You are finding it confusing as to why the number of visitors on your website isn’t increasing?😕
Various websites receive a steady amount of visits every day, and they update as frequently as you do.😒
You become furious and begin yelling from the windows,🗣 “SEO doesn’t work!” You might have no idea💡 that you had skipped an important basic step in your SEO strategy.
That step is: Technical SEO audit
You see, you might be creating the best content. But all of your efforts might be for nothing if your website has basic SEO issues and errors.
Understanding the technical aspects of your website’s SEO is important to search performance. Understanding and maintaining will help your website rank well and drive traffic.
I believe that right now a mountain of questions are running through your mind about technical SEO audit:
- What is a Technical SEO audit?
- What tools are needed to perform a technical SEO audit?
- How to perform a technical SEO audit?
- What is included in a technical SEO audit?
- Why is technical SEO important?
Tools that you need to perform a technical SEO audit
SEO tools🧰 give information🛈 and warnings⚠ regarding the general health of your website. You may get some remarkable results if you use these tools correctly. They may be game-changers at times.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free service provided by Google that allows you to monitor and troubleshoot the appearance of your website in their search results. Search Console provides tools and information to ease the process of identifying some of the most frequent technical SEO issues.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a useful tool for tracking and monitoring real-time information about a website’s traffic and visitors. Analytics will definitely help you if you want to know where your website visitors come from, what they see on the website, which pages are popular, and which traffic has a higher conversion rate.
Ahrefs’ Site Audit
Ahrefs is competing for first place among the best and most trustworthy all-in-one SEO tools. It offers one of the most comprehensive and user-friendly technical SEO audit tools on the market.
Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool
Google suggests starting with the Rich Results Test to discover what Google-rich results can be generated for your page. To verify all types of schema.org markup without Google-specific validation, use the Schema Markup Validator.
Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test determines how easy it is for a visitor to use your website on a mobile device. It also pinpoints specific mobile-usability issues, like text that is too tiny to read. Remember: The search engine will index the mobile version of all websites rather than the desktop version. (In the age of Google’s mobile-first indexing, it seems very few sites remain that are not mobile-friendly ). This is, without a doubt, a very useful tool, however, it only tests a single page. But, if you need to check if an entire website is mobile-friendly ( every single page of the website) there is a mobile-friendly test tool that automatically tests multiple URLs. After entering a URL, the tool crawls the entire website, reporting back on the mobile-friendliness of all sub-pages. Try the Expert mobile-friendly tool, it is a very awesome tool!
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a website crawler that runs on a desktop. It is one of the most popular tools for analyzing and auditing technical and on-page SEO issues available.
The free version allows you to crawl up to 500 URLs.
How to Perform a Technical SEO Audit?
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO makes your site easier to crawl and index so that Google can provide the right content from your site to users at the right time. Site design, URL structure, how your site is built and coded, redirects, your sitemap, your Robots.txt file, image delivery, site errors, and a range of other technical SEO factors may all have an impact on your technical SEO health.
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Make sure your site is crawlable
It’s pointless to create high-quality content if search engines can’t crawl and index it. Therefore, before running a crawl report, look at your robots.txt file. When web crawling software arrives at your site, it will use this file as its first point of call. Your robots.txt file defines which parts of your website should be crawled and which should not.
You can find it by adding “robots.txt” to the end of your root domain:
Here’s another example for our website Backlinker.io:
You can also look at the Google Console to see your crawl budget. Your crawl budget is the number of pages that Google is crawling on your website and how often are doing that.
How can you get the most out of your crawling budget?🤔
You must complete the following:
Remove Duplicate Content
Duplicate pages can easily waste your crawl budget. These pages usually share the same title and meta description tags. As many duplicate pages as possible should be removed. If you must keep them, block search engine bots from accessing them. With the SEO Site Audit tool, you’ll be able to identify duplicate content and fix technical issues that can cause search engines to treat your pages as duplicates.
Indexation should be limited
Some pages, such as the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions, may not need to be included in search results. You can prevent these pages from being indexed.
Set URL Parameters
Google may end up indexing the same page twice, once with URL parameters and once without as if it were two separate pages. URL parameters can be added to the Google Search Console. This can tell Google that it is crawling the same page rather than two.
Redirects must be fixed
Every redirect followed by the Google bot is a waste of the crawl budget. Furthermore, if there are a lot of 301 or 302 redirects, the bots may lose track of them and fail to reach the destination page.
Search on Google
You can manually search your website on Google. You can type in the search Google field “site: domain name” to see the results. In this case, it will show you how many pages appear in the search results. Remember: “ Don’t panic “ 😱 if there are any missing pages, it doesn’t mean that your website isn’t crawlable. Instead, it can give you an idea of what might be going wrong with your site.
Review Sitemap
The sitemap of your website is extremely important. Your XML sitemap serves as a map for Google and other search engine crawlers. It basically helps these crawlers in finding and ranking your website pages.
When it comes to creating a successful sitemap, there are several factors to consider:
- Your sitemap should be correctly formatted in an XML document
- It should follow the XML sitemap protocol
- URLs should only be included if they are valid
- There should be no “no index” URLs
- When you edit or create new pages, make sure to include them all
If you use the Yoast SEO plugin, it can create an XML sitemap for you.
Example:
Check that your sitemap includes your most important pages, does not include pages you do not want Google to index, and is properly organized. After you’ve completed all of this, you should resubmit your sitemap to Google Search Console.
Test Site Speed
Page speed is a ranking factor. Therefore, no technical SEO audit is complete until you test the speed of your website.
Increase page loading time and your site’s performance will improve. Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool can help you with this. Enter a URL and PageSpeed Insights will grade it from 0 to 100.
Example:
It will show you how quickly your website loads and how it compares to other websites. The best part about this tool is that it also shows you how to increase your speed. (Improve page load time and you’ll improve site speed.)
Make Sure Your Site is Mobile Friendly
Another essential thing is to make sure that your website is mobile-friendly.
Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test is a free tool that can be used to test whether or not your page is mobile responsive and easy to use. When you enter your domain, it will show you how the website is displayed for mobile and whether it is mobile-friendly.
Duplicate Content Review
Duplicate content is e big No for SEO.
Google dislikes duplicates of the same information. Because, they serve little use to the user, and Google has difficulty determining which page to rank in the SERPs, which means it is more likely to serve one of your competitors’ sites.
Duplicate content issues can occur for some reasons:
- Using the same headers, page names, and meta descriptions to make pages look the same even if the body content differs.
- Avoiding the removal or redirection of similar pages used for historical or testing purposes.
- Similar tags should not be added to a single page with multiple URLs.
A web crawl will assist in identifying duplicate pages. Check the content for duplication of:
- Titles
- Header tags
- Meta descriptions
- Body content
After that, you may either delete these pages or rewrite the duplicated elements to make them unique.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, a technical SEO audit of your website is important for the success of your SEO strategy. A technical SEO audit searches for any issues that could prevent search engines from crawling and indexing your site or pages.
However, we use SEO audit tools to increase the speed and efficiency of your auditing process. This removes the need for you to do each check manually and can automate many of the steps of an SEO audit.
However, following the steps in this article will only solve the difficulties you are currently experiencing. New difficulties with links, site performance, and the content will develop as your company grows and your website evolves, as well as when Google’s algorithms change.
As a result, technical audits, along with on-page and off-page SEO efforts, should be part of an ongoing strategy. Audit your website on a regular basis, or if you make structural or design changes to it.
