A technical SEO audit is an evaluation of a website’s infrastructure and technical set-up that looks for problems that might be keeping the website from showing up in search results. The goal of a technical SEO audit is to find and fix any technical problems on a website that could be hurting its search engine rankings.
A technical SEO audit might find broken links, duplicate content, slow page load times, and problems with how the website works on mobile devices, among other things.
There are several steps involved in conducting a technical SEO analysis. Here is an overview of the process.
Web crawling Technical SEO Audit
Screaming Frog is a powerful tool for website crawling and SEO auditing. It helps you find problems like broken links, redirects, duplicate content, thin content, and more quickly. It can also be used to check the website’s structure, including metadata, page titles, and headings. Screaming Frog can also help you find problems with URLs and possible canonicalization problems.
Analyze the website’s structure
Analyzing the structure of a website involves evaluating the hierarchy, navigation, and organization of the website to make sure it’s intuitive, easy to use, and optimized for both people and search engines. Start by looking at the main menu and evaluating the categories and sub-categories. Make sure they make sense and are organized in a logical way.
Check the page titles and meta descriptions to make sure they match the page’s content. Also, check the URLs to make sure they are structured in a logical and consistent manner. Lastly, evaluate the internal linking structure and ensure that the pages are linked together in a way that makes sense and leads to a better user experience.
How to Optimize Your Site for Technical SEO
Check for broken links
- Check for out-of-date content: Use a tool like SEMrush to find any out-of-date or irrelevant content on the website.
- Check for broken images. Use a tool like Screaming Frog to identify any broken images on the website.
- Check for keyword optimization: Use a tool like Moz to identify any keywords that are missing from the website or are not properly optimized.
- Check for redirects: Use a tool like Redirection to identify any redirects that are not working correctly.
- Check for page speed: Use a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights to identify any pages that are taking too long to load.
- Check for meta tags: Use a tool like Yoast to identify any meta tags that are missing or need to be updated.
💡 Reviewing links from time to time is a must. Statistics have that it over 66.5% of links to sites in the last 9 years are broken (Ahrefs, 2022)
Analyze the website’s content.
- Check for duplicate content: Use tools like Copyscape or Siteliner to detect any duplicate content on the website.
- Check for thin content. Use tools like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb to find pages that don’t have enough content.
- Check for keyword stuffing: Use tools like SEMrush or Moz to find any keyword stuffing or overuse of keywords on the website.
- Check for keyword cannibalization: Use tools like Raven Tools or Ahrefs to find pages that are competing for the same keyword phrases and for broken links.
- Check for page speed: Use tools such as Google Pagespeed Insights or GTmetrix to identify any pages that could use improvements in loading speed.
Check the website’s speed and mobile usability
Google’s PageSpeed Insights and Mobile-Friendly Test are two great tools to use when checking a website’s speed and mobile usability. To use these tools, simply enter the website’s URL into the appropriate search box.
The tools will then give the website a score that shows how well it works on both desktop computers and mobile devices. They will also give suggestions on how to improve the website’s performance and how it works on mobile devices. You might want to consider Yellow Lab as alternative to check your websites technical seo audit checks
Analyze the website’s backlinks
Once you have identified any toxic or low-quality backlinks, you can contact the websites that are linking to your website and ask them to remove the link. You can also use the disavow tool in Google Search Console to disavow any backlinks that you cannot get removed.
Review the website’s use of tags and metadata
Title tags should accurately describe the content of the page and use relevant keywords. Meta descriptions should accurately describe the content of the page and also contain relevant keywords. Other tags, such as header tags and image alt tags, should also be used to accurately describe the content of the page and contain relevant keywords. Additionally, any other metadata, such as Open Graph tags, should also be used to improve search engine visibility.
Review the website’s security
The best way to review a website’s security is to look for an SSL certificate. A secure socket layer, or SSL certificate, helps make a safe connection between the user’s browser and the website server. If a website has an SSL certificate, it means that the website is safe and that all data being sent is encrypted so that it can’t be stolen.
You should also look for other security measures that the website may have put in place to protect user data, such as two-factor authentication and other measures.
Conclusion and findings
A technical SEO audit is a thorough look at all the technical parts of a website, like its code and architecture, to make sure it is optimized for search engine visibility. The goal of a technical SEO audit is to find any problems that may be hurting the website’s performance in search engine results pages (SERPs).
At the end of a technical SEO audit, the results should be presented in a clear and concise way, along with suggestions for how to fix any problems that were found. The recommended changes should be put in order of how likely they are to improve search engine visibility and how much work it will take to make them. The audit should also include a schedule for when the changes should be made to improve the website’s performance in search engine results pages (SERPs).
