for you to address any issues on your website, including crawling all of its pages and checking content types. Choosing the right technical SEO audit tool is key to your technical SEO success.
The two most important technical factors when it comes to crawlability are site loading speed (also known as a time-to-first byte) and page indexation status. These relate directly back to user experience – which is why Google wants them included in search results! Page load times depend heavily on how fast each individual server responds when requests are made by bots crawling through websites…which brings us full circle!
To conduct a technical SEO audit, ensure that each URL within your site is crawled and indexed. This technical SEO audit can be performed manually or semi-automatically using a technical SEO tool like SearchMetrics Suite, which crawls the entire site in real-time to show you URL issues that are blocking your website from being adequately crawled by Googlebot.
Check Internal Links
One of the most important ranking factors for Google is internal linking. If your website has many links pointing to other pages on your site, it will be easier for search engines like Google and Bing to crawl through all the different parts of your website to find out what each page is about. Ensuring you have a logical hierarchy can work wonders with regards to SEO, so make sure to check both external and internal links when auditing them. What’s more, web pages could get deleted or moved, which might result in broken link problems. Broken links hurt the technical SEO performance of a website because it undermines trust and can create confusion for users.
A logical hierarchy helps Google understand your site better and makes sure that if any part of your website is hacked or compromised, there are no broken links throughout the entirety of your site, which will redirect visitors from one page to another! In order to conduct an internal link technical audit, you have various options at hand depending on what technical issue you want to address: You could use a technical SEO tool like SearchMetrics Suite, as mentioned earlier in this article. However, other tools such as Screaming Frog allow you to check all internal linking parameters manually using filters so that each URL within either sidebar menus/navigation boxes/footers, etc., are crawled and indexed.
The technical SEO audit process is a combination of technical factors you need to check in order for your website to perform well within Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). Make sure that each URL has been crawled by the web crawler bots as this technical factor helps both users and search engines alike. In addition, making sure there aren’t any broken links throughout your site will help with user experience and have an essential impact on rankings!
Test Site Speed
Interested In My SEO Audit Service?
Site speed is another technical SEO factor that’s important for the rankings of your website. The faster each page of your website loads, the better it will be ranked in search engine results pages (SERPs). One way to perform a technical site speed audit on your webpage is by using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or Pingdom Tools. These technical tools crawl through all your web pages and provide you with easy-to-understand reports showcasing which areas need optimizing, so that load times are reduced throughout the entirety of your website – helping increase conversions along the way!
Conclusion
The technical SEO audit process is about more than just checking internal links; it also includes crawling every URL on every one of your web pages while considering any technical factors such as site speed that influence your rankings. To conduct a technical SEO audit successfully, make sure that all internal linking parameters such as headings/navigation boxes/sidebar menus, etc., have been checked. Hence, they contain or point towards non-404 error web pages. In addition, a technical site speed audit is also vital to decrease page load times and increase conversions/visitor engagement! The technical SEO audit process should begin with crawling your website using tools such as SearchMetrics Suite or Screaming Frog – before moving onto, crawl every URL on each one of your web pages while checking for broken links in order to avoid any technical issues that may cause problems when it comes to rankings.
You can learn more about doing an in-depth technical SEO audit by visiting Dennis Ventura.
